Published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of *The Making of
the English Working Class*, *E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism* serves both
as a tribute and an intervention. Edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor
and published by Manchester University Press in 2013, this volume fits within a
thriving field of Thompson scholarship. This field has expanded steadily since
his death and shows no signs of slowing down. Events at Harvard, Birkbeck
symposia, new publications from Monthly Review Press, and ongoing biographical
and historiographical analyses all highlight Thompson’s lasting significance.
His work remains widely translated, debated, and included in curricula
worldwide. Few British historians post-WWII have attracted such sustained international
attention. However, this widespread recognition has created a peculiar
distortion: Thompson is celebrated, contextualised, and memorialised, yet
rarely subjected to a rigorous Marxist critique. This noticeable gap is what
the current review aims to address.
The editors present their collection as a multifaceted
assessment of Thompson—covering his roles as a historian, educator, poet, peace
advocate, and political figure. Many contributors, personally acquainted with
Thompson or engaged within his intellectual circle, approach him with a blend
of respect and critique. The eye-catching cover, clearly inspired by Soviet
interwar propaganda posters, aims to place Thompson within a history of radical
politics. However, this choice is ironically complex, given Thompson’s
complicated and often hostile relationship with Marxism, especially its
revolutionary Soviet form. His political evolution—from early Communist Party
membership to Cold War dissent and New Left activism—was characterised more by
breaks than consistency. Consequently, the cover’s stylistic homage
unintentionally underscores the gap between Thompson’s idealised radicalism and
the Marxist tradition he aimed to support.
Mainstream academic audiences have received the volume well.
Sheila Rowbotham commends its sympathetic yet critical tone, highlighting the
editors’ success in showcasing Thompson’s broad intellectual scope. Mary Kaldor
considers it a reminder of the “loss of English radicalism” and a prompt to
revive it. These endorsements show how the book aligns with a broader academic
trend that views Thompson as a symbol of humane socialism, participatory
democracy, and cultural dissent. He is celebrated not only for The Making but
also for his critiques of nuclear weapons, his defence of civil liberties, and
his focus on the moral aspects of politics. In this way, Thompson has become a
symbol of a certain kind of left-liberal nostalgia—an icon invoked to mourn the
decline of grassroots activism and the weakening of public intellectual
engagement.
Despite the growing body of literature, one perspective is
notably missing: a Marxist critique of Thompson’s politics and approach to
history. This gap is deliberate. The widespread hostility to authentic
Marxism—especially the classical Marxism of Trotsky, Lenin, and the
revolutionary tradition—has led to Thompson’s anti-Marxist critiques being
seldom questioned. Instead, people often praise them as bold acts of
intellectual independence. His criticism of Althusser, his dismissiveness of
“theory,” and his focus on moral experience over class analysis are viewed as
refreshing counterpoints to dogmatism. However, for Marxists dedicated to
historical materialism, these positions are not a progression but a step back
from Marxism.
This review does not aim to cover every chapter of the
volume or every facet of Thompson’s extensive work. Instead, it highlights
aspects most relevant to his political ideas—his views on class, his opposition
to Marxist theory, his moral critique of Stalinism, and his influence on the
British New Left. These themes are crucial to understanding Thompson’s legacy
and his ongoing role in modern historiography. Often seen as the symbol of
“history from below,” emphasising agency, culture, and lived experience, this
positive view can hide the political consequences of his approach: replacing
class struggle with moral storytelling, favouring cultural radicalism over
revolutionary action, and turning Marxism into an ethical outlook rather than a
scientific analysis.
By emphasising Thompson’s activism—his advocacy for peace,
opposition to nuclear armament, and critique of Cold War militarism—the editors
strengthen a moralised perspective. Although Thompson’s activism was genuine
and often brave, it also reflected a strong rejection of Marxist ideology. His 1956
split from the Communist Party, triggered by Khrushchev’s disclosures and the
Soviet invasion of Hungary, shifted his focus from revolutionary Marxism to
humanist moralism, increasingly excluding class analysis. The New Left he
co-founded embodied this moral stance: anti-authoritarian, culturally broad,
and politically varied. It criticised capitalism without proposing a
revolutionary agenda and praised working-class culture without advocating for
proletarian power.
This review treats E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism not
just as an academic work, but as part of a larger ideological effort to
domesticate Marxism in academia and to position Thompson as its acceptable
figurehead. Focusing on chapters most relevant to his political views, the
review seeks to reintroduce a perspective often overlooked in modern
scholarship—a Marxist critique rooted in historical materialism rather than
moral judgment.
A gifted teacher, an undisciplined historian
Thompson’s reputation as an educator has always been a key
part of his legacy, and those who contributed to _E. P. Thompson and English
Radicalism_ rightly highlight this aspect. He was, by all accounts, a natural
teacher: lively, demanding, and driven by a belief that history matters because
ordinary people matter. While his politics are subject to debate—and this
review will suggest they had significant flaws—his dedication to adult
education and the intellectual emancipation of working-class individuals was
sincere. His years teaching extramural classes in Yorkshire for the Workers’
Educational Association not only influenced his teaching approach but also
deeply impacted his historical writing. _The Making of the English Working
Class_ cannot be understood without those years in church halls and community
centers, listening to working-class students’ experiences and encouraging them
to see themselves as active participants in history.
John Rule’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography reflects this duality effectively. Thompson’s postgraduate students
at Warwick recalled him as meticulous, inspiring, and deeply devoted to their
intellectual growth. He was the type of supervisor who examined drafts
meticulously, encouraged students to approach history, not just theory, and
regarded scholarship as a moral calling. Nonetheless, Rule also highlights the
tensions between Thompson and the university. Heavy teaching responsibilities,
constant meetings, and bureaucratic pressures within a rapidly growing
institution left little time for research. Thompson was uncomfortable with the
managerial university that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, as his temperament
and politics were influenced by the older tradition of adult education, where
teaching served as a social mission rather than a professional duty.
Rule’s observations on The Making are equally perceptive.
The book reflects an author who challenges conventional academic norms with a
lively, combative, and sometimes unrestrained language. For example, Thompson’s
harsh critique of Methodism as “ritual psychic masturbation” illustrates his
tendency to use strong language when moral clarity calls for it. His aversion
to quantification, evident in his mocking critique of economic historians
claiming that industrialisation’s benefits amounted to “a few potatoes, some
cotton clothing, tea and sugar, and many articles in the Economic History
Review,” was not merely stylistic but also indicated a deeper rejection of the
analytical rigor associated with Marxism.
Thompson's resistance to formal analysis is central to any
Marxist critique of his work. His avoidance of quantification was driven not by
personal preference but by a deeper disdain for abstract, theoretical, and
structural methods. Instead, he emphasized narrative, moral storytelling, and
lived experience. This perspective shaped his historical techniques and
political views. After leaving the Communist Party in 1956, his shift was
towards a moral humanism that prioritized ethical sentiments over class analysis,
rather than embracing a more rigid Marxist stance. The New Left he helped
create embodied these ideas: it was anti-authoritarian, culturally open, and
politically inclusive, yet lacked a coherent theory of capitalist development
or proletarian action.
Thompson’s impatience with rigour permeated his work at all
levels. In history, it led to a romanticised view of working-class agency that
often overlooked the structural limits capitalism imposed. Politically, it produced
a moral critique of Stalinism that never matured into a comprehensive critique
of bureaucratic decay or serious engagement with revolutionary Marxism. For
example, his debates with Althusser were not about defending Marxist
methodology but about rejecting theory altogether. Thompson’s claim that
“theory” was an external imposition on historical practice did not deepen
Marxist analysis but signalled a retreat from it.
The contributors to E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism
celebrate his teaching, his prose, and his moral passion. These qualities were
real, and they help explain his enduring appeal. But they also point to the
limits of his politics. Thompson’s strengths as a teacher—his immediacy, his
impatience with abstraction, his belief in the primacy of lived experience—were
inseparable from the weaknesses of his historical method and his political
thought. A Marxist critique must therefore begin not by denying his gifts but
by recognising how those gifts were bound up with a rejection of the very
rigour that Marxism demands.
1956: the crisis of Stalinism
Michael Newman's chapter addresses the decisive episode in
Thompson's political life. Khrushchev's "secret speech" of February
1956, followed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary that November, threw the
Communist Party of Great Britain into crisis. Thompson, together with John
Saville, produced the dissident Reasoner inside the party and, after
leaving it, launched The New Reasoner in 1957.
Newman correctly notes that 1956 caused a leftist
realignment, but his explanation overlooks the key political decision presented
by the crisis. Thompson deliberately rejected Trotskyism, the only current that
challenged Stalinism from Marxist and international worker perspectives.
Additionally, describing the New Left Review, created in 1960 from The New
Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, as a leading Marxist scholarly
publication is inaccurate.
The British branch of the International Committee of the
Fourth International, led by Gerry Healy, viewed the crisis as a chance to
expose Stalinism as counter-revolutionary and attract the most promising
individuals breaking away from the CPGB. They did so with a notable group,
including Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker journalist whose Budapest reports the
party suppressed, historian Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, and Tom Kemp. These
individuals helped found the Socialist Labour League in 1959.
Thompson was not among them, whatever Newman's attempt to
place him at the centre of a "Marxist revival." The Trotskyists were
sharply critical of The New Reasoner but sought political discussion. In
"The New Left Must Look to the Working Class," published in Labour
Review in 1959, Healy pointed out that Thompson's article entirely omitted
the working class.
Healy explained that the New Left was not simply a group of
people with new ideas. It reflected a phase in the crisis of capitalism, and
like earlier movements among intellectuals and students, it warned of a
resurgence of the working class. He wrote that the crisis first found its reflection
in the battle of ideas.
Thompson had no interest in such a discussion. He responded
to the SLL by accusing it of factionalism, a charge levelled at the Trotskyist
movement throughout its history. Healy remarked that Thompson had discarded all
the baggage he carried out of the Communist Party except "one soiled old
suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism."
The Trotskyists' fight was made harder by the revisionist
tendency led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, which split the Fourth
International in 1953. The Pabloites presented Khrushchev's speech as evidence
that the bureaucracy could reform itself under mass pressure and move leftward.
This perspective lent credibility to those leaving the Communist Party who wanted
to break with Stalin's crimes without breaking with the political outlook that
had produced them.
Thompson found a warmer reception among the state-capitalist
tendency of Tony Cliff, forerunner of today's Socialist Workers Party, which
abandoned the defence of the Soviet Union and broke with the Fourth
International around 1950. For decades that tendency has provided left cover
for emigrants from Stalinism. David McNally, writing in International
Socialism in 1993, called Thompson the greatest Marxist historian of the
English-speaking world and credited him with a commitment to freeing Marxism
from Stalinist distortion.
Socialist humanism and the New Left
The New Reasoner drew together former and current
CPGB members, individuals who had passed through the Trotskyist movement, and
Labour Party members. They were united by opposition to Trotskyism. Thompson
was openly hostile to an international revolutionary perspective and sought
instead to root his journal in a supposedly native "English" radical
tradition.
Kate Soper's chapter shows that Thompson offered, in place
of Marxism, what he called "socialist humanism." It is a moral and
essentially utopian outlook. Its critique of Stalinism was vague by design. For
Thompson, Trotskyism was merely another variant of Stalinism, a position that
spared him the need to explain how the Soviet bureaucracy arose.
Even McNally conceded the point. He noted Thompson's
lackadaisical attitude to scientific rigour. He acknowledged that while
Thompson denounced the camps, the show trials and the police state, he never
offered a clear analysis of the nature of the Stalinist regimes. That is
precisely the analysis Trotsky had provided in The Revolution Betrayed
two decades earlier.
Thompson never advocated building a revolutionary party.
Like the New Left as a whole, he blamed Lenin's conception of the party for
Stalinism. In 1959, The New Reasoner published Eric Heffer, a former Communist
who later became a Labour MP, arguing that the vanguard had met a past
historical need but had become a hindrance.
Thompson's dispute with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, who
took control of New Left Review in the early 1960s, and his later
polemic against Louis Althusser in The Poverty of Theory (1978), have
been presented as a defence of Marxism. They were nothing of the kind. They
were arguments between different tendencies of the petty-bourgeois left, none
of which based itself on the working class.
The subsequent evolution of New Left Review is
instructive. As Julie Hyland has written on the WSWS, the journal became a
meeting place for Stalinist-influenced academics and Pabloite tendencies,
promoting the Frankfurt School, structuralism, Maoism, anarchism, postmodernism
and a succession of other theories of student radicalism.
Theodore Koditschek's chapter discusses Thompson's lifelong
engagement with socialism and Marxism while acknowledging his distance from the
"dogmas" of orthodoxy. The formulation is revealing. What Koditschek
calls dogma is historical materialism itself, and it is precisely this that
Thompson abandoned.
The Making and the problem of consciousness
Thompson's break with historical materialism underpins The
Making of the English Working Class. Despite its rich detail and undoubted
literary power, the book lacks a materialist account of how the working class
developed. Class appears above all as a cultural experience and a moral
self-definition, rather than as a social relation rooted in the development of
the productive forces.
The "history from below" genre that Thompson
helped found is enjoying a revival, promoted by a section of academic
historians and by groups such as the SWP. Amid the crisis of world capitalism,
its popularity is understandable, and well-written works in this tradition can
add to our knowledge of complex events. But its practitioners rarely examine
the political origins of the method, or the politics it serves.
Its most damaging feature is how it treats consciousness. It
is one thing to rescue the working class from what Thompson famously called
"the enormous condescension of posterity." It is another to explain
where the working class came from, and how and from where it derives its ideas.
Stuart Hall, Thompson's collaborator in the first New Left,
set out their shared view in New Left Review in 2010. Against what he
called the "economism" of the Stalinist, Trotskyist and Labourist
left alike, Hall insisted that socialists were "made, not born." On
this view, consciousness is detached from the objective processes of the mode
of production.
The materialist conception of history begins from the
opposite standpoint. As Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology: The
production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly
interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the
language of real life.... We do not set out from what men say, imagine,
conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, to arrive
at men in the flesh. We start with real, active men, and based on their real
life-process, we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and
echoes of this life-process.... Life is not determined by consciousness, but
consciousness by life.
This does not equate consciousness with mere passive
reflexes. Marxism argues that a revolutionary party must actively cultivate
socialist awareness among the working class through deliberate struggle,
grounded in a scientific grasp of the objective conditions. Thompson, Hall, and
the New Left, however, rejected this approach.
Nina Power's discussion of Thompson's view of class
highlights a related issue. Thompson idealized the working class and its
spontaneity, while recognizing his own empirical approach. Without the praise
often associated with it, his view of class tended to distinguish socialism
from the working class as a revolutionary, global force. Paul Bond noted on
WSWS that this form of "Marxism" was aligned with a petty-bourgeois
fraction that remains closely connected to the current order.
No single review can finally settle E. P. Thompson’s place
in history, nor should it try. Thompson remains a historian whose work will
continue to be read, debated, and reinterpreted for decades to come. The
Making of the English Working Class will endure as one of the most
influential works of post‑war British historiography, not only for its
narrative power but also because it opened space for history writing that took the
experiences, aspirations, and cultural worlds of ordinary people seriously.
Thompson’s achievement in this respect is undeniable. He restored agency to
historical subjects who had long been treated as passive objects of economic
forces, and he did so with a literary verve that few academic historians have
matched. Future generations will continue to turn to his books for answers to
the political and historical problems of their own time.
But they should read him critically. Thompson’s strengths as
a historian were inseparable from his weaknesses as a Marxist. His hostility to
abstraction, his suspicion of theory, and his impatience with analytical rigour
were not incidental features of his work; they were constitutive of his
intellectual identity. These qualities made him a compelling teacher and a
vivid writer. Still, they also limited his ability to grasp the structural
dynamics of capitalist development or the political logic of revolutionary
movements. Thompson’s insistence on moral experience over theoretical analysis
led him to elevate culture over class, agency over structure, and narrative
over explanation. The result was a body of work that is rich in detail and
human sympathy but often thin in its conceptual foundations.
This tension stemmed from Thompson’s political formation.
Although he left the Communist Party in 1956, he never fully discarded the
outlook he acquired within it—above all its hostility to Trotskyism. His break
with Stalinism was moral rather than theoretical. He rejected the bureaucratic
brutality of the Soviet regime, but he did not engage seriously with the
Marxist critique of Stalinism developed by Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
Instead, he carried into the New Left assumptions shaped by the Communist
Party's ideological battles: suspicion of Trotskyist analysis, dismissal of
revolutionary strategy, and a tendency to equate Marxist rigour with dogmatism.
His polemics against Althusser were not a defence of Marxist method but a
rejection of theory itself. His critique of Stalinism remained ethical rather
than historical, grounded in moral outrage rather than a systematic account of
bureaucratic degeneration.
This legacy has shaped how Thompson’s work is received. The
academic celebration of Thompson as a humane socialist, a defender of civil
liberties, and a champion of “history from below” has often served to
domesticate Marxism within the university. Thompson becomes the acceptable face
of radical history: passionate but not doctrinaire, moral but not
revolutionary, cultural but not structural. The contributors to E. P.
Thompson and English Radicalism largely reproduce this image. They admire
his teaching, prose, and activism, but they do not confront the political
limits of his method or the ideological function his work continues to serve.
A genuinely Marxist biography of Thompson remains to be
written—one that situates him not as a heroic outsider but as a product of the
political contradictions of the British left in the mid‑twentieth century. Such
a biography would examine his formation within the Communist Party, his
moralised break with Stalinism, his role in shaping the New Left, and the
theoretical consequences of his hostility to Marxist rigour. It would treat
Thompson not as a saint of radical history but as a complex figure whose achievements
and limitations illuminate the broader crisis of socialist politics in the post‑war
period.
Thompson will continue to be read, and he should be. But readers
should read him with an awareness of the political choices that shaped his work
and the theoretical horizons he refused to cross. Only then can we understand
his legacy in its full historical and political significance.
Notes
- Roger
Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (eds.), E. P. Thompson and English
Radicalism, Manchester University Press, 2013.
- The
Many-Headed Monster blog, papers from the Birkbeck symposium on
"history from below."
- Cal
Winslow (ed.), E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays
and Polemics, Monthly Review Press, 2014.
- John
Rule, "Thompson, Edward Palmer (1924–1993)," Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography.
- G.
Healy, "The New Left Must Look to the Working Class," Labour
Review, 1959.
- David
McNally, "E. P. Thompson: Class Struggle and Historical
Materialism," International Socialism 61, Winter 1993.
- Eric
Heffer, article in The New Reasoner, 1959.
- Julie
Hyland, "Embittered row between UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband
and Daily Mail over his father, Ralph," WSWS, 8 October 2013.
- Stuart
Hall, "Life and Times of the First New Left," New Left Review
61, January–February 2010.
- Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1845–46.
- Paul
Bond, "Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014): A political career
dedicated to opposing Marxism," WSWS, 5 March 2014.
