{"id":9684,"date":"2020-10-02T16:38:10","date_gmt":"2020-10-02T15:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=9684"},"modified":"2020-10-02T16:38:10","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T15:38:10","slug":"the-british-radical-tradition-e-p-thompson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2020\/10\/02\/the-british-radical-tradition-e-p-thompson\/","title":{"rendered":"The British Radical Tradition: E.P. Thompson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Britain has produced its fair share of major public intellectual figures. Having surveyed the legacies of George Orwell<\/span>, Christopher Hitchens<\/a><\/span>, the Irish-born Edmund Burke<\/span> and contemporary leading lights John Gray<\/span> and Jonathan Sumption<\/span><\/a>, I now turn my attention to the great radical historian E. P. Thompson.<\/p>\n

Intellectuals often stand apart from a mainstream radical tradition. Hitchens, for example, while broadly adhering to Thomas Paine and The Rights of Man was a contrarian and dedicated atheist who tendentiously supported George W. Bush\u2019s War in Iraq, although perhaps the waterboarding he voluntarily submitted to, and declared to be a form of torture<\/a><\/span>, acted as a form of atonement.<\/p>\n

It is unthinkable, however, that Edward Palmer (E. P.) Thompson (1923-1993) would have performed such a volte-face. Thompson held himself squarely within the English radical tradition of William Cobbett, Thomas Paine and Robert Owen, as well as his hero the poet William Blake, and to a lesser extent William Morris. Thompson\u2019s ideology was a form of socialitist libertarianism for the ordinary man.<\/p>\n

I grew up reading his work, and indeed watching his grey mane flowing in the wind as he addressed CND rallies, although I understand he was a difficult colleague, a hopeless administrator and an egotist. It seems to have been another case of don\u2019t meet your heroes.<\/p>\n

The Making of the English Working Class<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

His lasting contribution is the seminal The Making Of The English Working Class<\/em> (1980), possibly the greatest work of history of the twentieth century that emphasised a new form of bottom-up history, related to the subaltern history that was emerging at the same time in former colonial societies. Notably, Edward Said\u2019s Orientalism, <\/em>which was published in 1978.<\/p>\n

Thompson methodology is well captured in the following quotation from this canonical text:<\/p>\n

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the \u201cobsolete\u201d hand-loom weaver, the \u201cutopian\u201d artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.[i]<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Also, In The Making Of The English Working Class<\/em>, Thompson places himself firmly within the British rights-driven tradition and focuses on The Liberty Tree, and its essential components of freedom under the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, habeas corpus <\/em>and the spectrum of individual rights now under threat of obliteration.<\/p>\n

I suspect, just as Lord Sumption is a libertarian, albeit in a different sense, who has spoken out about the restriction on our current restrictions on liberties, Thompson would be horrified at the course of current events in the U.K. ushered in by Coronavirus Emergency legislation and recent Counter Terrorism Legislation.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/RTUKnews\/status\/1296487156198903808<\/p>\n

The Poverty of Theory<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Although a Marxist \u2013 albeit unlike his contemporary historian Eric Hobsbawm he resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 \u2013 he was also a historian in the empiricist tradition, distrustful of great meta narratives and the abstract musings of structuralists, which culminated in his famous polemic against Althusser The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors<\/a> <\/span>(1978).<\/p>\n

He argued that individuals were agents of activity though caught within the agency of history. They have room to achieve what they do, but only under specific conditions and defined constraints. His sense of the developmental nature of the working class is perhaps best illustrated in the following quote: \u2018The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.\u2019[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

This led to the famous opening passage of The Making of the English Working Class<\/em>, and his emphasis in his teaching on bottom-up or grassroots analysis, rather than a top-down, theory-driven, approach. He prized empirical evidence derived from the activities of human subjects. A true historian.<\/p>\n

That great book in fact has many resonances for our age, not least in how the chiliasm of despair and poverty awakened renewed religiosity \u2013 Wesleyan Methodism in particular. His bottom-up analysis pointed to how religion became the opium of the people. This may also explain the rise of religious fundamentalism in our own period of profound economic security.<\/p>\n

Thompson demonstrated how local worker communities were often collective, and how a moral economy operated that distributed goods and services according to the respective needs of those who traded and bartered. These localized and community-driven economies were also explored by the late David Graeber in his Debt: the First 5,000 Years<\/em> (2011).<\/p>\n

\n

key point, "it's not our hedonism that's destroying the planet, it's our puritanism," the fact we feel everyone has to be working constantly, regardless of whether there's anything needs to be done, to justify our consumer pleasures<\/p>\n

— David Graeber (@davidgraeber) July 14, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n