by: Nicole Rabalais
Introduction
E.P. Thompson was one of the most prominent British historians of the twentieth
century. Not only was he a historian but a communist activist, and his insights
into the nature and function of history provide interesting answers to some
of the most fundamental questions of the discipline. Should one study history
solely for its own sake or for its practical use? If one studies history for
its present use, how truthfully can one recover the past? Every historian is
inevitably biased, but to what extent do they impose their own values and writing
styles into the meaning of history? In this paper, I shall attempt to answer
these questions by first, describing E.P. Thompson’s early activism and
disillusionment and how this led to his unique approaches to Marxist historiography—both
his diachronic understanding of the world and his emphasis on human agency.
Secondly, I hope to demonstrate how his approaches to history, in turn, inspired
him to tireless activism even after his break with the British Communist Party.
Finally, the last section is dedicated to the importance of his distinctive
writing style in reinforcing the ties of past and present and the complexity
of human existence and interaction.
Early Activism and Disillusionment
An insight into E.P. Thompson’s early life reveals that he was, first and
foremost, a leftist and an activist. He was born in England in 1924 to ardent
critics of British imperialism. Thompson followed in his parents’ footsteps,
joining the British Communist Party in 1942 while a student at Cambridge. Later,
he fought in the World War II on the side of the Allies to fight Fascism in
Europe. After the war, Thompson married Dorothy Towers in 1948, also a devoted
communist, who was his political and intellectual equal. The Thompsons lived
a fulfilling but financially constrained early married life in Halifax, England.
Both Edward and Dorothy worked part-time jobs and relied extensively on family
to help support their children. Edward worked as a professor in adult education
at the University of Leeds, hoping to convert them into socialists; this teaching
post was more than a job to Edward—it was another way to transform society.
The Thompsons used almost all of their extra money to finance communist activities
with which they were both heavily involved. In the 1950s, he was head of the
Halifax Peace Committee, editor of Region of Peace (a local leftist journal)
and participated in grass-roots activities, such as collaborating with the local
working class movement.1 Miraculously, the Thompsons’
idealism would never fade, even with their subsequent break with the British
Communist Party. In fact, the years only seemed to increase their dedication
to the movement.
In 1956, Edward and Dorothy Thompson resigned from the British Communist Party.
Increasingly, they increasingly had become disgruntled by the Communist Party’s
attempts to exert their influence among people who were not affiliated with
the Party. However, the biggest disappointments came after the February 1956
announcements of the atrocities under Stalin’s regime and the subsequent
suppression of the anti-Stalinist activities of the Hungarian working class.
By the end of that year, little hope remained for widespread support of the
British Communist Party. The Thompsons and seven thousand other members would
resign from the British Communist Party in 1956. A few years later Edward Thompson
and John Seville would publish The New Reasoner, a journal for disgruntled communists.2
E.P. Thompson’s departure from British Communist Party politics and its
brand of Marxist orthodoxy led him to socialist humanism as a counter to Stalinism,
which he had come to regard as theory that denied the creative agency of human
labor and the values of the individual as an agent in historical process. Stalinism,
which was allegedly Marxist theory in practice, failed to implement the ideology’s
inherent humanity. Stalinism eliminated values from the political sphere and
feared independent thought. Through Stalinist practices, Marxism became an ideology
that led to suffering, death, and destruction. The Thompsons would eventually
join the mainstream Labour Party in the 1960s and ally themselves with some
of the more radical factions. Although the Thompsons remained radicals and not
Labour reformists, joining the Labour Party entailed no contradiction. The Thompsons,
who abhorred violence, espoused a peaceful revolution within the system and
through the ballot box. Unlike some of his contemporaries who changed ideologically
to embrace capitalism, Thompson would later speak out against both superpowers
during the height of the arms race.3
Approaches to History
There is little distinguishing Thompson’s views as an activist from his
views as a historian. Just as Thompson realized the need to modify the strict
Stalinist interpretation of communism, Thompson also understood the need to
reinterpret Marxism on a theoretical level for the purposes of historical writing.
Thompson rejected the notion that history must conform to theory. For Thompson,
being a Marxist historian simply meant relying on a loose body of theory, which
could be modified and reinterpreted.4 History must not be studied
to uphold overarching philosophies. Thompson says in “Historical Logic,”
“History is not a factory for the manufacturer of Grand Theory…Its
business is to recover, to explain and to understand its object—real history.”5
Nevertheless, Thompson had faith in Historical Materialism as an “interpretive
historical category.”6 Thompson believed that Marx and
Engels had not originally intended for their theories to seem so static, but
they were so caught up in developing their ideas that Marxism eventually seemed
necessarily inert.7
Thompson thought that it was best to overcome these synchronic portrayals society
by presenting the complexity of human interactions and relationships. He was
quite critical of disciplines such as anthropology, which attempt to study human
development through a “series of stills…each of which shows us a moment
of social time transfixed into a single eternal pose.”8
Instead, Thompson proposed that one should study each second of humanity as
though it were “..not only a moment of being but also a moment of becoming…Not
only is each present moment intricately and necessarily linked to the past and
future—a single still could never capture the complex dynamics of human
relations and conditions.” 9 It is most important to acknowledge
that a historical moment is comprised of an innumerable amount of diverse conflicts,
interests, and persuasions. One cannot completely and accurately convey every
aspect of even a single historical moment.
Thompson did not believe that Marxist theory was “true” or “complete”
in itself but that the ideas derived from this school of thought explain history
better than other ideological schools; he felt as though Marxist theory was
the closest approximation to the truth.10 Thompson embraced
Engels’s view that theories, understood as only approximation of reality,
are not necessarily false when they fail to encompass the complete truth. Theories
simply help to make sense of reality, and they should not be discarded, only
adjusted and amended to fit historical evidence. 11 In his
preface to The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson suggests that there
are definite parallels or a unifying “logic” among different social
movements, but since nothing ever happens in exactly the same way, there can
be no law.12 In the constructions of historical concepts,
it is often hard to generalize. Historians must form “expectations”
rather than strict “models,” and they must always allow great flexibility
for irregularities, for there are always exceptions to the rule.13
Bess, author of the article, “E.P. Thompson: Historian As Activist,”
argues that in spite of Thompson’s elasticity in theoretical matters, he
did not seek to eliminate theory so much as postmodernists would suggest and
only believed in modification of theories rather than a complete obliteration
of them. Also, Thompson failed to tackle such issues as linguistic turn or the
Derridean “metaphysics of presence,” and his works would never satisfy
a postmodernist critique.14 In response to such challenges,
Thompson maintained that “the appeal is not (or is rarely) to a choice
of values, but to the logic of the discipline. But if we deny the determinate
properties of the object, then no discipline remains.”15
As a historian, Thompson was an empiricist, though not in the strictest sense.
He believed in the ability of historians to faithfully reveal the past if they
were honest about their motivations and intentions. Thompson thought that history
was utterly fascinating as a discipline, because the past was subject to an
infinite multitude of variables; the historian should attempt to piece these
variables together into a collective whole. He was often defensive about the
perceived inadequacies of history as a discipline, and in his article “Historical
Logic,” Thompson said, “Our knowledge may not satisfy some philosophers,
but it is enough to keep us occupied.”16 Thompson argued
that history, in no way, could be held to the same standards as the sciences.
In “Historical Logic,” Thompson stated:
History never afford the conditions for identical experiments; and while, by comparative procedure, we may observe somewhat similar experiments in different laboratories (the rise of the nation-state and industry), we can never reach back into those laboratories and impose our own conditions, and run the experiment through once again.17
History, therefore, necessitates its own logic and criteria to be evaluated.
The human condition is impossible to generalize, and it is always in flux with
contradictions existing in every second. In Thompson’s own notion of “historical
logic,” a historian could attain relatively objective knowledge by undergoing
an “arduous preparation” and research to arrive at a “dialogue”
between successive hypotheses and historical evidence. Thus, information is
deemed to be “true” via historical logic if nothing proves it false.
To put it simply, a hypothesis is true if it works well enough with the historical
evidence to “prove” the outcome at hand. After the historian arrives
at this “objective knowledge,” then the second part of this process
is for the historian to assign the information a special significance. However,
Thompson stresses, it is essential for historians to uncover the truth (though
it will inevitably be incomplete) to the very best of one’s ability first.
Any new and contradictory piece of data must be taken into account. Bess says
about Thompson, “He saw no reason why rival explanations could not be fruitfully
compared with each other, with an eye both to the internal coherence and to
the way in which they confronted ‘fresh and inconvenient evidence.’”18
The more accounts and interpretation the historian has, the better he or she
can come to a fuller understanding of the subject. After the historian feels
comfortable and confident in his or her discoveries, only then should the historian
impose his or her own meaning and importance to the matter.19
Likewise, in evaluating historical knowledge, there are also two levels of contemplation.
The first phase is the “listening” phase, in which the historian attempts
to understand the situation as objectively as possible. Most importantly, the
historian must try to comprehend the events in terms of the subject. In the
preface to The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson says about potential
criticisms of the subjects, “But they lived through these times of acute
social disturbances and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of
their own experiences; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain,
condemned, in their own lives, as casualties.” However, to be made useful
to the present, the historian should review the circumstances and then evaluate
them in terms of his or her own standards. The lessons from the past are still
often relevant today. Thompson says that the West often touts its own values
and ideals but forget about the social evils that were never remedied. Moreover,
peoples in other areas of the world may successfully prevail over the challenges
that the West failed to overcome. 20 The coexistence of these
two kinds of aims—accuracy and advocacy—did not trouble Thompson,
for he believed that a conscientious writer could distinguish the two and assign
each to its own appropriate moment.
Emphasis on Human Agency
One of the most important aspects of E.P. Thompson’s thought as a Marxist
historian is his stress on human agency or free will. While he acknowledges
that people are born into the world under circumstances that they cannot control,
how people respond to their environment are very much their own choices.21
Bess describes Thompson’s views about the complexities of humanity: “Human
beings cannot be reduced to abstract categories…out of the synthesis that
each individual continually creates among the structures that are impinged on
his or her life, a unique and ultimately unpredictable story arises.”22
A famous example that Thompson used to describe the human agencies and complexities
that often evade metanarratives is one of a hypothetical woman who is at once
a union organizer, an activist, a musician, a church member, a wife of one person,
and a mistress of another person. Thompson poses the question: Which role defines
her? If no single role classifies her existence, then is she simply the place
where all these functions interconnect? Then Thompson describes how in one instance
the woman could have a nervous breakdown and in another relinquish all of her
responsibilities and join a women’s liberation organization.23
Although people’s identities are very much determined by certain social
factors including but not exclusive to class, there is still room for individual
choice. If people individually make certain decisions, their actions could change
others’ perspective and in turn “snowball into major structural changes.”24
Furthermore, Thompson argued that class consciousness is a result of an identification
resulting from shared experiences and interests. The individuals within the
“class” are free agents who consciously construct it; however, “class”
does not exist without their acknowledgment or awareness.25
Thompson rejected both the oversimplification of the notion that a consciousness
automatically develops due to a certain relationship to the means of production,
as well as the opposing viewpoint that class is false and arbitrarily defined.
Unable to come up with an adequate description for the notion of “class,”
Thompson simply states, “Class is defined by men as they live their own
history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.”26
Thompson did not think that class was automatically derived from a certain relationship
to the means of production. Rather, class formation is an intricate development
with progressions and failures. Change happens as a result of the collective
actions of a group, and it does not necessarily happen in the cohesive fashion
that the group might imagine—but in a much more fragmented manner. Unity
does not exist without a consciousness of the people; they make it happen.27
Post Communist Party Activism
Renato Rosaldo, author of “Social Analysis in History and Anthropology,”
argues that Thompson characterized himself as a modern day William Cobbett (who
helped to pass the Reform Bill of 1832), though Thompson did not admire him
so much for the bill but for his ability to integrate different interests into
a single cogent movement.28 Never was this idea more apparent
than in his post-1956 activism, starting in the 1950s with his work for the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and especially in the 1980s with the
European Nuclear Disarmament (END). In the early 1980s, Thompson completely
abandoned historical writing to devote himself entirely to activism. During
this period, Thompson was battling poor health; nevertheless, Thompson wrote
innumerable letters to the editor, made countless public appearances and interviews,
including the famous 1984 debate at Oxford University with then U.S. Secretary
of Defense Caspar Weinberger.29 In the article “Agenda
for Radical History,” written in the late 1980s, Thompson describes how
overworked he had been in his activism. In the past five years, he had addressed
over five hundred meetings and visited over twenty countries as an “emissary”
of the peace movement.30
Thompson’s speeches always conveyed a great sense of urgency. He beckoned
the citizens of Europe to act quickly before “the forces of history”
would gain momentum and leave them with a nuclear holocaust. He felt as though
the Cold War was promoting cultural stagnation to the most dangerous degree.
Both sides maintained their easy decades-old targets; they simply allowed old,
irrelevant ideologies to tailor their prejudices. The dynamics of the Cold War
necessarily elicited successive, reciprocal actions of aggression.31
Thompson says about Cold War politics between the Soviet Union and the United
States: “[The superpowers are] not acting out of a conflict between modes
of production or economics, but [they are] acting out a conflict from an outworn
ideological script which threatens indeed to be terminal to all modes of production
alike.”32 Thompson truly believed that grassroots movement
could save a divided Europe—and the world. Just as the English workers
in the early nineteenth century had rebelled against being turned into machine-like
instruments of an exploitative social system, so the citizens of the East and
West might rebel then against the mindless social process that was carrying
them collectively toward a nuclear war that no one wanted.
Narrative Structure
Thompson’s critics argue that his unique narrative style further imposes
biased principles onto his historical subjects. It is widely known that Thompson’s
initial academic interests were primarily in literature, and his inspiration
to become a historian largely has been attributed to his admiration for William
Morris, a nineteenth century politician and historian. Like Morris, Thompson
did not object to painting a very lofty and glossy picture of a utopian socialist
future. Thompson also agreed with Morris that a socialist revolution would not
only entail an economic change but an alteration of peoples’ mindsets that
would embrace the benefits of a socialist system.33 Bryan
Palmer, a friend of Thompson, goes on to argue that Thompson’s ideological
development as a Marxist historian was shaped just as much by Dickens’s
Hard Times as Engel’s The Housing Question.34 Thompson
abandoned his extensive activism for historical writing in the 1960s, because
he felt as though a revelation of a past development of working-class consciousness
would be equally if not more fruitful to his leftist endeavors. Thompson’s
friend Robert Palmer called Thompson’s Marxist beliefs “a communism
driven less by economic necessity and the logic of determinative forces than
by moral passion and desire.”35 Thompson’s most
famous work, The Making of the English Working Class, heavily reflected this
combined ethical fervor with his appreciation for Romantic literature.
While many historians admire Thompson’s writing style in The Making of
the English Working Class, Renato Rosaldo, author of “Social Analysis of
History” is critical about the implications of his writing structure—Thompson’s
distinctive method of emplotment. Rosaldo describes historical writing as a
practice that must both remain true to the historical evidence and create a
narrative to explain the evidence. Though these components are two distinct
entities, they cannot be adequately separated. Facts without an accompanying
story are nothing more than a chronology; however, the historical narrative
must remain consistent with the information, or else it is simply fiction.36
Rosaldo then claims that Thompson tells his story in a very “melodramatic”
fashion, as to present the history in such a light that the reader would sympathize
with the working class. Rosaldo uses the character of Thomas Hardy as an example;
Thompson portrays Hardy as a man who was persecuted by the “evil forces”
of the state. Nevertheless, this interpretation of Hardy’s oppression could
have just as easily been interpreted as a consequence of divine fury, a “consequence
of moral flaws,” or “a quirk of destiny.” Rosaldo believes that
Thompson’s choice of this “melodramatic” tone is not so much
consistent with his subjects’ own perception of their situation but simply
Thompson’s interpretation.37
Rosaldo’s complaint about The Making of the English Working Class is that
Thompson treats his narrative as a “neutral medium,” though he has
imposed his own understanding of what happened onto his subjects. By telling
the history of the working class in a storybook-like fashion, Thompson takes
the role of the omniscient narrator in a novel, presuming to know how his subjects
really thought and felt. However, Rosaldo identifies the values conveyed in
the work as those of Thompsom and not those of the nineteenth century working
class. Thus, the major lesson is that historians, particularly those who are
ultimately concerned with human agency, must take care to not conflate their
subjects’ perceptions and values with their own, or else they are being
unfaithful in their narratives.38 In Rosaldo’s words,
the most unfortunate flaw of The Making of the English Working Class is that
“the very identification which enables other voices to be heard in their
full persuasive force as they speak to the present can at the same time muffle
the distinctive tones of the past.”39 Ultimately, the
question is that one can never be sure whether historical concepts make history
or if they are inherent within historical change.40
While Rosaldo’s criticisms are thoughtful ones, I disagree with him. Although
Rosaldo most likely acknowledges (as most modern historians do) that it impossible
to recover a completely (or even mostly) objective account of history, he feels
as though Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class is very lacking
in that it confuses the author’s own biases as his subjects.’ If the
tone of the work would have reflected Thompson’s actual relationship to
his subjects, it would have been at the hefty expense of the fluidity between
past and present and the complex dynamics of human interactions that Thompson
wanted so much to convey. Moreover, I do not feel as though Thompson is nearly
so guilty of this hazy conflation as Rosaldo claims. The questions posed and
answered by The Making of the English Working Class are quite deliberately connected
to the work of the New Left. Thompson’s very concern for making the connection
present in his work in itself admits the author’s agenda for trying to
find links in the Radical Tradition. Never did Thompson assert that he was outside
of history; he always intentionally and purposefully spoke about the past to
the Present. Both in his history and in his activism, Thompson linked the past
to the present, because it is the past that provides us with our cultural legacy;
however, it is the duty of the present humanity to create the future. Rosaldo
himself says quite eloquently that for Thompson, “Cultural traditions are
selected, recombined and invented as an active part of class formation. Cultural
traditions, understood as actively selected versions of the past, constitute
and reconstitute themselves through the future.”41
Conclusion
After this brief assessment of the life and thought of E.P. Thompson and the
questions of propriety concerning the historian’s purposeful imposition
of values onto the subject matter, I have come to the conclusion that it is
wholly appropriate for a historian to recount the past with a political bent.
History has always served very specific roles in human society. Folklorist Henry
Glassie, an admirer of E.P. Thompson, reveals this idea in his article “Practices
and Purposes of History,” in which he states that history mainly has two
functions; first, history allows people to feel more integrated into their communities.
An understanding of history, Glassie argues, leads people to perform certain
rituals, resulting in a sense of community and an expression of commitment to
the social order.42 Secondly (and relevantly to the topic),
some histories are created and preserved to reveal human potential. This “potential”
can be manifested in many forms: agreement, withdrawal, perseverance, and dissent.
Simply, the tales of human capabilities provide a basis for alternatives.43
Glassie states, “History—like myth, powerful, suggestive, and inevitably
fragmentary—exists to be altered, to be transformed without end…”44
History provides people with a background with which to make a choice.
Although I am only now a little familiar with Thompson’s work and life,
I greatly admire him as a historian and an activist, and I find Glassie’s
views to be extremely compatible with E.P. Thompson’s approach to history
in his works, but more importantly, in his life. Though Marxism can be an extremely
dreary and deterministic philosophy, the reason so many idealists embrace the
ideology is because it reveals the oppression inherent in capitalist society—oppression
that industrialized societies still face today. Thompson’s excavation of
a fragmented radical tradition inspired him (and many others) to fight subjugation
and work for a more humane world. As Glassie explains, history provides choices.
Therefore, as long as historians make honest attempts to uncover history truthfully,
perhaps through Thompson’s own process of historical logic, I find no reason
why historical writing should be without an “agenda.” Of what use
is learning about the past if not to use its lessons in the present? Even though
history may not inspire one to activism, as it had in Thompson’s case,
the past ultimately and necessarily provides insight into the present and cannot
be separated from it. With the present moment so intricately linked to the past,
it seems inevitable that History’s students will learn something about
the world in the present, no matter how obscure or far removed the history may
seem. Thompson’s activism, therefore, must be thought of as his attempt
at a continuation of the English Radical Tradition, started (in his opinion)
by the English working class of the nineteenth century. Not only did Thompson
want to be a student of history, but also an active participant in its making.
Subsequently, other students of history, who are inspired by Thompson and, to
use Glassie’s term, appreciate the “human potential” he exemplified
in his lifestyle will also someday be moved to action.
Notes
1 Bryan D. Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, (London: Verso,
1994), 50-65.
2 Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, 72-3.
3 Bess, “Activist,” 23-7.
4 Michael D. Bess,” 31.
5 E.P. Thompson, “Historical Logic,” in The Essential
E.P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 1993), 454.
6 Thompson, “Historical Logic,” 458.
7 Thompson, “Marxism and History,” in The Essential
E.P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 1993), 464-7.
8 Thompson, Historical Logic,” 455.
9 Thompson, “Historical Logic,” 455.
10 Thompson, “Historical Logic,” 452.
11 Thompson, “Marx and History,” 461.
12 Thompson, Preface from The Making of the English Working
Class , ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 1993), 4-7.
13 Thompson, “Historical Logic,” 453.
14 Bess, “Historian as Activist,” 30.
15 Thompson, “Historical Logic,” 449.
16 Thompson, “ Historical Logic,” 458.
17 Thompson, “Historical Logic,” 455.
18 Bess, “Activist,” 30.
19 Thompson, “Historical Logic,” 447-50.
20 Thompson, Preface, 6.
21 William H. Sewell, Jr. “How Classes are Made: Critical
Reflections on E.P. Thompson’s Theory of a Working-class Public,”
in E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kay and Keith McClelland
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 53-55.
22 Bess, “Activist,” 28.
23 Bess, “Activist,” 25.
24 Bess, “Activists,” 28-9.
25 Sewell, “Theory,” 53-4.
26 Thompson, Preface, 4-5.
27 Bess, “Activist,” 22-9.
28 Renato Rosaldo, “Social Analysis in History and Anthropology,”
in E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kay and Keith McClelland
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 118-9.
29 Bess, “Activist,” 19-21, 34.
30 E.P. Thompson, “Agenda for Radical History,” in
The Essential E.P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 1993),
490.
31 Bess, “Activist,” 35.
32 Thompson, “Radical History,” 493.
33 Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, 58-9.
34 Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, 58.
35 Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, 57.
36 Rosaldo, “Social Analysis,” 103.
37 Rosaldo, “Social Analysis,” 116-17.
38 Rosaldo, “Social Analysis,” 116-20.
39 Rosaldo, “Social Analysis,” 120.
40 Bess, “Activist,” 22.
41 Rosaldo, “Social Analysis,” 103
42 Glassie, “Practices,” 962.
43 Glassie, “Practices,” 965-6.
44 Glassie, “Practices,” 962.