E.P Thompson: Historian as Political Activist, Political Activist as Historian

E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class inspired more than a generation of historians to analyze historical actors from the bottom up and to rescue marginalized historical actors—variously defined—from the condescension of history.  From an early point, the enthusiastic reception of the book was linked not only to the object of its focus but also Thompson’s practice as a historian.  A founder of the British New Left and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a teacher of working-class people in the Workers’ Educational Association, in his work Thompson linked the past to contemporary politics.  The agency that he so famously bestowed upon historical actors was simultaneously bestowed upon those in the present.  Just as industrial workers had shaped the cultural and political terrain of the nineteenth century, so “the people” of his own day could intervene to transform theirs.

            In my paper, I link Thompson’s practice as a historian with his interventions in politics, arguing that they are inseparable.  Critical to this practice was his interest in utopian thought, most famously expressed in Thompson’s deep connection with William Morris, his model for how intellectuals were to fuse theory and practice.  In this paper I flesh out such concerns not only in the most famous of Thompson’s writing, texts such as The Making and Whigs and Hunters, but also in other texts, notably Writing by Candlelight, that more overtly confront the relationship between past, present, and future.