Edward
Thompson, the son of Methodist missionaries,
was born in Oxford in 1924. He studied
history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
His studies were interrupted by the Second
World War and
as a member of the British Army saw
action in Italy. His brother, Frank Thompson,
was killed while fighting for the Bulgarian partisans.
In
1948 Thompson became lecturer in history at Leeds University. For
the next 17 years he worked as a extra mural lecturer. Later he became
Reader in the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University
of Warwick.
After
the war Thompson, a member of the Communist
Party, joined Christopher Hill, Eric
Hobsbawn,
Rodney Hilton, Raphael
Samuel, George Rudé, John Saville,
Dorothy Thompson, Edmund Dell, Victor Kiernan and Maurice Dobb in
forming the Communist Party Historians' Group. In 1952 the group founded
the journal, Past and Present.
Over the next few years the journal pioneered the study of working-class
history.
Disillusioned
by the events in the Soviet Union and the
invasion of Hungary,
Thompson, like many Marxist historians, left
the Communist Party in 1956. Later he
became active in the Labour Party.
In
1957 Thompson
helped form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND). Other members included J. B. Priestley,
Bertrand Russell, Fenner
Brockway, Frank Allaun, Donald
Soper, Vera Brittain, Sydney
Silverman, James Cameron, Jennie
Lee, Victor Gollancz, Konni
Zilliacus,
Richard Acland, Frank
Cousins, A. J. P. Taylor, Canon
John Collins and Michael Foot.
Thompson
wrote William
Morris, Romantic
to Revolutionary
(1955) and The Making of the English Working
Class (1963). In protest against the "tailoring of
Warwick University to the needs of industry" Thompson resigned
his post in 1971.
Thompson spent the next
few years as a roving ambassador for world peace. He also wrote a
series of books including Whigs
and Hunters (1975), The Poverty
of Theory (1978), Writing by Candlelight
(1980), Protest and Survive (1980),
Customs in Common (1992), Witness
Against the Beast (1994) and Making
History: Writings on History and Culture (1994).
Edward
Thompson
died in
1993.
(1)
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite
cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'Utopian' 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; and, if they were casualties
of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.
Our only criterion of
judgement should not be whether or not a man's actions are justified
in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the
end of social evolution ourselves. In some of the lost causes of the
people of the Industrial Revolution we may discover insights into
social evils which we have yet to cure. Moreover, the greater part
of the world today is still undergoing problems of industrialization,
and of the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many
ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolution. Causes
which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa,
yet be won.
(2)
E. P. Thompson, The Business University, New Society (19th
February, 1970)
When student unrest erupts at a British university,
two standard reactions can be expected. The first assumes that the
students are alone responsible, and leads on to speculations as to
their motives. The second assumes that responsibility may be charged
to old-fashioned elements in the university administration and among
senior academic staff, who have responded too slowly or too clumsily
to legitimate student demands.
There is, however, a third
explanatory hypothesis, which most observers would overlook as being
too improbable.
This is the explanation
that dominant elements in the administration of a university had become
so intimately enmeshed with the upper reaches of consumer capitalist
society that they are actively twisting the purposes and procedures
of the university away from those normally accepted in British universities,
and thus threatening its integrity as a self-governing academic institution;
and that the students, feeling neglected and manipulated in this context,
and feeling also - although at first less clearly - that intellectual
values are at stake, should be impelled to action.
(3)
E. P. Thompson, The Great Fear of Marxism, The
Observer (4th February, 1979)
Anyone who is even casually informed knows that Marxism,
as an intellectual system, is in a state of crisis. The term 'Marxism'
conceals an immense conflict going on between different claimants
to the Marxist tradition. In Russia dissidents like Roy Medvedev are
offering, in Marxist terms, scholarly exposures of the Stalin era
- analyses which are refused publication by Soviet (Marxist-Leninist)
publishing houses. In East Germany Rudolf Bahro, a Marxist, is imprisoned
by a Marxist state for his stubborn and honest thought.
If we move from intellectual
to political and social movements, the conflict is even more obvious.
In Africa the most disparate regimes, from old-fashioned military
tyrannies to more open societies with real democratic potential, all
invoke the word 'Marxist'.
As a Marxist (or a Marxist-fragment)
in the Labour Party, I have always tried to envisage a politics that
will enable us,
in this country, to effect a transition to a socialist society - and
a society a great deal more democratic, in work as well as in government,
than our present one - without rupturing the humane and tolerant disposition
for which our working class has often been distinguished, in this
country, if not abroad.
(4)
E. P. Thompson, European Nuclear Disarmament, The
Guardian (4th February, 1979)
I am very much against sin, and especially against
Russian sin. When the Russian state does not give me a pain in the
head, it strikes my lower anatomy.
Now that my moral credentials
are plain to the whole world, let us discuss serious matters.
These concern Cold War
chain-reactions, the nuclear fission of diplomacy. The sequence has
been this. From last October there was a long run-up to NATO's decision
to 'modernize' its nuclear armoury. Mrs Thatcher and Mr Pym were the
self-appointed cheerleaders of this operation, although they disdained
to consult the British Parliament at any point. A 'new generation'
of nuclear missiles, under US ownership and control, was to be planted
all over West Europe, many on our own soil.
Soviet spokesmen repeatedly
warned of the consequences of this decision; proposed discussions;
and even made small gestures of concession. NATO spokesmen refused
every advance and argued that discussion could only take place 'from
strength': that is, from a posture of menace, after the decision.
The decision made nonsense
of the trivial provisions of Salt 2. But it became clear, meanwhile,
that the US Senate was not going to ratify even these trivial provisions,
thereby indicating that top level nuclear détente would prove
futile in the face of the American military and arms lobby. As this
became clear, a trickle of Soviet dissidents went off to gaol.
On 12 December, at Brussels,
NATO ratified its menacing plans in full. On 19 December, exactly
one week later, the
Soviet decision to enter Afghanistan was taken. The hawkism of the
West directly generated the hawkism of the East - according to one
account, Brezhnev was actually overruled by his own hawks. On the
Cold War billiard-table, NATO played the Cruise missile ball, which
struck the Afghan black, which rolled nicely into a Russian pocket.
It was as if Mrs Thatcher, Mr Pym and Mr Bill Rodgers were there,
perched on the leading Soviet tanks, waving to the astonished people
of Kabul.
(5)
Kate Soper, Radical
Philosophy (March, 1997)
The articles, letters and memos poured from his desk in the sackful.
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 skullduggery of the Soviet Peace Committee. That the CIA and the
KGB would both accuse each other of funding these activities only
served to reaffirm the wisdom of pressing for a process of `citizens'
detente' and for the adoption of a non-aligned position within the
Western peace movement. This was to prove of critical importance,
both in the impact it had on the politics and strategies of the latter,
and in the space it opened up for trans-bloc dialogue between it and
the independent peace initiatives and dissident groups in Eastern
Europe. This was no easy dialogue to sustain, demanding as it did
a keen sensitivity to differences of political priority and to the
divergent conditions under which the various peace groups in both
halves of Europe were at that time working. The story of its ideological
complexities is yet to be told. But when it is, it will be clear that
without Thompson's sense of historical eventuation and his punctilious
concern for the individuals involved in the process, certain lines
of East-West communication which contributed to the dramatic changes
of the late eighties would not have been opened up.
To
make these claims for Thompson's agency in the making of recent history
is not to suppose he was the only influence on the internationalisation
of the British peace movement, or that he singlehandedly either devised
or promoted the END programme. Even less is it to suggest that he
was responsible for the ending of the Cold War, which is the `absurdity'
which some respondents have read into Mary Kaldor's obituary tribute
in the Independent. What Kaldor actually claims is that, in the fullness
of time, Thompson, along with Gorbachev and Havel, will be viewed
as `one of the key individuals who influenced the course of events
in the 1980s', and this point is hardly refuted either by an appeal
to the steadfastness of Reagan and the hard right, or to Western `victory'
in the Cold War, or even to the supposedly brute fact that the freeze
ended because of the internal economic contradictions of the Soviet
Union and the consequent transformation in its leadership. To argue
that the Cold War collapsed because the Soviet Union collapsed is
more in the order of an analytic statement than a piece of historical
analysis. `Collapses' of that order do not take place in a vacuum,
but in a context shaped by shifts of atmosphere and the emergence
of altered logics; a context which in turn exerts a specific influence
on the direction taken by the unfolding of the events it has helped
to precipitate. If it is true that glasnost and perestroika came in
response to domestic crisis, it is also true that its defence and
foreign policy initiatives were informed by peace movement thinking,
and that the climate of reception of these both within and without
the Soviet bloc had been altered by exposure to the pressures of the
nonaligned anti-nuclear campaign in the West. As the major architect
and spokesperson of that campaign, Thompson can certainly be said
to have played a key role in shaping the historical disposition of
the late eighties. Even at the time, as Kaldor notes, he was wryly
predicting the historical theft of the peace movement contribution.
`This is the most serious political work I have ever done or will
ever do in my life,' he wrote. `It won't last long. If we succeed
a little, the politicians will move in and take it off us.'
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