E. P. Thompson

1. E. P. Thompson • Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner.

2. E. P. Thompson • 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).

3. E. P. Thompson • 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.

4. E. P. Thompson • 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.”

5. 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.”

6. E. P. Thompson • 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. • During the 1980s, he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.

7. E.P. Thompson • Antinuclear Weapons Movement in Europe

8. 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. • It told the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below.

9. The Making of the English Working Class • Thompson's work was also significant because of the way he defined "class". • To Thompson, class was not a structure, but a relationship:

10. The Making of the English Working Class “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.”

11. The Making of the English Working Class • 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 labor historians, such as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working classes.

12. The Making of the English Working Class • A major work of research and synthesis, the book was also important in historiographical terms: with it, Thompson demonstrated the power of an historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers. It remains on university reading lists 40 years after its publication.