1. Who He Was and Why He Matters
E.P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class (1963), one of the most influential works of history produced in the twentieth century, and spent the rest of his career as both a scholar and a political activist — including a central role in the European Nuclear Disarmament movement in the 1980s. His importance is methodological as much as substantive: he insisted that history must recover the experience of ordinary people in their own terms, and that class is not a category imposed from above but a relationship that people make for themselves through struggle. The question his life poses is whether the same political commitment that energised his scholarship also distorted it.
2. The Thought, Work, and Activism
The Making of the English Working Class opens with one of the most famous statements in historiography: Thompson’s intention to rescue working people ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ The book covers the period 1780–1832 and argues that the English working class was not a product of the Industrial Revolution imposed on passive recipients, but an active historical subject that made itself through shared experience of exploitation and through the cultural and political traditions it brought to that experience. Methodologically it drew on pamphlets, trial records, songs, and popular culture — sources that structural and economic historians had largely ignored.
His subsequent work included Whigs and Hunters (1975), an account of the Black Act of 1723 and the rule of law, and The Poverty of Theory (1978), a fierce polemic against Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism which Thompson attacked for eliminating human agency from history. His nuclear disarmament writing — especially Protest and Survive (1980), a direct riposte to a government civil defence pamphlet — reached audiences far beyond academic history.
3. The Context
Thompson left the Communist Party in 1956, after Hungary and the Secret Speech, unlike Hobsbawm who stayed. The break produced The New Reasoner and eventually the New Left Review, which attempted to develop a socialism independent of Soviet orthodoxy. His political formation was in the anti-Stalinist tradition of the British left, and his historical work was partly a response to the mechanical, base-superstructure Marxism that had dominated Communist historiography. His insistence on agency, culture, and experience was both a historiographical and a political argument.
4. The Contradictions and Limits
Thompson’s ‘history from below’ approach has been enormously productive but also has limits. His focus on English working-class experience has been criticised for romanticising a particular tradition of artisan radicalism that was already being displaced by industrial capitalism in the period he studied — the Luddites and Jacobins are not representative of the broader working class. His anger, which gave his writing its energy, also produced polemical overstatement: The Poverty of Theory was brilliant but unfair to Althusser in important respects. The priority he gave to class over gender has been challenged by feminist historians, most pointedly by Joan Scott.
His nuclear disarmament activism in the 1980s led to accusations that he was being manipulated by Soviet peace propaganda, a charge he rejected but which was not entirely without foundation.
5. The Legacy and Debate
Thompson’s influence on social history is incalculable. The sub-discipline of ‘history from below’ — with its focus on popular culture, resistance, and the experience of the non-elite — is substantially his creation. The concept of a ‘moral economy’ — the popular expectation that markets and rulers should operate according to norms of social justice, not just market logic — has been applied far beyond eighteenth-century England, most recently by James Scott to peasant economies across the developing world. The debate between Thompson’s humanist Marxism and Althusserian structuralism shaped the intellectual left for a generation. His influence on cultural studies, via Stuart Hall and others, is also significant.
6. Related Podcast Episodes
Explore Explaining History episodes on the themes Thompson illuminated:
7. Cross-Links
Ideas this life connects to:
- Anarchism — the libertarian socialist tradition Thompson drew on
- Social Democracy
- Frankfurt School Critical Theory — comparable project of humanist Marxism
Historiographical debates:
- The Russian Revolution — the Marxist tradition Thompson worked within and against
Related Lives:
