E. P. Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993), usually cited as E. P. Thompson, was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).^[1] He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry. His work is considered to have been among the most important contributions to labour history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.^[2]

Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a "historian in the Marxist tradition", calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives".^[3] Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and an early and constant supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.^[4]

Early life

E.P. Thompson was born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents: His father, Edward John Thompson (1886–1946) was a poet and admirer of the Nobel Prize–winning poet Tagore. His older brother was William Frank Thompson (1919–1944), a British officer in World War II, who was captured and shot aiding the Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans.^[5][6]

Thompson attended two independent schools, The Dragon School in Oxford and Kingswood School in Bath. Like many he left school in 1941 to fight in World War II. He served in a tank unit in the Italian campaign, including at the last battle of Cassino.^[7]

After his military service, he studied at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1946, E.P. Thompson formed the Communist Party Historians Group with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr and others. In 1952 they launched the influential journal Past and Present.^[4]

Career

William Morris

Thompson's first major work of scholarship was his biography of William Morris, written while he was a member of the Communist Party. Subtitled From Romantic to Revolutionary, it was part of an effort by the Communist Party Historians' Group, inspired by Torr, to emphasise the domestic roots of Marxism in Britain at a time when the Communist Party was under attack for always following the Moscow line. It was also an attempt to take Morris back from the critics who for more than 50 years had emphasised his art and downplayed his politics.^[8]

Although Morris's political work is well to the fore, Thompson also used his literary talents to comment on aspects of Morris's work, such as his early Romantic poetry, which had previously received relatively little consideration. As Thompson noted in his preface to the second edition (1976), the first edition (1955) appears to have received relatively little attention from the literary establishment because of its then-unfashionable Marxist point of view. However, the somewhat rewritten second edition was much better received.

The first New Left

Thompson launched the dissident Marxist journal The New Reasoner in the summer of 1957. The publication would merge to form New Left Review in 1960.

After Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which revealed that the Soviet party leadership had long been aware of Stalin's crimes, Thompson (with John Saville and others) started a dissident publication inside the CP, called The Reasoner. Six months later, he and most of his comrades left the party in disgust at the Soviet invasion of Hungary.^[9]

But Thompson remained what he called a "socialist humanist". With Saville and others, he set up the New Reasoner, a journal that sought to develop a democratic socialist alternative to what its editors considered the ossified official Marxism of the Communist and Trotskyist parties and the managerialist cold war social democracy of the Labour Party and its international allies. The New Reasoner was the most important organ of what became known as the "New Left", an informal movement of dissident leftists closely associated with the nascent movement for nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s.^[10]

The New Reasoner combined with the Universities and Left Review to form New Left Review in 1960, though Thompson and others fell out with the group around Perry Anderson who took over the journal in 1962. The fashion ever since has been to describe the Thompson et al. New Left as "the first New Left" and the Anderson et al. group, which by 1968 had embraced Tariq Ali and various Trotskyists, as the second.

Thompson subsequently allied himself with the annual Socialist Register publication. With Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, he was one of the editors of the 1967 May Day Manifesto, one of the key left-wing challenges to the 1964–70 Labour government of Harold Wilson.^[11]

The Making of the English Working Class

Thompson's most influential work was and remains The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 while he was working at the University of Leeds. The massive book, over 800 pages, was a watershed in the foundation of the field of social history. By exploring the ordinary cultures of working people through their previously ignored documentary remains, Thompson told the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Reflecting on the importance of the book for its 50th anniversary, Emma Griffin explained that Thompson "uncovered details about workshop customs and rituals, failed conspiracies, threatening letters, popular songs, and union club cards. He took what others had regarded as scraps from the archive and interrogated them for what they told us about the beliefs and aims of those who were not on the winning side. Here, then, was a book that rambled over aspects of human experience that had never before had their historian.^[4]

The Making of the English Working Class had a profound effect on the shape of British historiography, and still endures as a staple on university reading lists more than 50 years after its first publication in 1963. Writing for the Times Higher Education in 2013, Robert Colls recalled the power of Thompson's book for his generation of young British leftists:

I bought my first copy in 1968 – a small, fat bundle of Pelican with a picture of a Yorkshire miner on the front – and I still have it, bandaged up and exhausted by the years of labour. From the first of its 900-odd pages, I knew, and my friends at the University of Sussex knew, that this was something else. We talked about it in the bar and on the bus and in the refectory queue. Imagine that: young male students more interested in a book than in gooseberry tart and custard.^[1]

In his preface to this book, E.P. Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

Thompson's thought was also original and significant because of the way he defined "class." To Thompson, class was not a structure, but a relationship:

And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.

By re-defining class as a relationship that changed over time, Thompson proceeded to demonstrate how class was worthy of historical investigation. He opened the gates for a generation of labour historians, such as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working classes.

A major work of research and synthesis, the book was also important in historiographical terms: with it, Thompson demonstrated the power of a historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers. Thompson wrote the book while living in Siddal, Halifax, West Yorkshire and based some of the work on his experiences with the local Halifax population.

Freelance polemicist

Thompson left the University of Warwick in protest at the commercialisation of the academy, documented in the book Warwick University Limited (1971). He continued to teach and lecture as a visiting professor, particularly in the United States. However, he increasingly worked as a freelance writer, contributing many essays to New Society, Socialist Register and historical journals. In 1978 he published The Poverty of Theory which attacked the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers in Britain on New Left Review (famously saying: "...all of them are Geschichtenscheissenschlopff, unhistorical shit"^[12]). The title echoes that of Karl Marx's 1847 polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy and that of philosopher Karl Popper's 1936 book The Poverty of Historicism. Thompson's polemic provoked a book-length response from Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism.

During the late 1970s Thompson acquired a large public audience as a critic of the then Labour government's disregard of civil liberties; his writings from this time are collected in Writing By Candlelight (1980).

From 19891 Thompson was a frequent contributor to the American magazine The Nation.^[13]

Voice of the peace movement

From 1980, Thompson was the most prominent intellectual of the revived movement for nuclear disarmament, revered by activists throughout the world. In Britain, his pamphlet Protest and Survive, a parody on the government leaflet Protect and Survive, played a major role in the revived strength of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.^[11][14] Just as important, Thompson was, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, an author of the 1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, calling for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, which was the founding document of European Nuclear Disarmament. Confusingly, END was both a Europe-wide campaign that comprised a series of large public conferences (the END Conventions), and a small British pressure group.

E P Thompson speaking to anti-nuclear weapons protestors in 1980

Thompson played a key role in both END and CND throughout the 1980s, speaking at many public meetings, corresponding with hundreds of fellow activists and sympathetic intellectuals, and doing more than his fair share of committee work. He had a particularly important part in opening a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which he was denounced as a tool of American imperialism by the Soviet authorities.

He wrote dozens of polemical articles and essays during this period, which are collected in the books Zero Option (1982) and The Heavy Dancers (1985). He also wrote an extended essay attacking the ideologists on both sides of the cold war, Double Exposure (1985) and edited a collection of essays opposing Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars (1985).

An excerpt from a speech given by Thompson featured in the computer game Deus Ex Machina (1984). Thompson's own haunting recitation of his 1950 poem of "apocalyptic expectation, "The Place Called Choice," appeared on the 1984 vinyl recording "The Apocalypso", by Canadian pop group Singing Fools, released by A&M Records.^[15]

William Blake

The last book Thompson finished was Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993). The product of years of research and published shortly after his death, it shows how far Blake was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English civil war.

Personal life

In 1948 Thompson married Dorothy Towers, whom he met at Cambridge.^[16] A fellow left-wing historian, she wrote studies on women in the Chartist movement, and the biography Queen Victoria: Gender and Power; she was Professor of History at the University of Birmingham.^[17] The Thompsons had three children, the youngest of whom is the award-winning children's writer, Kate Thompson.^[18]

Thompson was a user of marijuana, although he never made his habit public during his lifetime.^[19]

Thompson died at the age of 69 in Worcester.^[20]

William Frank Thompson

Thompson's older brother William Frank Thompson (1920–1944), was also a member of the British Communist Party during World War II. A gifted linguist, Frank Thompson parachuted into fascist-occupied Bulgaria as part of a "Phantom Brigade" during Operation Mulligatawny.^[21][22] There, he supported the resistance as a liaison officer. Frank Thompson was captured and on 10 June 1944 he was executed. His body was buried in the War Cemetery of Sofia. After the war, the Bulgarians erected a statue in his honour. The nearby villages of Livage, Lipata, Tsarevi Stragi, Malak Babul, Babul and Zavoya were merged and renamed to Thompson in the British officer's honour.

E. P. Thompson and his mother wrote There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson (1947). Frank Thompson was also a friend and confidant of Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and novelist.^[23] E. P. Thompson wrote another book about his brother, published in 1996.^[24][25][26]

Criticism

Although Thompson left the Communist Party of Great Britain, but remained committed to Marxist ideals, Leszek Kołakowski wrote a very harsh criticism of Thompson in his 1974 essay "My Correct Views on Everything."^[27] Tony Judt considered this rejoinder so authoritative that he claimed that "no one who reads it will ever take E.P. Thompson seriously again". Kolakowski's portrait of Thompson elicited some protests from readers,^[28] and other left-wing journals came to Thompson's defence.^[29] On the 50th anniversary of the landmark publication of The Making of the English Working Class, journalists celebrated E.P. Thompson as one of the preeminent historians of his day.^[1][30]

Key works

• William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955.
• "Socialist Humanism," The New Reasoner, vol. 1, no. 1 (Summer 1957), pp. 105–143.
• "The New Left," The New Reasoner, whole no. 9 (Summer 1959), pp. 1–17.
• The Making of the English Working Class London: Victor Gollancz (1963); 2nd edition with new postscript, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, third edition with new preface 1980.
• Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism. Past & Present, vol 38, no. 1 (1967), pp. 56–97.
• The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present, vol. 50, no. 1 (1971), pp. 76–136.
• Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, London: Allen Lane, 1975.
• Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England. (Editor.) London: Allen Lane, 1975.
• The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London: Merlin Press, 1978.
• Writing by Candlelight, London: Merlin Press, 1980.
• Zero Option, London: Merlin Press, 1982.
• Double Exposure, London: Merlin Press, 1985.
• The Heavy Dancers, London: Merlin Press, 1985.
• The Sykaos Papers, London: Bloomsbury, 1988.
• Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, London: Merlin Press, 1991.
• Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Making History: Writings on History and Culture, New York: New Press, 1994.
• Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, Rendlesham: Merlin, 1997.
• The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1997.
• Collected Poems, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999.

See also

• Communist Party Historians Group
• The New Reasoner
• Postpositivism
• Cultural studies
• Time discipline

References

Further reading

• Anderson, Perry (1980). Arguments within English Marxism (2nd ed.). London: Verso. ISBN 9780860917274. 
• Blackburn, Robin (September–October 1993). "Edward Thompson and the New Left". New Left Review, special issue: Edward Thompson and the New Left. New Left Review. I (201): 3–25. 
• Hobsbawm, Eric (Winter 1994). "E. P. Thompson". Radical History Review. Duke University Press. 1994 (58): 157–159. doi:10.1215/01636545-1994-58-157. 
• Johnson, Richard (Autumn 1978). "Edward Thompson, Eugence Genovese and Socialist-humanist History". History Workshop Journal. Oxford Journals. 6 (1): 79–100. doi:10.1093/hwj/6.1.79. 
• Kaye, Harvey J. (1984). The British Marxist Historians. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 9780333662434. 
• Kaye, Harvey J.; McClelland, Keith, eds. (1990). E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives. London: Polity Press. ISBN 9780745602387. 
• Lynd, Staughton (2014). Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below. Chicago: Haymarket Books. ISBN 9781608463886. 
• Merrill, Michael (1984) [1976], "Interview with E. P. Thompson", in Abelove, H., Visions of History, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, pp. 5–25, ISBN 9780394722009. 
• Merrill, Michael (Winter 1994). "E. P. Thompson: In Solidarity". Radical History Review. Duke University Press. 1994 (58): 152–156. doi:10.1215/01636545-1994-58-153. 
• Kołakowski, Leszek (1974). "My correct views on everything: A rejoinder to Edward Thompson's 'Open letter to Leszek Kołakowski'". Socialist Register. Monthly Review Press. 11. 
• Palmer, Bryan D. (1981). The Making of E. P. Thompson: Marxism, Humanism, and History. Toronto, Canada: New Hogtown Press. ISBN 9780919940178. 
• Palmer, Bryan D. (1994). E. P. Thompson Objections and Oppositions. London: Verso. ISBN 9781859840702. 
• Webb, W. L. (Winter 1994). "A Thoroughly English Dissident". Radical History Review. Duke University Press. 1994 (58): 160–164. doi:10.1215/01636545-1994-58-160. 
• Christos Efstathiou, E.P. Thompson: A Twentieth Century Romantic, London: Merlin Press, 2015
• Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (Eds.) E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014

External links

• E. P. Thompson in discussion with C. L. R. James, 1983 on YouTube.
• E. P. Thompson at the March 1977 SSRC Seminar on Models of Social Change on YouTube.
• Mary Kaldor, "Obituary: E. P. Thompson", The Independent, 30 August 1993.
• "E. P. Thompson, 69, British Leftist Scholar" (obituary), New York Times, 30 August 1993.
• Edward and Dorothy Thompson Family Website