E.P. Thompson: Historian and Socialist

Abstract

In the early 1960s, when E.P. Thompson published his classic, The Making of the English Working Class, history writing was still a favorite vehicle for left intellectuals. There was no great mystery about the contribution of this ground-breaking work of historical scholarship to the politics of the socialist project. When Thompson crafted his marvelous and much quoted phrase about rescuing ordinary people from "the enormous condescension of posterity"—a phrase quoted in just about every obituary—it did not sound like romantic nostalgia or like some kind of populist antiquarianism (which is the tone all too often given to it by people who quote it now). Instead, it held a clear and immediate political message about the agency of the working class in making its own history, a message that goes to the heart of the socialist project as the self-emancipation of the working class.

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