E. P. Thompson, The Activist Historian

Contemporary interest in social history owes much to the work of a pioneering generation of British Marxist historians. Today the best-known member of this group is E. P. Thompson. His book, The Making of the English Working Class did more than anything else to translate the concerns of the 1950s and 1960s protest movement into historical practice. Edward Thompson's work has been widely used by many activist historians since, especially for the 'Preface' to The Making, one of the most-often quoted documents of its kind. E. P. Thompson himself was undoubtedly an attractive figure, as much for his prominent activism in the peace movement and the New Left as for his history, important as that was. In this short paper, I want to argue that it was precisely Thompson's rejection of history - his democratic activism - which established his greatness as a historian. The point of this paper is not merely to praise an important writer and activist. It shall also engage with some of the most important ideas found in Thompson's work and their reception since.

We all know how historians are supposed to live: with winter in our heart, leather patches on the sleeve, spectacles on our nose. We should avoid all controversy, of if we must succumb to it, make our complaints known only to the appropriate academic milieu. We should seek full-time employment in the university system, write for a peer audience of fellow academics, and in due course be promoted to a condition of managerial oblivion. Thompson defied this path, exuberantly. At the start of his career, he rejected the comfort of a university history department for the much harder task of adult education. He taught literature to groups of workers. Later in life, when his international reputation was made, Thompson turned his back on history itself, to build the peace movement. As he told one friend in 1981, 'I have been so fully preoccupied with matters which concern me as a citizen - the settled direction towards a terminal collision in Europe that I have had to set aside for a time my work as a historian. I have been forced to take leave of libraries and to spend my time in public meetings and turn my pen to pamphlets and public correspondence.' In 1986, Thompson confessed to another New York gathering of British radical historians, 'I don't even have a valid ticket to the British Library or the Public Record Office'.

Thompson's activism took up five decades. It included service at Cassino in the 1939-45 conflict which he judged an anti-fascist war; involvement in socialist and anti-fascist activity in post-war London; peace campaigns in Yorkshire in the early 1950s; a leading role in the organisations of the New Left. He was a founder member of CND, one of the editors of the Reasoner, the New Reasoner and the New Left Review. He also helped to write the 1968 May Day Manifesto. Thompson gave practical and intellectual support to a generation of Indian socialists. He spent most of the 1980s campaigning against nuclear war, as Kate Soper records, 'At any moment he might be found exhorting the masses in Trafalgar Square to `feel their strength' or manning the bookstall at the END bazaar; playing percussion in a fund-raising concert or haggling at the Czech embassy over the suppression of the Jazz Group; dialoguing with Charta 77 or marching at the head of an anti-NATO rally in Madrid; exposing the grotesqueries of the SDI programme or railing against the skulduggery of the Soviet Peace Committee.' Yet the purpose of this paper is not really to consider different moments in Thompson's activism, but the interaction between it and his writing.

For it would be wrong to suggest that 'history' suffered from Thompson's activism. There were also moments when the experiences gained by a life on the left reinforced the quality of his work. One example of a book informed by the movement is Thompson's best-known study, The Making of the English Working-Class. The book was shaped by Thompson's experiences both as a Communist and peace activist, and as a lecturer teaching groups of adult workers. Tom Steele has documented the patient determination with which Thompson set about building classes in the small towns of the West Riding, where they were unknown. One such was Shepley near Huddersfield, where Thompson established a group of older workers. Tired and slow as they sometimes were, such successes pleased him more than any gains in the larger towns. On another occasion, Thompson wrote to a friend, delighted that he had made contact with the surviving members of Bradford Independent Labour Party. Edward Thompson himself dubbed The Making his 'West Riding' book, to remember the activists whose documents and memories had so shaped the book.

Similar points could be made for Thompson's biography of William Morris, informed as it was by its author's long interest in the linked tasks of political organisation and writing poetry. The book also expressed its author's belief in legitimate working-class leadership that Thompson thought he had found in the Communist Party's Harry Pollitt. The search for an overarching moral code - a consistent theme of Thompson's socialist pamphleteering - informs not just his peace writing but the concluding passage of Thompson's Whigs & Hunters which defends the rule of law as a universal good, something to be defended even in an age when the state was guilty of widespread corruption.

The interaction between the insights that we might to expect to find in an 'activist' and in a 'historian' is most clear in Thompson's book of polemics, 'Outside the Whale', 'The Peculiarities of the English', 'The Poverty of Theory'. In these essays Thompson used the traditions of his generation - the familiarity of war, the memory of the Communist Party at its height, the founding of the New Left and CND - as a common fund of experience from which to criticise a series of false arguments on the left, all of which tended to assimilate the story of people's lives to a dull and lifeless, prior model. The alternative, Thompson labelled 'socialist humanism'. This was both a programme for Communist reform, and at one and the same time, an intervention within Marxism, an argument for a different form of socialist literature, a history closer to the fund of people's real experience.

So what was socialist humanism? In the course of his polemic with Louis Althusser, Thompson suggested that socialist humanism was distinguished from Stalinism by the loyalty it maintained to an older conception of freedom. The roots of this term, he claimed, were broad, 'It was voiced by poets in Poland, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia; by factory delegates in Budapest; by Communist militants at the eighth plenum of the Polish Party; by a Communist premier (Imre Nagy) who was murdered for his pains.' It was a plebeian good sense, internationalist, rooted in a common dissident experience, 'For the veteran leader of the Derbyshire miners, Bert Wynn, solidarity with our critique meant (as for many others) severing connections within his own heart; for the full-time organiser of the Leeds Communist Party, Jim Roche, formulating the positions of socialist humanism meant getting out his tools and returning to the cutter's bench.' Notice how both 'definitions' are traced not in theoretical abstraction, but (and this is pure Thompson) in named people's lives.

Yet important as these arguments were, a gap, a certain sense of vagueness remained. The Canadian Marxist David McNally makes the point: 'For all its moral and political fervour, there was something remarkably imprecise about his attack on Stalinism. Thompson described his as a 'moral critique of Stalinism' - and there is much to be said for that. Whatever its limitations, revolutionary socialists can only applaud a critique which refuses to countenance slave labour camps, show trials, mass murder, a police state regime of lies and crimes against human rights, as authentic forms of socialism. But alongside the vigour of moral denunciation one needs a clear analysis of the nature of the regimes at issue. At no time did Thompson offer the latter.'

As early as the 1950s, Alasdair Macintyre complained that ethical commands were often so timeless as to exist beyond reproach, or so contingent as to provide poor guidance to those who used them. Humanism could not be detached from 'the history of the class struggle'. More recently, the historian of the New Left Michael Kenny has taken our author to task for 'romanticism'. Clear as Thompson was in critique of Stalinism, Kenny argues, socialist humanism offered no positive conception of a different society or of the rules by which people should live. Such criticism do not detract, of course, from the insights which Thompson gained by means of his distinctive philosophy, including his absolute commitment to the cause of the East European dissidents, and his campaign for peace. They point rather to an imprecision, a deliberate - and fruitful - underdevelopment of a case.

What was the source of Thompson's brilliance as a historian? What was the key insight for which he will be longest remembered? The one passage that has been most often cited comes from the Preface to his Making of the English Working-Class. 'I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' handloom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott from the enormous condescension of posterity ... Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history they remain condemned in their own lives, as casualties...' The story of everyone's life was valuable, whether or not the causes that they spoke up for were won.

Another passage defines more closely what Thompson had in mind when he wrote the word 'class' into the title of his book: '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) their own ... Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.' The key concept in both passages was 'experience'. In Thompson's work, experience became the basic historical reality, of greater importance than class or structure, agency, role, ideas, or indeed any of the other generalisations that historians have employed to make sense of the past. The term is both pregnant with meaning and also frustratingly vague. Experience is felt in the passing of time, it is a link between memory and history. Beyond that, Thompson does not say anything definite about it at all. We know what Thompson was against, a Marxism which lost count of people's values, and a metaphor of human action which portrayed economics as the sole determinant. To avoid this negative trap, Thompson's Preface folded the two categories of base and superstructure together, leaving this single category of experience as the sole substance to be explored.

There are problems with placing too much explanatory weight on this grand concept of 'experience'. The more specific meaning it is given, the further the concept departs from Thompson's use of it. Yet as Thompson's biographer Bryan Palmer suggests, it was in this case a saving abstraction. Thompson took a complex argument and made it simple. The emphasis on experience in The Making enabled Thompson to advance towards new historical insights. The most important of these was that the working class itself would not have existed as a self-conscious independent agent, without the determined political activity of many thousands of people. Among other things, class was a badge of self-identification, a choice. As Palmer writes, 'Whatever the difficulties in defining such conceptual terms [as experience] with precision, their utilisation in The Making allowed entry to whole areas of neglected importance in the lives of workers, areas that could never again be ignored in negotiating the slippery slopes that connect being and consciousness.'

Since the publication of the Making, a significant left-wing literature has been devoted to the critique of Thompson's use of 'experience'. Sam Ashman suggests that Thompson's cultural definition of class contributed to the subsequent rise of postmodernism. Another Marxist critic Alex Callinicos has taken up the argument, 'the trouble with experience is that it is, by definition, subjective. To describe how someone experienced an event is to describe that event from that person's point of view. In principle, therefore everyone's experience is as valid as anyone else's.' The point matters, of course, because is in the forty years since Thompson's book, rival conceptions of the past have emerged, that stress the national-solidarity of the English, the lack of class tensions, even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the period which Thompson made his own. Encouraged by the climate of postmodern theory in the 1980s and 1990s, such writers as Patrick Joyce and Gareth Stedman Jones have argued that Thompsonian history has itself become outdated. The historian hears only a babble of discordant voices, from which to construct their record. If we take 'experience' seriously, then Thompson's narrative of the past can only be one among several. According to Patrick Joyce, for example, 'There is a powerful sense in which class may be said to have "fallen". Instead of being a master category, it has become one term among many, sharing a rough equality with the others.'

For writers such as Sam Ashman, the criticism of Thompson is only an intermediate stage in a more important process, the critique of postmodernism. The problems with the latter position are more evident. The argument that all accounts are multiple, and no truths 'real', points to a radical break between campaigning and academic knowledge. Democratic activists depend on clarity of insight and purpose, while academics are said to thrive on multiplicity, subjectivism and chaos. Yet if Thompson is criticised for acting as a bridge towards this 'heresy', his was not the crime itself. Thompson himself faced similar criticisms in his lifetime. For example, while reviewing Michelle Perrot's A History of Private Life for the New York Review of Books, David Cannadine observed in passing that the author's post-feminism rested on 'vulgarised version of Thompson's arguments put forward nearly thirty years ago'. The claim of inadvertent intellectual ancestry drew a sharp response. 'I was surprised to find myself blamed for the supposed sins of this largely French collection, with which I am in no way connected and for which I hold no brief ... Cannadine exposes the malign influence of The Making as more far-reaching than that: it seems that I am responsible for the supposed deficiencies of feminist historiography. Once again I find his account of my views to be unrecognisable ... Most American feminist historians will not thank him for attributing their basic historical model to me ... It may be that the influence of The Making is now a drag upon historical scholarship. But let the matter be argued out by attention to the issues or to the text, and not - slop, slap, splosh - with a distemper brush.'

Similar points can be made, of course, against E. P. Thompson's more recent critics. They blame Thompson for the wave of intellectual defeatism associated with postmodernism. Yet of the various antagonists that appear in Thompson's polemics, several played a much greater role in the genesis of this theory. Louis Althusser in particular deserves a good slice of blame for the argument that any theory should be judged not in terms of its practical application but its internal logic. Althusser was not just the father of structuralism, then he is also the grandfather of post-structuralism, and the great-grandfather of postmodernism. Conversely, Thompson's repeated insistence that the moral conduct of the various Communist Parties - East and West - was more important than their claim to doctrinal authority surely points to at least one potential grounds on which postmodernity is suspect.

I also wonder how much damage this supposed imprecision did? It reminds me of the fruitful mistakes, invoked by Thompson, in his account of the war-time generation, 'I recall a resolute and ingenious civilian army, increasingly hostile to the conventional military virtues, which became ... an anti-fascist and consciously anti-imperialist army. Its members voted Labour back in 1945: knowing why, as did the civilians back home ... Our expectations may have been shallow, but this was because we were overly utopian and ill prepared for the betrayals at our backs.' Shallow, utopian, ill-prepared - the metaphors all imply error - and yet something better, behind and explaining the fault, a sort of deliberate innocence, the open eyes of a child, the only perspective from which a non cynical society could be built.

It remains to be seen whether postmodernism will ever be refuted on the terrain of intellectual history. And if this does happen, there is no necessary argument to say that the victor will be wearing the clothes of 1848 rather than 1956. Who anyway, has legislated that only one set of influences should be allowed? 'There is in Thompson', writes David McNally, 'something of the revolutionary temper, a disposition towards finding the cracks within the heavy structures of society which enable agency and self-activity to bend history, to shape the direction of things. And it is this which makes the best of his work, whatever its limits, marvellous examples of genuine historical materialism at work.' E. P. Thompson's history fused empirical research with imaginative, emancipatory politics. Other travellers may since have become lost, but that was not only the fault of this one pioneer.