his history, politics and reputation

634 E. P. THOMPSON RECONSIDERED

© The Historical Association 2000

© The Historical Association 2000. Published byBlackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UKand 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

History, Politics and Reputation:E. P. Thompson Reconsidered

DAVID EASTWOODUniversity of Wales, Swansea

AbstractThis article offers a reinterpretation of the public career and work of E. P. Thompson.Much of the current critical work on Thompson assumes that he had two, largelyseparate, careers, one as an historian, the other as a political activist. As a result his his-torical writing is generally considered in isolation from an equally large and influentialbody of political writings, which represented interventions in contemporary debates fromthe struggle of the Yugoslav partisans in the 1940s to the campaigns for nuclear dis-armament in the 1980s. The present article attempts an historical reading of Thompson’spolitical writings, reconsiders his achievement as an historian, and seeks to offer a moreintegrated and critical reading of his historical and political vision.

It is perilous to define anyone as a popular historian. This category,to say the least of it, is ill defined. We might be thinking in terms ofsale, public salience or literary style. Moreover, despite academics’

none-too-secret craving for recognition, readership and rewards, thehistorical profession as a whole remains deeply sceptical of popularity,suspecting at best subtle compromises with scholarly rigour and at worsta prostitution of the craft. If one thinks simply in terms of market salesand recognition in and beyond the chattering classes, a small coterieof popular historians does emerge. In the twentieth century these wouldinclude G. M. Trevelyan, Arthur Bryant, A. J. P. Taylor and prob-ably J. H. Plumb.1 All, in their way, figures of the establishment, with

In writing and revising this article, I have incurred many debts. Gareth Stedman Jones and the lateRaphael Samuel first asked me to write on Edward Thompson, and Richard English suggested Idevelop my thoughts on Thompson’s oeuvre as a whole. Seminar audiences at Queen’s Belfast, OxfordUniversity, and the University of Wales, Swansea have commented helpfully on earlier versions. MikeKenny has been generous in sharing his ideas and enthusiasm for reappraising Thompson’s place inthe post-war left with me, and my friend and colleague Steve Sarson commented on a draft withcharacteristic perceptiveness.1 For Trevelyan, see David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992); G. M. Trevelyan,An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949), pp. 1–51; for Bryant, see The Blackwell Dictionary ofHistorians, ed. John Cannon (Oxford, 1988), pp. 54–5; for Taylor, see Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor:A Biography (1994); A. J. P. Taylor, A Personal History (1983); for Plumb, see Neil McKendrick,

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Taylor as the establishment’s licensed jester. To this quartet the name ofE. P. Thompson must be added. This is not company which Thompson,a heterodox Marxist and soi disant scourge of the establishment, wouldhave sought, but in terms of sales, media recognition and influence, onlyAlan Taylor amongst post-war historians could rival Thompson.

Measured even in the crudest of ways, Edward Thompson’s achieve-ment as an historian was enormous: four major books, two seminalcollections of historical essays, a central role on the editorial board ofPast and Present, and a period as reader in the highly influential Centrefor the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick. Moreimpressively still, Thompson’s output spanned the vastness of modernEnglish radical history. Thompson began with what is still the most com-pelling study of Morris in William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary(1955), and a career which began with one act of homage ended with threeothers when in the early 1990s he published studies of William Blake, JohnThelwall, and his father and India.2 Successful and scholarly as thesestudies were, Thompson’s two other books are of a quite different order.The Making of the English Working Class, a study of English working-class formation between 1790 and 1830, first published in 1963, trans-formed the study of labour, class and political radicalism in Britain andAmerica and is incontestably the single most influential work of Englishhistory of the post-war period.3 Equally significant, although not quite asfar reaching in its influence, was Thompson’s study of eighteenth-centurycrime and law, focusing on the Black Act of 1723, which he publishedunder the wonderful title, Whigs and Hunters, in 1975. This study, alongwith the simultaneously published collaborative volume from the Warwickcentre, Albion’s Fatal Tree, opened up crime and the law as the terrainfor some of the most fertile social history to be published in the 1980s.4

‘J. H. Plumb: A Valedictory Tribute’, Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society inHonour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (1974), pp. 1–18. Thompson clearly read McKendrick’stribute to Plumb, perhaps more than once. When I bought what turned out to be Thompson’s copyof the volume second-hand, it fell open at the Plumb tribute.2 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955, new edn. Stanford, 1976)[hereafter Thompson, William Morris]; idem, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the MoralLaw (Cambridge, 1993); idem, Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore ( Delhi, 1994); idem,‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, Past and Present, 142 (1994), 94–148.3 First published in 1963, The Making of the English Working Class was reprinted in 1968 with along postscript in which Thompson replied to his critics, and reprinted with a new short preface in1980. Quotations in this article are from the 1968 Penguin edition [hereafter Thompson, Making ofthe English Working Class].4 E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (first published 1975, new edn.Harmondsworth, 1977) [hereafter Thompson, Whigs and Hunters]. This Penguin reprint containeda characteristic postscript in which Thompson sought to lavish scholarly irony on his critics. Whatbecame Whigs and Hunters had started life as a contribution to the collective project at Warwickon eighteenth-century crime. Thompson helped edit the ensuing volume and contributed a moremodest, but typically illuminating, piece, E. P. Thompson, ‘The Crime of Anonymity’, Albion’s FatalTree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, JohnG. Rule, E. P. Thompson and Cal Winslow (first published 1975, new edn. Harmondsworth, 1977),pp. 255–344.



To open up one major field of study is something most of us cannot hopeto achieve; to open two is the fruit of prodigious intellectual originality.

For all that, and for all the sheer literary virtuosity of The Making ofthe English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters, much of Thompson’sfinest historical writing is contained in his essays. Here craft, originalityand economy combined, not in miniature, but in a distilled concentrationwhich mark his essays out as amongst the finest works of twentieth-century British history. The movement away from the Mahlerian sym-phonic grandeur of The Making of the English Working Class to a moretightly argued historical idiom was announced in ‘Time, Work-discipline,and Industrial Capitalism’ in 1967.5 Four years later his ‘Moral Economyof the English Crowd’ opened up not just an Atlantic but, more rarelyfor Thompson, a European debate on the nature of crowd interventionsin the early modern and modern periods. This was Thompson’s mostinfluential single article.6 His earlier essay, ‘The Peculiarities of the Eng-lish’, has, sadly, now lost a mass readership, but it should be read byanyone who wants to try to understand the nature and idiosyncrasy ofEnglish historical development.7 ‘Time, Work-discipline and IndustrialCapitalism’ and ‘Moral Economy’ were reprinted in Thompson’s finalcollection of historical essays, Customs in Common, published in 1991,along with two richly suggestive essays on the customary culture ofeighteenth-century England and a reworked and expanded version ofa brace of articles from the mid-1970s.8

Thompson’s oeuvre and methodology reshaped British social history.9

Armies of admirers have followed Thompson into the field of crime, thelaw, customary cultures, class and radical movements. For someone who

5 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967),56–97. It is worth noting that this was Thompson’s first strictly historical essay. It remains perhapshis finest.6 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Pastand Present, 50 (1971), 76–136. Thompson himself reviewed the debate on ‘moral economy’ whenhe reprinted the original essay, unaltered, in Customs in Common (1991) [hereafter Thompson,Customs in Common], and followed it with ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, pp. 259–351. The re-sponse to those who had engaged with ‘Moral Economy’ is some nineteen pages longer than theoriginal article, and is the least effective of all Thompson’s many attempts to set his critics right.7 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ [hereafter Thompson, ‘Peculiarities of the Eng-lish’], originally published in The Socialist Register, ed. Ralph Milliband and John Savile, no. 2 (1965)and reprinted in E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978) [hereafterThompson, Poverty of Theory], pp. 245–301.8 Two earlier essays (‘Patrician Society and Plebeian Culture’, Journal of Social History, vii (1974),382–405, and ‘Eighteenth-century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?’, Social History, iii(1978), 133–65) were developed in ‘The Patricians and the Plebs’, Customs in Common, pp. 16–96.9 Adrian Wilson, ‘A Critical Portrait of Social History’, Rethinking Social History: English Society1570–1920, ed. Adrian Wilson (Manchester, 1993), pp. 9–58. Some, of course, would cast Thompsonas the founder of modern British social history, but as Miles Taylor has argued, there is another,earlier tradition of British social history whose origins lay within rather than without Oxbridge, whoseprincipal concerns were non-Marxist, and whose methodology was clearly differentiated from thatof the social sciences; see Miles Taylor, ‘The Beginnings of Modern British Social History’, HistoryWorkshop Journal, xliii (1997), 155–76. See also Harold Perkin, The Structured Crowd: Essays inEnglish Social History (Brighton, 1981), esp. pp. 1–27, 168–85, 212–30.

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supervised few doctoral students, Thompson’s influence over historicalscholarship in the past thirty years has been truly alchemic.10 Even thoseof us who work in these and similar fields have lost count of the numberof articles written directly on Thompson, to say nothing of those pub-lications that proclaim a debt to his example and approach. Americansocial history, from Herbert Gutman and Eugene Genovese onwards, hasexperienced its Thompsonian moment.11 Even those who have not beencaptivated or converted by Thompson have confronted and contested hispositions. Thompson often implied that his critics refused engagement.This claim is implicit in the postscript to the 1968 Penguin edition of TheMaking of the English Working Class, where Thompson berates his re-viewers for criticizing his work whilst being unwilling to engage with hisagenda. In the postscript to the 1977 edition of Whigs and Hunters heaccuses his critics in the ‘academic establishment’ of wanting ‘to condemnour works unread’.12 Nothing, in point of fact, could have been furtherfrom the truth. From 1963 onwards, the publication of a book or anarticle by Thompson was an event. None of us, one suspects, is whollysatisfied with our work’s reception. We all have trouble with the way inwhich we are read. E. P. Thompson – long postscripts and replies to criticsnotwithstanding – had less reason to complain than most. At his deathin 1994 few would have questioned claims in obituaries that he was thegreatest social historian of his generation.

Despite the scale of Thompson’s achievement as an historian, there wasanother E. P. Thompson. This E. P. Thompson was a political activist,working outside the academy and the conventional boundaries of schol-arship. This E. P. Thompson followed his brother into support for theYugoslav partisans in the 1940s.13 Professionally, he found comradeshipin the fraternal contestation of the Communist Party Historians’ Group.14

10 Of the many books which acknowledge Thompson’s direct assistance, few were written by thosewho had formally studied with him. Perhaps the most notable monograph by one of Thompson’sdoctoral students is J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change inEngland, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993).11 For Thompson and American social history, see Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture and Societyin Industrializing America (New York, 1977); Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made(New York, 1969); idem, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972); SeanWilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class 1788–1850(New York and Oxford, 1984); and, for a review article, Peter Way, ‘Labour’s Love Lost: Observa-tions on the Historiography of Class and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of AmericanStudies, xxviii (1994), 1–22. The English debate on Thompson’s socialist humanism has tended totake Genovese as the most obvious American disciple, but Genovese was always more of a Gramscianthan a Thompsonian. For this, and much more, I am indebted to Steve Sarson. For Thompson’sinfluence on Indian social history, see Rajnarayan Chandavankar, ‘ “The Making of the WorkingClass”: E. P. Thompson and Indian History’, History Workshop Journal, xliii (1997), 177–96.12 Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, p. 311; cf. Making of the English Working Class, pp. 916–39.13 There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson, ed. E. P. Thompson and T. J. Thompson(1947).14 Bill Schwarz, ‘ “The People” in History: The Communist Party Historians’ Group, 1946–56’,Making Histories: Studies in History, Writing and Politics, ed. Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan,Bill Schwarz and David Sutton (1982) [hereafter Making Histories], pp. 15–43; E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘TheCommunist Party Historians’ Group’, Rebels and their Causes, ed. M. Cornforth (1978).



Politically, he existed, at best uneasily, in the Communist Party in the1950s but broke immediately and irrevocably over Hungary in 1956.Nothing better expressed the humanitarian warmth of dissident opinionthan Thompson’s critique of the Communist Party of Great Britain’sleadership in ‘Through the Smoke of Budapest’ in the third number ofThe Reasoner.15 Thereafter he sought a new ‘socialist humanist’ way, andwas a key figure in establishing the New Left Review in January 1960.16

In one sense, William Morris had been an attempt to claim Morris forsocialist humanism, but for much of the late fifties and early sixties theidiom of debate within the new left compelled Thompson to argue hiscase polemically rather than historically.17 For many of Thompson’s criticson the left, his history is defined and disfigured by what they take to bethe theoretical flaccidity of socialist humanism. This was at the heart ofhis disputes with Perry Anderson and resurfaced in Richard Johnson’sassault on Thompson in History Workshop Journal in 1978.18 The con-test over practice and theory which came increasingly to engulf the NewLeft Review in the early 1960s was crucial to Thompson’s intellectualformation. Whilst his opponents, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn mostobviously, sought to ground the left’s future in French theory and arevolutionary tradition rooted ultimately in a paradigmatic reading ofthe French Revolution of 1789, Thompson insisted on the importance,one might even say the primacy, of the English historical experience.19

It was Thompson’s historically rooted essay, ‘The Peculiarities of theEnglish’, which in 1965 marked his final divorce from the New Left Re-view circle.20 The year 1968 might have been Thompson’s moment,and Penguin Books enabled him, along with Raymond Williams andStuart Hall, to publish their May Day Manifesto.21 Here again, though,Thompson’s sense of Englishness impaired his effectiveness at a moment

15 Thompson and John Saville published three numbers of The Reasoner in July–September 1956only to find the publication suppressed by the leadership of the British Communist Party; see MichaelKenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin (1995) [hereafter Kenny, First New Left],pp. 17–19; Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh, 1993) [hereafter Chun, British New Left],p. 10.16 Chun, British New Left, pp. 15 and passim.17 On Thompson’s understanding of the ideological location of William Morris, see Thompson,William Morris, pp. 763–810. For Thompson’s socialist humanism, see, inter alia, Out of Apathy, ed.E. P. Thompson (1960) [hereafter Out of Apathy], esp. pp. 3–18, 141–94; and the perceptive analysisin Michael Kenny, ‘Reputations: Edward Thompson’, Political Quarterly (forthcoming), and Kenny,First New Left, pp. 69–85.18 Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (1980) [hereafter Anderson, Arguments withinEnglish Marxism]; Richard Johnson, ‘Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and Socialist Human-ist History’, History Workshop Journal, vi (1978), 79–100; Keith McClelland, ‘Edward Thompson,Eugene Genovese, and Socialist-Humanist History’, History Workshop Journal, vii (1979), 101–15;Gavin Williams, ‘In Defence of History’, History Workshop Journal, vii (1979), 116–25.19 For an expansive statement of Anderson’s counter-position, see Perry Anderson, English Ques-tions (1992).20 Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English [1965]’, reprinted in Thompson, Poverty of Theory,pp. 245–301.21 The May Day Manifesto, ed. Raymond Williams (Harmondsworth, 1968); Kenny, First New Left,pp. 158–62; Chun, British New Left, pp. 86–7.

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of international upheaval. As I have observed before, describing yourselfin New York in 1968 as a ‘Muggletonian Marxist’ is not adopting aninherently recognizable mode of international discourse.22

Like many of the academic left, Thompson was sometimes inclined toelide his own struggles with fundamental struggles against the Zeitgeistand the commanding heights of state power. Thus his campaign against‘Warwick University Limited’, his employer in the later 1960s and early1970s, was represented as a microcosm of the revolutionary dramas whichconstituted and sustained the radical tradition. Thus Thompson, withoutany sense of irony, compared the campaign of dissidents at Warwick Uni-versity in 1970 to the popular agitation for the Second Reform Bill. Ina still grander rhetorical flourish, the struggle against Warwick’s councilbecame a re-enactment of the struggle for the Great Reform Act. ‘The stu-dents are likely to press for a public inquiry . . . Beyond this, the Warwickmovement [sic] faces the classical dilemma of a reform movement whichhas no access to constitutional means to enforce reform. We face the Unre-constituted Council in the same manner as the British people faced, in1831, the Unreformed House of Commons.’23 One cannot doubt Thomp-son’s sense of the issues at stake at Warwick in the early 1970s, but it wasan acute case of that notable academic syndrome of conflating academicpolitics with global politics. With Thompson now having broken with thefirst new left, the Warwick skirmish did give him a cause, and one he foundcongenial, at least in the way in which he chose to construct it: a strugglewhich could be represented as a defence of academic freedom, the rightto dissent, and fidelity to the common law of the academic world. Soonafter this the peace movement claimed Thompson’s energies, and muchof the later 1970s and 1980s was given over to working for the Campaignfor Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and then establishing and campaigningfor European Nuclear Disarmament (END). From the later 1970s to thelater 1980s Thompson’s principal energies went into the peace movement,and he became at least as widely known as a peace campaigner as he wasas an historian. In 1991 Thompson was in no doubt that he had beensummoned away from his historical work by a major international crisis:what he termed ‘the emergency of the “second cold war” ’.24 As Thomp-son the historian fell largely silent, the other Thompson, the polemicistand platform speaker roared from the pages of New Society, from thepresses of radical publishers, and from the platforms and rallies of thepeace movement. One should not underestimate Thompson’s perceptionof the profundity of this struggle. This ‘new cold war’ had ‘descendedlike a polluting cloud on every field of political and intellectual life’.25

22 David Eastwood, ‘E. P. Thompson, Britain, and the French Revolution’, History Workshop Jour-nal, xxxix (1995), 79.23 Warwick University Limited, ed. E. P. Thompson (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 159, cf. p. 156.24 Thompson, Customs in Common, p. ix.25 Ibid. For a fuller statement of Thompson’s position and his sense of being called from history topolitical action, see his contribution to the debate on ‘The Agenda for Radical History’ in 1985,Radical History, xxxvi (1986) [hereafter Thompson, ‘Agenda’], 37–42.



Only when the peace movement had made what Thompson called‘a major contribution’ to the ending of the cold war did he return tohis work as an historian. Thompson’s collected articles from these years– Writing by Candlelight (1980), Zero Option (1982), Double Exposure(1985) and The Heavy Dancers (1985) – resonate with a polemical pas-sion which was part of his authentic voice. They are also embroideredwith that heavy humour – a kind of irony, heavily worn – which I some-times think was Thompson’s principal debt to Marx.

Thompson’s moving from being a professional historian workingin and around the academy to a platform campaigner for the peace move-ment has led to the fractured evaluation of his work and historicalvision. Thompson the historian and Thompson the peace campaignerseem to have been possessed by different constituencies. The voluminouswork on Thompson as an historian and theorist has paid scant atten-tion to his political and polemical writings. It is almost as if these twocareers inhabited separate spheres. Thompson, of course, sometimesencouraged this seeming segmentation of his life and, in the 1980s at least,privileged one mode of engagement over another. Historians, too, areresponsible for perpetuating this image of a split personality by remain-ing silent over what might be termed Thompson’s ‘political writings’:occasional pieces conceived as direct interventions in contemporarypolitical debates.26 Distinguishing between Thompson’s historical, theoreti-cal and political work is analytically helpful, especially to understandingthe trajectory of his later career. Interestingly, Thompson’s ‘theoretical’,‘political’ and ‘historical’ writings were symbiotic and synchronous inthe 1950s, 1960s and earlier 1970s. Only in the 1980s did he abandonthis broad intellectual and political engagement in favour of an exclusiveemphasis on polemical writing and political campaigning. Thompson’sessays from the later 1970s and 1980s were widely circulated and easilyavailable, yet they are virgin territory for most historians, even those whowould be close to Thompson’s political instincts. By examining thesynergy between Thompson’s historical and political writings, however,we can bring into relief the historical and theoretical framework whichunderpinned his oeuvre as a whole.

Throughout his published work Thompson constructed himself asa dissenter. Although Thompson’s dissent was stridently secular, strippedof the Methodism of his upbringing, his secular dissent paralleledreligious dissent, positioning itself outside and against the establishment.Lapsed Methodists are like lapsed Catholics, with something of theirintellectual formation surviving the loss of religious belief. Whilst Thomp-son’s own secular radicalism associated him directly with a tradition of

26 Amongst the exceptions here is Gregor McLennan, ‘E. P. Thompson and the Discipline of His-torical Context’, Making Histories [hereafter McLennan, ‘Discipline of Historical Context’], pp. 96–130. See also the evaluations which emerge in Protest and Survive: The Historical Experience. Essaysfor E. P. Thompson, ed. John Rule and Robert Malcolmson (1993); and B. Palmer, E. P. Thompson:Objections and Oppositions (1994).

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political dissent reaching back through Morris, the Chartists and theEnglish Jacobins to the radicalism of the seventeenth century, his lapsedMethodism gave him at least points of connection with that other,passionately religious, dissenting tradition.27 That said, Thompson con-sistently wanted to privilege secular dissent over religious dissent, and thisprivileging was a matter of morality and of agency. Many have suggestedthat Thompson’s treatment of Methodism in The Making of the EnglishWorking Class is one of the book’s least satisfactory themes. His presenta-tion of Methodism as a kind of counter-politics, or a refuge in momentswhen all passion was spent, rests not on the imperatives of the evidencebut on the imperatives of Thompson’s wishing to construct a narrativeof secular radicalism. Thus, in a notable or notorious passage, Thompsontells us that:

One is struck by . . . the impermanence of the phenomenon of Methodistconversion. Rising graphs of Church membership are misleading; what wehave, rather, is a revivalist pulsation, or an oscillation between periods ofhope and periods of despair and spiritual anguish. After 1795 the pooronce again entered into the Valley of Humiliation . . . In this sense, the greatMethodist recruitment between 1790 and 1839 may be seen as the chiliasmof despair.28

Methodism as the ‘chiliasm of despair’, along with its more prosaicanalogue, that Methodism represented ‘psychic masturbation’, have beenoften repeated and much commented on. The counterpoint – that itwas secular radicalism which represented ‘hope’ – is equally importantto understanding Thompson’s analysis, and merits equal attention.29

Thompson’s belief that religions ultimately represented a profound formof false consciousness was crucial to his reconstruction of the radicaltradition. In ‘The Heavy Dancers’ Thompson even tries to neuter JohnBunyan’s religious idiom, writing of ‘the tradition of popular “dissent”. . . of the alternative political nation, with its own vibrant but unofficialculture – the true Dissent of John Bunyan, but also the political dissentof Cobbett, the Chartists, women’s suffrage pioneers’.30 Here he is morethan hinting that religious dissent is a mutant form, a kind of pervasivefalse consciousness within the true tradition of radical dissent.

Whatever its complications, Thompson’s eagerness to associate himselfformally with a dissenting tradition is revealing of his understanding ofwhat lay at the heart of a democratic political culture, of the idiom ofhis writings, and of his point of intervention in debates. As early as 1961

27 Thompson’s delivering a ‘lay sermon’ in 1969 hinted at both his reverence for the idioms of theradical tradition and the resonances of his Methodist roots; E. P. Thompson, ‘Disenchantment orDefault? A Lay Sermon’, Power and Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien and W. D. Vanich(New York, 1969).28 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 427.29 Ibid., p. 428.30 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Heavy Dancers’, in E. P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers (London, 1985)[hereafter Thompson ‘Heavy Dancers’], 4. The title essay was first published in 1982.



Thompson was chronicling the rise and decline of dissent within Englishpolitical culture and political institutions. The long march of dissentthrough the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries culminated in what hewas to come to call ‘the making of the English working class’ by the 1830s.Its high point seems to have been the later nineteenth century, and itsnadir Thompson’s own days. The vitality of dissent, for Thompson, rep-resented both a commentary on the catholicity of a political culture andan augmentation of a system’s formal institutions. Reflecting on this in1961, he could suggest that:

One hundred years ago – from the standpoint of formal democracy – wewere an under-developed country. But within this limited democracypolitical heresy abounded and was often surprisingly effective. The minorityhad direct access to its own means of communication. The cost of launch-ing a newspaper was not prohibitive. From the press, the public meeting,or the chapel, a determined minority could conduct a sustained propa-ganda, on issues which it selected and according to its own strategy.31

This is crucial to what I want to call Thompson’s sense of a ‘dissentingdemocracy’. There is a clear genealogy from religious dissent, throughsecular radicalism, Chartism and trade unionism, into the radical wing ofthe labour movement, and eventually to CND and END. For Thompsonthe core of a democratic polity consisted in developing not formal par-ticipatory political institutions but rather patterns of political debate. Herehis vision was strikingly close to that of early nineteenth-century rad-icals on which he lavished such loving scholarly attention.

The quality of democratic life is revealed not in the existence of certaininstitutions but in the way these institutions are used. Formally, the institu-tions may appear admirable; controversy of a kind may take place withinthem; the odd licensed radical may even be given an air of openness to asystem which is in fact three-quarters shut. But, all the time, essentialconditions of free controversy are absent. If dissent is to stand any chanceof self-propagation . . . it must present its arguments systematically andcontinuously, in its own tone, according to its own strategy, selecting itsown points of engagement, over a long period of time.32

In Thompson’s analysis the development of party politics and elab-orate media technologies stood proxy for the formal instruments of cen-sorship in totalitarian states. ‘There is no need in this country to supposeany active apparatus to suppress dissent . . . It is more simple than that.These heretical opinions (let us say, neutralism, or Welsh nationalism,or the advocacy of rent strike, or – indeed – orthodox Communism)have no effective “party political” existence.’33 Political dissent, of course,

31 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Segregation of Dissent’, reprinted in E. P. Thompson, Writing by Candle-light (1980) [hereafter Thompson, Candlelight], p. 2.32 Ibid., pp. 6–7.33 Ibid., p. 4. The story of Welsh nationalism since the 1960s offers its own commentary onThompson’s position.

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embodied a programme, or rather programmes, and Thompson waspassionate about some, although by no means all, dissenting programmes.But analytically he was more committed to the fact of dissent than to itssubstantive agendas. More than that, dissent represented a tone, a pol-itical idiom, which sustained unorthodox opinions through unorthodoxpolitical modes.

Dissent can [now] never present its views in its own way and in its owntone – it is assumed that the British public would be bored by ten minutesof consecutive argument. But, for dissent, tone is as important as content.It must say, not that these ideas are true, but that they matter. How canone think of Paine or Cobbett or Hazlitt [or, we might add, Thompson]apart from their tone?34

Dissent was best served by what might be termed the intermediatetechnologies of mass media, ‘by the cheap printing-press, the hustings,the soap-box and the public hall. The crucial growing point of the demo-cratic process is the point at which a minority may propagate an opinionintolerable to the majority.’35 If Thompson’s political writings representan attempt to revive the idiom, tone and public language of dissent, muchof his historical writing was a celebration of the history of radical dissent,either in the persons of Morris and Blake, or in the collective voice ofEnglish radicalism and popular protest. To understand Thompson as adissenter is to perceive the thematic and idiomatic unity of his work; it isto understand its timbre and tone; and it is to appreciate his sentimentsand sentimentality.

Strikingly for someone who was best known as a ‘social historian’,Thompson’s contemporary political interventions often appeared to privi-lege the agencies of the state over social agency. As a political essayist,Thompson’s principal interest was in the commanding heights of thestate. There is nothing inconstant or even ironic about one of England’sgreatest social historians fixing his political gaze on the summits of themodern British state. Indeed, one might argue that social history isreally about the state and social systems of power, and Thompson some-times succeeded in using the analytical tools of social history to enrichhis analysis of rituals of state authority.36 Nevertheless, it is notable thatThompson’s political journalism was often very narrowly focused, andhis understanding of the state and its agencies rather thin. This wasparticularly true of his interventions in the 1970s and 1980s, when he wasmost closely associated with CND and END. There, notably in theessays collected in The Heavy Dancers, the ‘secret state’ is in danger ofbecoming the British state. However much Thompson despised ChapmanPincher, he shared with him an intuition that the crucial decisions, the

34 Ibid., pp. 5–6.35 Ibid., p. 7.36 See his discussion of the role of symbolism in state power in ‘Deterrence and Addiction’, inE. P. Thompson, Zero Option (1992), p. 21.



decisions that shaped British policy, were the decisions of the secret staterather than the parliamentary state.

The rise of the secret state was the grim counterpoint to Thompson’sculture of political dissent. Just as radicalism had its Thompsoniangenealogy, so did the secret state. As demonologies go, this one wasrather precise: the Cromwellian major-generals, the Home Office and itsphalanx of spies in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, the newpolice of the nineteenth century, the Official Secrets Act of 1911, and theemergence of MI5, MI6, the Special Branch and the twilight world of‘intelligence services’ (an Orwellian term if ever there was one). This riseof the secret state had diminished the domain of radical politics andpolitical dissent. Thus in 1982 Thompson argued that:

For a century the powers of the British state have enlarged and enlarged.The alternative political culture has never touched these places of power.On the contrary the alternative political culture is watched from theseplaces, by covert agencies like MI5 and the Special Branch . . . This is onereason why our country is dying from the head downwards.37

There are moments, and this is one of them, where Thompson writes asif the struggles of CND and END represented the endgame of this longstruggle between the secret state and political dissent. Oddly, Thompsondid not see the development of intelligence and political surveillance inEngland as part of an international phenomenon. Rather, his perceptionof English exceptionalism extended even to the formation of its style andapparatus of surveillance. Take two examples from 1978. In that yearThompson republished an essay on ‘The Secret State’, where he suggestedthat official secrecy and the Official Secrets Act have:

worked so that, whereas the CIA is now a household word, many peoplehave only the haziest notion as to the character and functions of MI5, MI6or the Special Branch of the police. Indeed, for a large part of the public,these organizations might not exist; or, if they do, they are thought ofeither as counter-espionage agencies . . . or emergency flying squads.38

This surely is to confuse popular knowledge of nomenclature with popu-lar understanding of the modus operandi of the secret apparatus ofthe state. If this seems a questionable judgement, Thompson’s review ofChapman Pincher’s Inside Story went still further, working up the casesof intelligence activity against Labour politicians and Labour gov-ernments into a unique triumph for the secret services. ‘It is becomingevident that the reason why the Prime Minister, the Government, theParliamentary Labour Party, and the House of Commons will do noth-ing whatsoever about the situation is that they lie under a state of black-mail to the security services. I know of no historical precedent for this.’39

37 ‘Heavy Dancers’, pp. 5–6.38 ‘The Secret State [1976]’, in Thompson, Candlelight [hereafter Thompson, ‘Secret State’], p. 150.39 ‘A State of Blackmail [1978]’, in Thompson, Candlelight, p. 120, original emphasis.

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In passages like this he comes perilously close to making a fetish of thesecret state. Thompson’s version of radical dissent, notably CND, livedboth actually and ideologically in a symbiotic relationship to the secretstate. Both, of course, exaggerated – and had reason to exaggerate – thepower and pervasiveness of the other. One consequence of Thompson’spreoccupations with the role of the secret services in the 1970s andearly 1980s was to construct a mode of analysis which decentres, evenmarginalizes, mere politics, and understates the capacity of the ordinary,open, agencies of the state.

At both the theoretical and the empirical levels Thompson elaborateda distinctly thin, or circumscribed, analysis of what constituted the state.Just as radicals of the later Hanoverian period inveighed against ‘Old Cor-ruption’ and Cobbett began to focus the establishment as ‘the THING’,so Thompson painted a modern state in the colours of secret services,executive agencies and a profoundly attenuated domain of politicaldebate. Hardly surprisingly, Thompson took on concepts such as ‘OldCorruption’ as a sufficient characterization of the eighteenth-centuryEnglish state. If this kind of reading understates the richness of the pol-itical cultures that have animated the English state, it also marginalizesthe impact of what might be termed mere politics.40 This well illustratesthe limits to Thompson’s integration of politics and social history, and,as a result, his social history is rich in its appreciation of politics butconceptually dismissive of the normative power of political processes.

Thompson’s quasi-Marxism rested on a perception that history wasdriven by mighty forces – class formation in Hanoverian England, thecold war after 1945 – a perception which marginalizes the contingenciesof politics, and which comes close to a formal denial of the capacity ofhigh politics to shape events. However much he underestimated the ca-pacity and impact of mere politics, his sense of the limitations of national,regional and local politics was, and is, a welcome challenge to those whothink the high political narrative is the only narrative. Sometimes he gotthe balance right. When reviewing Kenneth Morgan’s survey of theLabour governments of 1945–51, Thompson directed us ‘to the profoundspiritual malaise which was striking a chill into the heart of Labourthroughout these years. The chill came directly from the onset of the ColdWar, and some of its episodes from events far beyond Labour’s control.Yet Labour’s leading Ministers were active – and, in the case of Ernest

40 In a fundamental sense, Thompson’s reading of the eighteenth century remained Namierite, andthus could not accommodate the much more nuanced readings of eighteenth-century political cul-ture which emerged after the publication of ‘Peculiarities of the English’. Important works publishedbetween 1965 and 1994 include: John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accessionof George III (Cambridge, 1976); H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology inEighteenth-century Britain (1977); J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-recognition in Eighteenth-century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal, 1983); Paul Langford,A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989); The Transformation of PoliticalCulture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford, 1990);Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991).



Bevin, eager – accomplices in these developments.’41 Here political agencyand the paradigm shifts which determine the domains of politics areproperly harnessed. Everything, roughly speaking, is in its place, althoughThompson’s assessment of Attlee’s governments and Professor Morgan’sstudy of them is remarkably grudging.

What Thompson never saw, or at any rate never perceived with suffi-cient political clarity, was that what he portrayed as vast, impersonal,extra-political forces were themselves subject to sudden and funda-mental change. Thus when Thompson intervened in the 1983 generalelection with The Defence of Britain, he did so in apocalyptic tones. Heassured us that, ‘The British people must take a decision on June 9th[1983] which will affect, in the most literal sense, their lives, and the livesof their children and of their children’s children, if these are to have anylives at all. Yet we are not being serious about it.’42 Now we must assumethat this was not an invitation to vote Tory in 1983, nor an endorsementof the Reaganite policy of busting the cold war by spending dollars ondefence and destroying the Soviet economy. Similarly, it seems safe toassume that Thompson thought the 1983 election campaign remainedirredeemably trivial and that the result on 9 June 1983 was the worstpossible result. And yet we are here and the cold war is not. It is, ofcourse, arguable that END may have played a part in turning opinionagainst the cold war. Many of us have been sufficiently persuaded byMarx to believe that the economic costs of rearmament in the 1980splayed a more important role. But, on any analysis, a mere political event,the advent of the Gorbachev half-decade, was crucial to ending the coldwar in the later 1980s. Viewed like this, the 1983 British general electionwas a modest historical moment, at which history did not turn. To de-scribe the 1983 election as ‘the most important general election to befought in Britain in this century’ now looks wrongheaded to the pointof quaintness.43

For those seeking to understand the fundamental unity of Thompson’sintellectual and political vision, his essay on ‘The Peculiarities of theEnglish’ (1965) is the key text. Its immediate occasion was Thompson’sengagement with Anderson, Nairn and French Marxist theorists. Someof its strands were developed later in his essay on ‘The Poverty of Theory’,but ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ is a more restrained, and ultimatelyricher, statement of his position. In essence it is a synoptic celebration ofthe English radical tradition, and offers a general context within whichmuch of Thompson’s historical and political thought should be located.44

41 ‘Mr Attlee and the Gadarene Swine [1984]’, in The Heavy Dancers, pp. 242–3. Here Thompsonwas reviewing K. O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–51 (Oxford, 1984).42 ‘The Defence of Britain [1983]’, in Thompson, The Heavy Dancers, p. 69.43 Ibid., p. 69. Similarly curious was his Hyde Park speech in October 1981 which linked the Tories’political survival in the next generation to their being willing to abandon Trident and Cruise mis-siles, ‘CND Demonstration’, in Thompson, Zero Option, pp. 119–22.44 Thompson, ‘The Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors’, in Thompson, Poverty of Theory,pp. 1–210.

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If Thompson the historian sought to reconstruct the contours of Eng-lish radicalism, Thompson the polemicist never hesitated to assert themoral, and even political, superiority of the English radical tradition overits more theoretically sophisticated continental counterparts. An editor-ial in The Reasoner in 1956 sought not so much to restore English rad-icalism to the Marxist tradition as to define that tradition through Englishcontexts. ‘We have no desire to break impetuously with the Marxist andCommunist tradition in Britain. On the contrary, we believe that thistradition, which stems from men such as William Morris and Tom Mann. . . is in need of rediscovery and reaffirmation.’45 In 1960 Thompsonoffered this English radical tradition as an alternative model in an essayon ‘Revolution’:

It is a dogged, good-humoured, responsible tradition: yet a revolutionarytradition all the same. From the Leveller corporals ridden down byCromwell’s men at Burford to weavers massed behind their banners atPeterloo, the struggle for democratic and social rights has long been inter-twined. From the Chartist camp meeting to the dockers’ picket line it hasexpressed itself most naturally in the language of moral revolt. Its weak-nesses, its carelessness of theory, we know too well; its strengths, its resili-ence and steady humanity, we too easily forget. It is a tradition which couldleaven the socialist world.46

Fifteen years later, in 1975, Thompson believed that the English radicaltradition’s moment had come. He intervened in the debate over the ref-erendum on Britain’s membership of the Common Market. His essay on‘Going into Europe’ was striking in its overt revolutionary energy: thecrisis of British capitalism truly was at hand, the bourgeoisie was seek-ing refuge in Europe; but simultaneously a crisis of the English radicalway, which had glimpsed the possibility of future transformation for overthree hundred years, was now also at hand.

There is a more momentous point. As British capitalism dies above andabout us, one can glimpse, as an outside chance, the possibility that wewould effect here a peaceful transition – for the first time in the world – toa democratic socialist society. It would be an odd, illogical socialism, quiteunacceptable to any grand theorist. That is perhaps why most BritishMarxists have long ceased to attend to British actualities and, at a time ofunparalleled socialist opportunity, play to each other their amateur revolu-tionary theatricals.47

It is not immediately clear whether Thompson thought that the Com-mon Market would avert Britain’s socialist transition by importing largerdoses of German capitalism or French Marxism. On reflection it is clear

45 The Reasoner, i (1956), 2; cited in Chun, British New Left, p. 10.46 Thompson, ‘Revolution’, in Out of Apathy, p. 308; cf. Harvey J. Kaye, ‘E. P. Thompson, the BritishMarxist Historical Tradition and the Contemporary Crisis’, E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives,ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (Philadelphia, 1990) [hereafter Thompson: Critical Per-spectives], pp. 252–75; Thompson, ‘Peculiarities of the English’, p. 288.47 ‘Going into Europe [1975]’, in Thompson, Candlelight, pp. 87–8.



that the Deutschmark and Althusser were equally potent enemies. ‘Butthe opportunity [for a British socialist transformation] is there, within thelogic of our past itinerary. The lines of British culture still run vigorouslytowards the point of change where our transitions and organizations ceaseto be defensive and become affirmative forces: the country becomes ourown.’48 Note here Thompson’s heavy emphasis on ‘the logic of our pastitinerary’. This is not a case of over-determining historical processes butrather an anguished cry against the systematic Marxism of Thompson’scontinental critics. Nothing could better exemplify Thompson’s sense ofthe exemplary power of English radicalism.

Much of Thompson’s historical writing should be understood in thecontext of his attempt to juxtapose this English radical tradition to whathe regarded as a theoretically oversophisticated and historically im-poverished continental Marxism. Reading Thompson’s work in this wayresolves one obvious puzzle: his willingness to infer a model of working-class formation from an English example. For Thompson, class formationwas not the consequence of climactic moments but of long-run culturaland political processes. At stake here was the model of revolution inform-ing Marxist analysis. ‘If earlier Marxists had been less obsessed with theFrench, and more preoccupied with the English, Revolution’, Thompsonsuggested, ‘the model [of revolution] itself might have been different.Instead of one climactic moment, the Revolution, we might have had amore cumulative, epochal model, with more than one critical transition.’49

Viewed in this way, The Making of the English Working Class was notsimply an exploration of a specific experience of class formation but anattempt to elaborate an alternative paradigm.

The central argument of The Making of the English Working Classis too well known to require elaborate recapitulation here. Thompsonargued that a working-class experience, and with it a definite working-class consciousness, was forged in and after the French revolutionarywars. The 1790s witnessed the advent of a genuinely popular Englishradicalism, with mass working-class movements forged for the first time.Simultaneously, labour experienced the dislocations of market capitalismand industrialization, and perceived with new clarity what Thompsoncalled the ‘friction’ between social and economic interests. From thesefrictions class perceptions arose, through a mass campaign for parliamen-tary reform, through Luddism, through embryonic labour organizations,and through the struggles associated with Swing riots and the campaignfor the Great Reform Act.

William Sewell has suggested that the preface to The Making of theEnglish Working Class is the most widely cited preface since Marx’s pref-ace to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.50 Its attraction

48 Ibid., p. 88.49 Thompson, ‘Peculiarities of the English’, p. 268.50 William H. Sewell Jr, ‘How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theoryof Working Class Formation’, Thompson: Critical Perspectives, p. 51.

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is that it offered a theory of class formation rooted in historical experi-ences and immediately attractive to historians.51 Historians who fearedthat they were about to be displaced in the great scheme of things bysociologists and grand theorists were suddenly back in business: therecould be no theory without history. ‘By class’, Thompson insisted,

I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate andseemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experienceand in consciousness. I emphasize that it is a historical phenomenon. I donot see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as somethingwhich in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in humanrelationships.52

Put like this, history was back in business in a big way. The space forhistorical specificity was preserved when Thompson brought togethermaterialism and culture. It is significant that he qualifies his apparentlyorthodox Marxism, that ‘class experience is largely determined by theproductive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily’,by an insistence on the primacy of culture to class perception: ‘Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cul-tural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutionalforms.’53 Over twenty years later, Thompson confirmed the rathersyncretistic basis of his socialist humanism:

I think the provisional categories of Marxism . . . – those of class, ideol-ogy, and mode of production – are difficult but still creative concepts. But,in particular, the historical notion of the dialectic between social being andsocial consciousness – although it is a dialectical relationship which I wouldsometimes wish to invert – is extraordinarily powerful and important. YetI find also in the tradition pressures towards reductionism, affordingpriority to ‘economy’ over ‘culture’ . . . And where, again, from the materi-alist vocabulary do agency, initiatives, ideas, and even love come from?54

This binds culture and materialism closely together, but carefully leavesthe door open on England’s distinctive social and political formation. Italso opened a door for Thompson’s mature historical work which movedincreasingly from focusing on ideas and institutional forms to studies oftraditions and value systems.

The real problem comes when Thompson tells us that class is a hap-pening; when an experience becomes the experience.55 The Making of theEnglish Working Class offers us a normative moment (c.1790–1832) whenan English working class happened. But, almost by sleight of hand, ahappening becomes a making. In other words, the Thompsonian moment

51 For no doubt very similar reasons, theorists found it wanting both in coherence and in convic-tion; see G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, 1978), pp. 73–7, 87.52 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 9. Original emphasis.53 Ibid.54 Thompson, ‘Agenda’, pp. 40–1.55 From a different perspective, this was the thrust of Perry Anderson’s argument in chapter 2 ofArguments within English Marxism, pp. 16–58.



turns out to be a Burkean moment: the moment which future gen-erations should recognize as normative, and hallow as representing anauthentically English class experience. I hesitate in offering Thompsonas a Burkean Marxist, but the label does seem to fit.

Thompson’s conviction that his Making of the English Working Classhad indeed established a crucial historical moment had profound conse-quences for Thompson’s own development as an historian. He publishedThe Making of the English Working Class in 1963 aged 39. Whilst work-ing on the proofs of the book, Thompson began work on the pre-historyof English class formation, gathering and organizing material whichwould be published in ‘Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism’in 1967 and ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eight-eenth Century’ in 1971.56 Other essays followed, which he either collectedin or revised for Customs in Common in 1991. These projects, coupledwith Whigs and Hunters and Albion’s Fatal Tree, the principal fruits ofWarwick University’s Centre for Social History’s project on the social his-tory of crime in the eighteenth century, and a study of Blake, WitnessAgainst the Beast, constituted Thompson’s scholarly work in the secondhalf of his career. This is not to imply that the second half of Thompson’scareer as an historian was either unfruitful or disappointing. Far fromit. The impact of Whigs and Hunters and the essays eventually collectedin Customs in Common has probably been as profound for eighteenth-century studies as the impact of The Making of the English Working Classwas for nineteenth-century studies. What matters, though, to understand-ing Thompson’s development as an historian is properly appreciatingthe extent to which his mature preoccupation with what he took to be thepre-histories of class formation transformed him from an historian of thenineteenth century into an historian of the eighteenth century. Much ofthe current work on Thompson’s career either neglects this or, implicitlyat least, regrets it.57

Many of Thompson’s followers or sympathetic critics assumed that thetrajectory of his intellectual development would be quite different. Theyassumed that The Making of the English Working Class – which hadoriginally been commissioned as a 60,000 word essay – would come toconstitute the foundation for a synoptic history of the English workingclass. They assumed, as did Tim Mason, that The Making would be fol-lowed by a synoptic study of subsequent development of the Englishradical tradition. ‘Why’, Mason asked:

has the author gone back in time to write the pre-history of the Englishworking class? Did not other readers, like me, look forward to vols. 2 & 3,on the Chartist Movement and ‘10 hours’, on the new model unions andthe battle for the vote in the 1860s, on the socialist revival of the 1880s

56 See Customs in Common, pp. ix and 259.57 Peter King, ‘Edward Thompson’s Contribution to Eighteenth-century Studies – The Patrician–Plebeian Model Re-examined’, Social History, xxi (1996), 215–28, is a notable exception.

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and the origins of the Labour Party . . . and to vol. 6 on Harold Wilson,Denis Healey and ‘The Mole’?58

Much ‘labour history’ in the 1970s and 1980s overtly or covertly consti-tuted itself as a continuation of the Thompsonian project: working outthe history of labour and class relationships in mid and later nineteenth-century England from notes, hints and ideas sketched out in Thompson’searlier works. As a completion, this was rather less successful thanSussmayer’s efforts with Mozart’s Requiem.59 More seriously, these com-pletions or forward projections were grounded in a fundamental misap-prehension of Thompson’s grand theoretical schema. There was no needfor volume two of The Making of the English Working Class because thestory – both as narrative and as theory – had already been completed.In its essentials the English working class had been made: what remainedopaque was not its mature history but its infancy. To understand this isto understand the crux of Thompson’s grand historical vision.

It is customary to present Thompson’s historical work after The Mak-ing of the English Working Class, as Tim Mason did, as an explorationof the pre-history of working-class formation. Characterizing Thompson’slater work in these terms, as a rich prologue to the grand opera of TheMaking, is probably unhelpful and, almost certainly, not the way in whichThompson himself would have conceived Whigs and Hunters and Cus-toms in Common. Rather, Thompson’s later historical work representeda sustained attempt to develop a conceptual model and an analyticallanguage which would illuminate social formation in the period beforethe nineteenth-century language of class became appropriate. Thompsonwas enough of a Marxist to want to understand social relations withinthe categories of class, but he was always alert to the different ways inwhich class relations could be articulated and mediated. His work fromthe later 1960s onwards was a reconstruction of the social and culturalrelations which were displaced in the ‘making’ of the English workingclass.

Methodologically, the link between Thompson’s work in The Makingand his work on the eighteenth century was his emphasis on culture. Putcrudely, if Thompson saw social relations in nineteenth-century Englandas mediated through the culture of class, he saw eighteenth-century so-cial relations as mediated through the culture of custom. In formal terms,

58 Tim Mason on ‘The Making of the English Working Class’, History Workshop Journal, vii (1979),224. Of course, Thompson did get round to Wilson and Healey, and obliquely to ‘The Mole’, butengaged with them polemically as ‘his’ opponents.59 For a helpful review of the debate, see Mike Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the BritishWorking Class 1840–1940 (1994), esp. pp. 4–20. Needless to say, I take the work of Gareth StedmanJones not as a completion but as a critique, and a critique which is crucial to assessing whatThompson actually achieved in The Making of the English Working Class; see G. Stedman Jones,Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 5–24 and passim. The linkages between Thompson and Stedman Jones are most helpfully explored inJon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, ‘The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics ofLanguage – A Reply’, Social History, xviii (1993), 1–16.



therefore, early nineteenth-century England saw the displacement of acustomary society by ‘a structural reordering of class relations and ideol-ogy’.60 At one level Thompson’s terminology for describing eighteenth-century society does not look very remarkable: paternalism, tradition,custom, deference, even plebeians and patricians. Moreover, in Whigs andHunters, Thompson acknowledged the centrality of law-making and legaldiscourse to patterns of authority in eighteenth-century England. WhatThompson rejected were consensual models of eighteenth-century so-ciety. The absence of formal notions of class did not mean an absence ofclass struggle.61 The paradox of eighteenth-century England was that classfriction was sustained by traditional languages and cultures. The locusclassicus of this argument came in the essay on ‘The Moral Economy ofthe English Crowd’ where Thompson insisted that crowd interventions –riots, most notably – were legitimized by traditional notions of a ‘justprice’ and entitlement. Thompson’s ‘moral economy’ (which he insists wasan eighteenth-century term, but offers no eighteenth-century references)represented a kind of equilibrium between the needs of the poor and theambitions of the rich, characterizing the point of exchange in terms ofmoral entitlements rather than market advantages. Indirectly, at least,moral economy empowered the poor:

While this moral economy cannot be described as ‘political’ in any ad-vanced sense, nevertheless it cannot be described as unpolitical either, sinceit supposed definite, and passionately held, notions of the common weal –notions which, indeed, found some support in the paternalist tradition ofthe authorities; notions which the people re-echo so loudly in their turnthat the authorities were, in some measure, the prisoners of the people.62

The kind of imperfect empowerment of the people which Thompsonsaw in moral economy was later elaborated into a more general readingof eighteenth-century culture. Resistance to enclosure, hostility to thegame laws, passionate commitment to popular amusement in the face ofpolite reformers, rough music, arson, and crimes of anonymity were seenby Thompson as offering a rich resource enabling plebeian society toconstrain patrician power. For Thompson, the ‘paradox’ of the eighteenthcentury was ‘a rebellious traditional culture’.63 At its most subtle this wasa highly suggestive reading of eighteenth-century rural society. Traditionalrights did shape the development of pre-modern agriculture. Commoning,gleaning, open field systems were more than the vestiges of earlier patternsof agricultural and social organization. Thompson’s sense of a dialecticbetween legal and traditional rights could be highly sophisticated.

At the interface between law and agrarian practice we find custom. . . Agrarian custom was never fact. It was ambience. It may best be

60 Thompson, Customs in Common, p. 96.61 For a perceptive discussion of Thompson’s privileging of ‘struggle’ over ‘class’, see McLennan,‘Discipline of Historical Context’, p. 113.62 Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 188–9.63 Ibid., p. 9.

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understood with the aid of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ – a livedenvironment composed of practices, inherited expectations, rules whichboth determined limits to usages and disclosed possibilities, norms andsanctions both of law and neighbourhood pressures.64

This kind of analysis has created the space for a new literature on ruralcustom which is not simply sentimental and nostalgic, but rigorous andtheoretically informed.

The power of custom was destroyed by a nascent capitalist state.On Thompson’s reading, this state was prepared to order a massive ex-tension of capital statutes in order to preserve the gaming rights of thearistocracy; it raped traditional rights by an unprecedented use of par-liamentary statute to enclose lands and create the preconditions forcapitalist agriculture; it emancipated the grain trade from regulation bymagistrates and subjected it to the impersonal disciplines of the market;and it abused the jury system which Thompson always saw as ‘a stub-bornly maintained democratic practice’.65 In the process the capacity ofplebeian culture to confine patrician power was substantially eroded. Asa result, in the 1790s this always fragile relationship of reciprocity betweenpatrician power and plebeian culture snapped. And in that moment ofbreakage a new radical intellectual perspective was able to establishitself. The 1790s are thus confirmed as the moment of fundamentaldiscontinuity. In the 1790s, with the reciprocity of patrician and ple-beian shattered, ‘It is possible’, Thompson insisted, ‘for the first time, toanalyse the historical process in terms of nineteenth-century notions ofclass.’66

Thus, in the revised version of his essay on ‘The Patricians and thePlebs’ in 1991, Thompson returned to the arguments, and to the caesura,he had identified in 1963. There is, strikingly, no modification of theargument of The Making of the English Working Class, nor even of thetrajectory traced in ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ in 1965. The periodfrom 1790 to 1830 remained the normative moment in English social andradical formation. Studying the eighteenth century whilst experien-cing Thatcherism did not lead Thompson to a greater emphasis on theuncertainties of social transition; rather it confirmed the grand schemawhich had been fully formed by the mid-1960s. To an extent, Thompsonwas candid about this. In 1985 he described himself and his fellowtravellers as ‘completing and enlarging work which was commenced insome cases forty years or more ago’.67 Viewed in this way, the problemwith Thompson’s work is that the whole is less than the sum of its parts;that the richness of his historical technique, and the plasticity of his

64 Ibid., pp. 97, 102.65 On Thompson’s sentimentality towards juries, see ‘Secret State’, p. 169, and Whigs and Hunters,p. 189.66 Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 96, cf. 249.67 Thompson, ‘Agenda’, p. 38; cf. Customs in Common which does as much as, and no more than,this.



historical observation, was ultimately put to the service of a rigid read-ing of the English radical tradition. Here Thompson’s historical andpolitical writings are of a piece in their thin readings of the state, theirdenial of the real power of formal political processes, and their some-times bold, sometimes sentimental, celebration of dissent. Yet preciselybecause Thompson rejected what he took to be the abstract certaintiesof continental Marxism, understanding both the distinctiveness and theintegrity of English history was fundamental to his radical vision. In 1977he had suggested that the English historical establishment wanted tocondemn his works unread. Two years later he berated Mrs Thatcher forsuggesting that socialist academics had brought up ‘a whole generation. . . to misunderstand and denigrate our national history’. In his essay‘Anarchy and Culture’, Thompson responded in a way which both elidedhis historical and political writings and merged Thompson the historianand Thompson the political dissenter:

The law-and-order brigade would like us to think that the constitutionis a generous provision, made at some time by Them to Us. But they knowin their hearts that the opposite is true. They know that one way of read-ing our history is as an immensely protracted contest to subject thenation’s rulers to the rule of law. This contest has swayed backwards andforwards, through a thousand episodes, and with each generation has beenrenewed . . . Every now we have notched up a victory, and every then theratchet has slipped back.68

Note the ‘we’: it reveals the essential E. P. Thompson.

68 ‘State of the Nation’, in Thompson, Candlelight, p. 246.

his history, politics and reputation

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