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E. P. Thompson, Politics and History: Writing Social History Fifty Years after The Making of the English Working Class

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jsh/shv036

1527-1897

Rudi Batzell, Sven Beckert, Andrew Gordon, Gabriel Winant,

Legal and Social Philosophy

The Making of the English Working Class in 1963, the book had evolved from fairly rote assignment for an undergraduate textbook on the British labor movement into what Eric Hobsbawm described as an "erupting historical volcano of 848 pages."i And surely, The Making has proved to be a work of geological proportions, opening an expansive interpretative terrain on which labor, social, gender, and cultural history have developed in the past fifty years.As both an inspiration and foil for critique, The Making has retained a central place in historiographical debates and the development of social history.When we organized "The Global E. P. Thompson" conference through Harvard's Program on the Study of Capitalism in October, 2013, we hoped to both survey this landscape across the world and to explore the continuing relevance of Thompson's ideas and arguments for present research.Additionally, we wanted to reexamine and amplify central themes in Thompson's workclass formation, exploitation, and the experiences, political traditions, and agency of working class people -and to insert them into the rapidly expanding "new" history of capitalism.ii If this newly demarcated subfield is to have any interpretive or political vitality, it must draw in and develop the strengths of social and labor history, a tradition fundamentally formed by Thompson's The Making.Thompson seems an unlikely character to play such a defining role in the development of academic history in general, and the subfields of social and labor history in particular.He was never fully within the profession, and only briefly held formal academic posts.His commitments and sensibilities were forged in the great struggles of the Popular Front era, when he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and participated actively in the Party Writers Group, as a poet first of all, before also joining the Historians Group, where he worked with Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, John Saville and many others.Thompson's first book on the English romantic and revolutionary William Morris was written within this context, and reflected the Historians Group collective efforts to "seek out a popular revolutionary tradition," as well as Thompson's peculiar sensitivity for the cultural, creative, and artistic dimensions of the socialist struggle.Thompson left the Communist Party in 1956 after Khrushchev's secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary; he later revised his book on William Morris to rid it of "Stalinist pieties.