Class, Identity, and Historical Agency in E.P. Thompson's Historiography

1. E. P. Thompson ‘s Historiography

4. “The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed hour. It was present at its own making.  I do not see class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships... Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. (p.1)”

5. “I am trying 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... Our only criterion of evolution should not be whether or not a man's actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves. (p.13)

6. ‘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.’

7. We have to try to understand both things – the continuing traditions and the context that has changed. Too often, since every account must start somewhere, we see only the things which are new. It is quite possible for statistical averages and human experiences to run in opposite directions. … People may consume more goods and become less happy or less free at the same time... E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963

8. Class acquired a peculiar resonance in English life: everything, from their schools to their shops, their chapels to their amusements, was turned into a battleground of class. In these same years, the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism was running its parallel but altogether separate course. After William Blake, no mind was at home in both cultures, nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other...these years appear at times to display, not a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement, in which both the Romantics and the Radical craftsmen opposed the annunciation of Acquisitive Man. (p.914) E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963

9. “It is possible to detect in almost every 18th century crowd action [e.g. food riots] some legitimising notion. By the notion of legitimisation I mean that men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs… it was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community… While this moral economy economy cannot be described as ‘political’ in any advanced sense, nevertheless it cannot be described as unpolitical either…”