Edward Palmer Thompson

1924-1993
In Memoriam

Edward Palmer
Thompson: In
Memoriam*
NICHOLAS ROGERS
dward Thompson died on 28 August 1993 after a
long and lingering illness. Those who visited him
at Wick Episcopi in the last few years, or saw him
at the few conferences he then attended, must have predicted,
as I did, that the end was near. But his peaceful death in
his own garden nevertheless came as a terrible blow.
E.P. Thompson was arguably the greatest historian of this
century writing in the English language. He was certainly
one of the most influential. A tall, white-haired, dishevelled
intellectual, with a physical likeness to the actor Paul Scofield,
Thompson's presence, delivery and passion at the conference
lectern were positively electric. The first time I encountered
him was at an Anglo-American conference in London in the
early 1970s, where he presented his now famous piece, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture" (published much later in
Customs in Common). It was a remarkable contribution, full
of wit, satire, dialect and dialectical thinking, refusing Whig
pieties about the progressive eighteenth century, and putting
the raucous, rebellious, ironic, profane, plebeian crowd
squarely back on the historical map. It positively stunned
the audience, and reminded his listeners, perhaps uncomfortably, that history was an engaged and political enterprise.
Thompson's talks were always a tour de force, a perfect
treat to listen to and watch. But they supplemented and reinforced his colourful, textured and impassioned prose.

*The following are adapted from remarks delivered at the E.P.

Thompson Memorial Roundtable at York University on September
15, 1993.
Studies in Political Economy 43, Spring 1994

Studies in Political Economy

Whether writing essays on contemporary issues, or on theoretical or historical themes, Thompson's command of the
English language was astonishingly rich. His prose bristled
with arresting metaphors and witty asides. He was a consummate narrator, who layered his arguments with poetic
imagination, Swiftian satire, and deft quotations.
The tone of Thompson's writing was immensely compelling to those who refused capitalist homilies and ideological
closure. But his theoretical departures were also critically
significant. Together with other members of the Historians'
Group of the British Communist Party in the immediate postwar years - among them Hill, Hobsbawm, Hilton and Rude
- he helped transform a British radical tradition into a rich
paradigm of Marxist historiography. It was central to the
writing of British social history in the 1960s and 1970s and
subversively influential in North America, where modernization models abounded.
Thompson's specific contribution to this collective enterprise was his rejection of economistic modes of historical
explanation, his restatement of the importance of human
agency to Marx and Marxist historiography, and his wonderfully nuanced redefinition of class formation, which allowed "the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the
deluded followers of Joanna Southcott" their role in history.
As Ellen Woodnotes in her appreciationof his work, Thompson
continually reminded his readers of the historicity and embattled path of capitalist enterprise and of the forces that
struggled against it. His work stands out as a crucial antidote
to the euphoria of capitalist triumphalism.
Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class
remains indispensable reading to anyone interested in social
history. His study of Morris offers important insights into
the juncture of Romanticism and socialism. His forays into
the eighteenth century, whether in Whigs and Hunters, Albion's Fatal Tree, or Customs in Common, reaffirm the cultural resources of the poor in the age of primitive accumulation, and explore the role of the state as a source of elite
appropriation, as well as the ambiguous role of the law in
the consolidation of consent. As Harry Arthurs' commentary
8

RogerslE.P. Thomspon

on the concept of "imbrication" reveals, Thompson could

capture the complex ways in which the law was embedded
in social relations in one brilliant metaphor.
Yet Thompson's stature does not rest on his status as an
historian or even as Marxist theorist. He was all of this and
more: social critic, socialist humanist, peace activist, poet,
novelist. As loan Davies reminds us, he played an important
role in the development of cultural studies in Britain and
in pioneering the journals of the New Left. Intellectual in
the best sense of the term, Thompson towered above the
academic specialisms of his day; his own relations with the
academy, as both Bryan Palmer and Douglas Hay point out,
were always ambivalent and contentious. Thompson began
his teaching "career" in the Workers Education Association
in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the heartland of the first
industrial revolution in Britain, and he never lost sight of
these grass roots. Nor did he lose sight of his family's commitments to Third World liberation and European socialism.
Indeed, it could be said that he carried his brother's commitment to the Bulgarian partisans and his own participation
in the building of the Yugoslav Youth railway into his campaign against the Cold War. Thompson's socialism was fashioned in the vortex of the Second World War resistance
movements. He detested the division of Europe and the ideological polarities that the Cold War inflicted on the socialist
movement. His brother gave up his life fighting for European
socialism, and in a sense, Edward Thompson did so, too,
for it was his long campaign against the logic of exterminism
as a leader of END that debilitated his health though not
his spirit.
Some of these aspects of Thompson's life are captured
in the following memorial tributes. The authors are people
who knew him, some personally, others simply through his
writing and the inspiration that flowed from it. The portrait
is not without its rough edges, and not unduly deferential.
But all would concur that Edward Thompson's creative genius will resonate with us for a long time. We leave him, in
his study in the Worcestershire countryside, with his own
thought% and anx.ietie%,rattling out that memorable ~rose.l

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Studies in Political Economy

King of my freedom here, with every prop

A poet needs - the small hours of the night,
A harvest moon above an English copse ...
Backward unrationalised trade, its furthest yet
Technology this typewriter which goes
With flailing arms through the ripe alphabet.
Not even bread the pen is mightier than.
Each in its statutory place the giants yawn:
I blow my mind against their sails and fan
The mills that grind my own necessity.
Oh, royal me! Unpoliced imperial man
And monarch of my incapacity
To aid my helpless comrades as they fall Lumumba, Nagy, Allende: alphabet
Apt to our age! In answer to your call
I rush out in this rattling harvester
And thrash you into type. But what I write
Brings down no armoured bans, no Ministers
Of the Interior interrogate.
No-one bothers to break in and seize
My verses for subversion of the state:
Even the little dogmas do not bark
I leave my desk and peer into the world.
Outside the owls are hunting. Dark
Has harvested the moon. Imperial eyes
Quarter the ground for fellow creaturehood:
Small as the hour some hunted terror cries.
I go back to my desk. If it could fight
Or dream or mate, what other creature would
Sit making marks on paper through the night?
September, 1973

Notes
1.

10

E.P. Thompson, "My Study," The Heavy Dancers (London: 1985),

pp. 338-9.

BRYAN PALMER
t is difficult, this close to Edward Thompson's death,
to comment on our loss, for I feel it quite personally.
I am going to quote extensively because Thompson's
own words so richly illustrate what made him the great socialist, inspiring historian, and devastating polemicist that
he was, and will remain. And I want to bypass most of his
well-known writings, drawing his words and tone instead
out of pieces less appreciated and less widely read. My purpose is not to outline the contours of a life of significance
and embattled engagement, but to convey something of the
tone that carried Thompson's impact and influence into
realms unlike those of any of his contemporaries.
Tone mattered to Thompson, and his distinctive tone marked
him always as an awkwardly alien presence, set apart from
the conventionalities of academic life and the left. For many
his tone was excessive, overly gladiatorial in its combativeness. No one used invective, satire, hyperbole, and ridicule to cut to the bone of pretension and complacency more
effectively than Edward Thompson, and those who felt the
bite of his words carried their wounds for some time. There
were some on the left who claimed that Thompson's polemical style and crusading zeal were somehow inappropriate
to socialist discourse. His tone angered many. Yet it was
central to his staying power as an oppositionist, for it was
in Thompson's refusals that his imaginative histories, powerful polemics, and sustained sense of the necessity of alternatives registered intellectually and politically.
As early as 1961, Thompson replied to those who would,
persistently, question his tone:

I may start by mentioning that I have a real difficulty with

RaymondWilliams' tone ... the whole transmittedthrough a disinterested spiritual medium. I sometimes imagine this medium
(and it is the church-going solemnity of the procession which
provokesme to irreverence)as an elderly gentlewomanand near
relative of Mr. Eliot, so distinguished as to have become an
institution:The Tradition.There she sits, with that white starched
11

Studies in Political Economy

affair on her head, knitting definitions without thought of recognition or reward (some of them will be parcelled up and sent
to the Victims of Industry) - and in her presence how one must
watch one's - LANGUAGE! The first brash word, the least
suspicion of laughter or polemic in her presence, and The Tradition might drop a stitch and have to start knitting all those
definitions over again. ... What is evident here is a concealed
preference - in the name of genuine "communication" - for
the language of the academy.
Thompson did not care much, to put it mildly, for this language and this place. He earned his authority against what
he called the "freezing negative" of the academic tone.!
One part of his counter-tone was an insistence on rekindling the ideas and values of those who had been part of
his tradition of socialist humanism. In a series of "homages"
he paid tribute to those, like himself, who stood fast for
alternatives to both capitalism and the deformed and degenerated workers' states of Stalinist "socialism." Along the way
he revived those buried in obscurity, forgotten, or underappreciated.
His remembrances
often touched an exposed
nerve, where his own history came to the fore in a statement
of loyalty to another.
Against the longstanding left allegations of Thompson's
parochial Englishness
and narrow provincialism,
must be
placed his own words on Tom Maguire, a founding figure
in the socialism of the West Ridings, where Thompson taught
in adult education for 17 years:
If many of the Yorkshire young people had in fact got socialism
"inside of them," then something of its quality - the hostility
to Grundyism, the warm espousal of sex equality, the rich internationalism - owed much to Maguire. It is time that this
forgotten "provincial" was admitted to first-class citizenship of
history ...
Or, in light of the pivotal role of 1956 and the subsequent
history in forging a New Left, consider these words on
Thompson's friend, the communist poet Thomas McGrath:
And what if that movement was collapsing in ruins and bad
faith all around us, did not poets have the duty to warn? McGrath
was right. But that did him no kind of good. Come 1956 and
all that, and surely McGrath was at last liberated, freed from
12

PalmerJE.P. Thomspon

the Stalinist shackles, in touch once again with the new and
ebullient radicalism of the 1960s, in accord with an audience
once more? Well, no. That wasn't how it was.
For his ally, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, he
offered this epitaph, not unlike the words of remembrance
that might echo in the heads of his own comrades and colleagues:
Wright Mills had few disciples. He didn't ask for intellectual
allegiance, nor did he respect those who offered it too readily.
His work provoked a critical admiration. We had come to assume
his presence - definitions, provocations, exhortations - as a
fixed point in the intellectual night-sky. His star stood above
the ideological no-man's land between the orthodox emplacements of West and East, flashing urgent humanist messages. If
we couldn't always follow it, we always stopped to take bearings.s
Such men, and women of the stature of Mary Wolle stonecraft and Dona Torr, earned Thompson's respect because of
their relentless oppositional character, their tone of resistance. They made their choice, not for acquiescence and accommodation, but for change, and they acted to that end:
Whatever evil there is
I declare was first let in
By timid men with candles
And abstract talk of sin.
Man is what he has made,
Chipping bone with bone,
Shaping the teaching spade:
Urged by his human needs
Changes the world, and then
Transfigured by his deeds
Changes necessity,
Becoming whole and free.3
Edward Thompson was not timid in the face of evil; he
carried no candle. His refusal of inhumanity, be it manifested
in Stalinist suppression of workers' power in Hungary in
1956, complacent denial of the horror of child labour in the
Industrial Revolution, or an escalating nuclear arms race,
was not whispered, but was shouted, with loudness and determination. This did not mean that his voice became "whole

13

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Studies in Political Economy

and free." It did not, and it was always bounded by contexts

not of its own making. But it did matter; it did make a
difference.
For this Thompson paid a price in political and academic
marginalization. His first book, William Morris: Romantic
to Revolutionary (1955) was either ignored or reviled, gibbeted on the scholasticism and anti-communism of the Cold
War. The Making of the English Working Class (1963) played
to more mixed reviews, but the audience was not uniformly
welcoming. And when he moved into the eighteenth century,
studying crime and the social order, the reciprocal relations
of paternalism, and the customary cultures of the plebeian
poor, he disturbed the gentlemanly good graces of a field
long deferential to lordly rule; at Oxford and Cambridge the
countenance of academic judgement frowned or, worse, exploded in angry hostility. Things were not all that much
different on the British left, where he was early deposed as
a leader of the first New Left; never quite reconciled with
the more expressive, youth-oriented politics of the second
New Left; and where he alienated many with the uncompromising tone of his assault on Althusserian structuralism
in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978). When,
in the 1980s, he moved into an oppositional stance, countering what he called the logic of exterminism associated
with both "superpower" sides of the Cold War, many on the
left responded with dismissals of the form and content of
the old peace warrior's message. Thompson revelled in his
outsider status, but he resented it as well. He saved the seriousness of his polemical writing for the left, but his most
biting irreverence and ridicule he directed at "the enormous
pomp and propriety of the self-important academic.t'<
Thompson dubbed this species Academicus Superciliosus,
and "the preening and mating habits of fully grown specimens" astounded him:
He is inflated with self-esteem and perpetually self-congratulatory as to the high vocation of the university teacher; but he
knows almost nothing about any other vocation, and he will lie
down and let himself be walked over if anyone enters from the
outer world who has money or power or even a tough line in
realist talk. ... Superciliosus is the most divisible and rulable
14

PaImerlE.P. Thomspon

creature in this country, being so intent upon crafty calculations

of short-term advantages - this favour for his department, that
chance of promotion - or upon rolling the log of a colleague
who, next week at the next committee, has promised to roll a
log for him, that he has never even tried to imagine the wood
out of which all this timber rolls. He can scurry furiously around
in his committees, like a white mouse running in a wheel, while
his master is carrying him, cage and all, to be sold at the local
pet shop.
These people annoy me a good deal .... Academic freedom is
forever on their lips, and is forever disregarded in their actions.
They are the last people to whom it can be safely entrusted,
since the present moment is never the opportune moment to
stand and fight. Show them the last ditch for the defence of
liberty, and they will walk backwards into the sea, complaining
that the ditch is very ill dug, that they cannot possibly be asked
to defend it alongside such a ragged and seditious-looking set
of fellows, and, in any case, it would surely be better to write
out a tactful remonstrance and present it, on inscribed vellum,
to the enemy.

Academicus Superciliosus, sensing this disdain, had no more

use for Thompson than he for it.
I ran headlong into this resentment in 1984, as I tried to
drum up support for a visit by Thompson and his wife
Dorothy, herself a distinguished historian and long-time political campaigner on the left. Thompson was considering
re-entry into academic work after half-a-decade of labouring
full-time in the cause of nuclear disarmament, and a teaching
post at Queen's might allow him to reacquaint himself with
the burgeoning literature on eighteenth-century
England and
pick up his scholarly interest in William Blake, on whom
he had been working for years. I anticipated a warm enthusiasm in some quarters for a series of public lectures on
Blake, and I sent off a copy of a taped talk that Edward
had delivered at Brown University in 1980. What I got was
more than warm; the lectures gave rise to some heat, one
professor writing:
I wish I could endorse E.P. Thompson's Brown lecture on the
basis of these ... but I have to admit that I cannot. Of course I
can only speak personally. but I would argue on the basis of
the thrust of English studies as taught at Queen's (as taught

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Studies in Political Economy

anywhere today, as a matter of fact), and on Blake studies as

they have flourished over the past 30 years.
Thompson's approach might hold some interest for the historian,
but I doubt whether even the literary historian could afford much
sympathy for its methodology. Thompson clearly revels in being
curmudgeonly in this respect and aligns himself with the traditions of 19th century scholarship. He freights his texts with so
much historical evidence, and with such an exclusiveness, that
it would appear that he assumes a work of literature is primarily
and even solely a confluence of historical currents. In spite of
his animated performance (he is theatrical in the best and worst
senses) he manages to encumber the Blake texts until they sink
from sight. There is no sense of, nor sympathy for, a literary
work as Blake himself saw it, as a work of the imagination.
Blake studies have, since Northrop Frye's first book, constituted
one of the liveliest and most influential perspectives, not only
on Blake, but on the subject of literature and the literary imagination ....
This approach brings him closer to the literary approach of writers like Hippolyte Taine, whose influence did outlast the nineteenth century but not by much. It is, moreover, somewhat cranky
and unproductive. His delivery is often maddeningly digressive,
turning aside to plod interminably ... And it is, for all its melodramatics, largely boring because it is so centrifugal, undermining the authority and centrality of the text for any excuse to
digress into peripheral matters.
My particular Superciliosus bowed, in his last line, to the
graces of COllegiality, but then returned to his bile: "I hope
you won't be offended by my account, but 1 do find the
performance
in its arch-conservative
crankiness somewhat
eccentric and antediluvian."
My Queen's colleague, in short, thought Thompson, who
had actually delivered the Northrop Frye Blake Lectures at
the University of Toronto in 1978, an unworthy visitor to
illustrious Queen's. His department played no role in sponsoring the Thompsons although, fortunately, there were other
interested
supporters in History, Law, Politics, Women's
Studies, and the Offices of the Dean of Graduate Studies &
Research. Thompson's study of Blake, tided Witness Against
the Beast was published by Cambridge University Press and

New Press, New York in 1993.

16

PaimerlE.P. Thomspon

Thompson himself had witnessed much of the beast in

his almost fifty years of political activism on the left, a half
century that saw him create histories unrivalled in their
imaginative powers, and polemics unsurpassed in their potency. His tone was a product of that process of witnessing,
a stance of refusal registered in defiant denunciation of a
world that needed turning upside down, interpretively and
practically. "Orphans we are, and bastards of society," declares a labour reformer on the last page of The Making of
the English Working Class. "The tone is not one of resignation but of pride," notes Thompson.f
We should remember Thompson's tone, which also was
never one of resignation, never one of accommodation to
The Tradition. Too often the left, especially a left embedded
in the University, assimilates itself to the surroundings of
institutions and ideologies not at all of its making. We will
need Thompson's voice to let us hear our way out of such
sound-proofed rooms, where the rough screams of human
need are seldom heard.
Notes
1.
2.

3.
4.

5.

E.P. Thompson, "The Long Revolution, I:' New Left Review 9 (MayJune 1961), pp. 24-25.
E.P. Thompson, "Homage to Tom Maguire," in Asa Briggs and John
Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History (London: 1960), p. 315;
Thompson, "Homage to Thomas McGrath," Triquarterly 70 (Fall
1987), pp. 122-123; Thompson, "Remembering C. Wright Mills," in
The Heavy Dancers (London: 1985), p. 261.
Thompson, "The Place Called Choice," (1950) in The Heavy Dancers,
p.258.
This phrase and the following long quote in the next paragraph come
from E.P. Thompson, "Highly Confidential: A Personal Comment by
the Editor," in Thompson (ed.), Warwick University Ltd.: Industry,
Management and the Universities (Harmondsworth: 1970), pp. 153156.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:
1963), p. 832.

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Studies in Political Economy

DOUGLAS HAY

Uch of Edward Thompson's work as an historian

lay outside, or rather alongside, the articles and
books and polemics and organizing. There was
his formal teaching, which he took very seriously. There
were also many friendships and more fleeting personal contacts in which he encouraged, criticized, and promoted the
work of local historians, independent scholars, and indeed
anyone with a serious interest and an ability to tum that
interest into good history.
I went to England for the first time in the fall of 1969
to meet Edward and to begin work as one of a handful of
graduate students he had at that time. (In all, he supervised
no more than a dozen doctoral theses.) I greatly admired
his history for many reasons, and John Beattie at Toronto,
and Bob Malcolmson at Queens, had strongly recommended
him. They said that unlike many English academics he took
the job of supervision seriously.
And he did, in the most direct way possible. Once he
accepted you as a student he made the assumption that you
were simply a colleague, albeit of a rather special kind, and
he treated you as an apparent equal. This was highly alarming
to all of us. It meant, among other things, that in some
months he sent us drafts to read as often as we sent ours
to him - or rather, usually more often, as he seemed to be
able to write five times as fast as well as twenty times better
than anyone else. Meanwhile our chapters would come back,
within days, usually unmarked by his pen, but accompanied
by five, ten, sometimes twenty single-spaced typed pages
of comments of the most useful, suggestive, and intimidating
kind. He did this not only for his graduate students, but
also for many of those other people I have mentioned: students at other universities whose theses he examined, tutors
in the WEA and other adult education organizations, local
historians whose research had impressed him, writers both
famous and unknown whose interests meshed with his own.
He was immensely generous, of his time and of his ideas, a
generosity tied to his belief that it was the work that mattered,
18

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BaylE.P. Thomspon

its potential to illuminate structures of belief and power that

formed part of the English past and the international and
national present.
He was not narrow or ideological in these matters. What
is sometimes difficult to grasp in North America (and I, as
a foreign student, found it amazing) is the violence of the
dislike his work aroused in some areas of English academic
life. Partly this was pure politics - the strength of highly
ideological views in English academic life, and the predominance of right-wing views particularly in some of the highest
reaches of it. As Christopher Hill said in his obituary in
The Guardian, it is to the lasting shame of the British Academy that they made him a member only in 1992. Sometimes
this virulent dislike took the form almost of personal pathology: one Regius professor gave a talk to an audience
that included Edward's wife Dorothy in which he said, in
apparent perfect seriousness, that whenever he saw Edward
on television he saw the devil leering at his shoulder.
That man, and tribes like him, could not have understood
the breadth and generosity of Thompson's relationships with
his students. Other English graduate students expected us
to be political epigones, but in fact we were a very diverse
crowd of English, American and Canadian students - diverse in approach, in interests, in political commitments. He
was equally generous, engaged, and helpful to all of us. He
was always open to argument, any well-presented argument.
His historical practice was committed but provisional, organized around some profound convictions about the structures of power but always listening for the voices that escaped the simplifying rhetorics of governments, class, and
theory. The unwillingness to surrender any part of his critical
intelligence to a theory or an institution often made him
persona non grata to partisans of particular theories and
institutions. But it was one of the things that made him a
wonderful teacher and colleague.
I think part of the hostility he experienced was due to
the fact that he didn't have a lot of respect for people
who thought the universities were the sole seat of learning
in England. He had an intense dislike of common-room
gossip and deference to academic hierarchies that were
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Studies in Political Economy

old-boy networks. Not only did he tease and insult with vitriolic eloquence, but he expressed enormous contempt for
scholars and institutions who were in receipt of funds that
came with ideological strings attached, as was increasingly
the case in the 1970s and 80s and 90s. I think he simply
could not believe that anyone could be so naive as to believe
that their work would be unaffected by the political views
of those who paid for it. But perhaps even more wounding
to those who derived their self-esteem from chairs and promotions, and equated such things with the quality of their
work, was his absolute indifference to such beliefs. He was
a meritocrat through and through, but he was a profound
democrat as well. He knew, from his long association with
adult education before he came to teach at Warwick, that
the attempt to grasp history, to write it and make it part of
a lived culture, was an ambition still-born in many university
classrooms, but alive and flourishing in a host of local education, trade-union, political, church, and other classes, in
the work of many unemployed graduates, and in that of dedicated local historians. He sent such people to the sources
he sent his graduate students to, he put up indigent historians
for months at a time in his home, and he made no distinctions
except on the basis of the quality and significance of the
work, encouraging publication of anything worthy.
For him, the significance of the work lay in its place in
the historical understanding of all his fellow-citizens. The
Making of the English Working Class (the largest-selling
Penguin book ever) put him in touch with hosts of people
whom he would never otherwise have met, as his short membership in the Communist Party had earlier. And this radical
democratic practice in his own work had a precedent in his
own family. His father, first a missionary and then an Oxford
don, wrote many books, of which I have read only one, lent
to me by my friend and colleague Reuben Hasson. The Other
Side of the Medal (published in 1925 with a second edition
in 1926, and reprinted in 1989), by Edward John Thompson,
is an account of the suppression of the Indian Mutiny of
1857, based on original accounts. It is a good piece of history, written at a crucial stage of the fight for Indian independence in which E.J. Thompson was so involved, with an
20

HaylE.P.Thomspon

explicit and avowed purpose: to try to make English people

understand why Indians could not take their avowals of good
will at face value. The book contrasts the pieties of the received version of the Indian mutiny and its suppression the glories of English heroes, those bearing the medals with that known by Indians: the massacres long after the
rebellion had been crushed, and the contemptuous brutalities
of English officers and gentlemen. Tying a brown man across
the barrel of a cannon and firing it did not disturb them:
they did it in scores of cases. The book is a passionate attempt to achieve a meeting of minds, to bridge a long history
of deep hatreds, to achieve a lasting peace. It is a model,
in some ways, for Edward's own later campaign against nuclear disarmament, and indeed for much of his historical
work. History informs understanding, and only understanding will make it possible to resist, if not overcome,
the brutalities of nations, of empires, and of class.
There are some people who will not recognize the picture
I have given of Edward Thompson as a man generous with
his time to the point of profligacy. Because he was also a
man haunted by time, by ideas and projects he knew he
would never complete, even before his last years of illness
made that utterly clear. That urgency, and the concentration
and abstraction of writing, made him distance himself from
many people. The much-feared Thompsonian postcard,
grumpy one-liners sent off to the hosts of people who sent
him unsolicited manuscripts, are famous: a few of them that
I have seen were not just grumpy, but positively fluoresced
with irritation. Talking to him in the library was absolutely
not done. Turning up at his home, even though invited, we
always steeled ourselves for the possibility that, for the first
hour or so, Edward's conversation would be limited to abstracted grunts, as he slowly and unwillingly came back from
whatever he was writing, and concentrated on the meal he
was cooking for us, if it was his tum. Meanwhile Dorothy
Thompson, who held a post at Birmingham, where she was
an admired and loved teacher and scholar, would welcome
us, talk history with us, and make us feel that it was indeed
possible to become historians. The last part of the visit,
whether it was hours or days, was engaged, high-spirited,
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Studies in Political Economy

argumentative, with a warmth few of us had known in intellectual work before or have known since.
He was a great man and a great teacher and friend. It is
hard to believe that we must now do without him.

lOAN DAVIES
ultural Studies, which has become something of a
buzz-word for those who see themselves as dissident
academics in North America and the Antipodes, was
a product of a very real struggle involving all the political
definitions that were present in Britain, in the late 1950s
and early 1960s. Those of us who marched to Aldermaston
and back, who helped to establish the New Left Club (at
the Partisan Coffee House at 7 Carlisle Street in Soho, London), who discovered Jazz with Eric Hobsbawm, who taught
evening classes for the Workers' Educational Association,
who fought with the Fife Socialist League, who defended
(equally) Tom Mboya, Lenny Bruce, Wole Soyinka, C.L.R.
James and Vic Allen were surprised to discover that what
we were doing was inventing Cultural Studies.
The death of Edward Thompson pulls us up short. Cultural
Studies has become the gossip of this and that. In
Thompson's case this involved the petulant diatribe against
Perry Anderson in the 1960s, the cantankerous outburst
against Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson at a History Workshop conference in an old church in Oxford in the late 1970s,
the absurd pomposity recorded by those who only knew him
from the outside. And, of course, the labelling: in the Oxford
meeting he said "I reject without reservation the identification of the Marxist tradition of historiography, of which I
have been taken as one representative, as 'culturalism'. This
term is Richard Johnson's invention." But, of course,
Thompson was all and none of that. It is impossible to think
of any of these disputes without recognizing that they were
not academic in the arcane sense of cultural theory, but directly political. There was nothing that was technically "academic" which was not equally political. From the execution
of his brother by firing squad in World War II (which he

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DavieslE.P.Thomspon

recounted in his first book) to his last book on Blake

(Thompson becomes Blake), the literary, the historical the
political, the personal are one.
His legacy was to compel us to engage with the human
other, to think ourselves into their situation, whether they
were the late eighteenth-century working class making themselves, or those in the twentieth century, living under the
terror of nuclear power, who chose to resist the ultimate
death machine. If Thompson was the ultimate Luddite, it
was because he was convinced that the mechanization of
everyday life was not conducive to our social health.
1 remember Edward as the colleague with whom 1worked
at the London New Left Club (I was coordinator of the London Club, he the Chair of the New Left Board); as the best
tutor 1 had on any subject about Marxism, history, or colonialism, the "tutorials" generally held on marches or in quiet
moments at the back of the Partisan; as the unfailingly generous supporter of a project on which 1 was then engaged
dealing with African labour; as a comrade at Helsinki Watch;
as an astute critic of my manuscript on cultural Marxism;
as someone who persuaded me that being the son of a missionary was an experience that had great socialist potential.
The central feature of Edward's life and work was that
it was not academic in the narrow sense of the term. He
wanted no part of an academia which saw itself as setting
rules or proformas in order to create an academic "culture"
sealed off from the everyday world. For Edward, that academic world was just as culpable in compounding the problems that face us as the multinational corporations, or the
politicians who constantly speak of our venalities. The real
test of our scholarship was how it measured up against the
harsh realities of everyday life. His venom was directed against
those (politicians, academics, even Marxists) who behaved
as if their rules, their tribal customs were the only ones that
mattered. As a fellow extra-mural lecturer who also moved
to one of the New Universities in the mid-1960s, how 1
cheered when he revealed all about our pompous new colleagues, (labelled Academicus Superciliosus) in Warwick
University Ltd: "He is a consummate politician in university
committees and can scull over every inch of his own duckpond;
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Studies in Political Economy

but....he knows next to nothing of the world outside his own

farmyard." Many people found this kind of thing hard to
take, and there are few who did not at some point feel the
tip of his rapier-sharp tongue or pen.
Thompson will be remembered for the marvellous books
on social and cultural history (William Morris, The Making
of the English Working Class, Whigs and Hunters, Blake),
his many pieces of journalism (in particular, perhaps, those
collected in Writing By Candlelight), his ferocious intervention in the theoretical concerns of the New Left (The Poverty
of Theory), and his systematic campaigns against nuclear
weapons from the late 1950s to his death. Ultimately, however, his major contribution was to a complete rethinking
of how history is written, involving not only a reclaiming
of people's history, but also involving non-academics in the
research and writing of that history. More than any other
thinker in the British New Left, Thompson went about helping to create, in Gramsci's terms, "organic intellectuals."
Anyone concerned with Cultural Studies today who forgets
his legacy does so at their peril.

H.W. ARTHURS
learned a new word from Edward Thompson: "imbricated." Imbricated is not a word which will often see
service as le mot juste - not in legal circles, not at
memorial tributes. But imbrication says neatly and succinctly
what I want to say today, and I want to take it as the text
for my remarks.
Imbrication is a method of making roofs - thatched or
tiled roofs - by which successive layers are laid down,
each overlapping the other, to form an integrated and impermeable surface of great strength and, usually, considerable charm. In a passage in Whigs and Hunters Thompson
speaks of law being "imbricated" with social and economic
activity:

Howcan we distinguishbetweenthe activityof farmingor quarrying and the rights to this strip of land or that quarry? The
24

ArthurslE.P.

Thomspon

farmer or forester in his daily occupationwas movingwithin

visibleor invisiblestructuresof law.
I found this an enormously insightful notion: visible or invisible structures of law shaped by mundane, everyday activities, and in tum shaping those activities. It helped me
understand how law is made, and how it influences our lives,
in contemporary neighbourhoods and bureaucracies and
workplaces and universities, just as it did in the eighteenth
century rural communities that Thompson described.
It wasn't just the idea: it was the way the idea was expressed that was so typical of Edward Thompson. Imbricated: the word sits there - precise, analytical, challenging
- in the midst of what? Of jargon and cant? Of impenetrable
theory and fanciful interpretations? Not at all: imbricated
was imbricated. Here was an intellectual insight of the highest order, lodged between the lines of some of the most
evocative historical narrative we will ever read, lodged with
Thompsonian cunning among noises and smells, songs and
pamphlets, pompous legal proclamations and gallows humour which draw the reader in, deeper and deeper, until
you finally realize that you have been captured not by a
mere historian, but by a master storyteller, someone with
the touch of a novelist of genius.
We all know how closely Thompson identified with his
historical subject: the common people of England. It is easy
to imagine that that identification took him into politics and
ultimately into the peace movement. One might almost be
tempted to say Thompson was imbricated in plebeian culture
himself. But he wasn't. He stood at one remove from the
history he wrote, the movements he served, and the scholars
he influenced. In a sense, the greatest compliment he could
pay the English working class, and his intellectual confreres,
was to remain a presence, a personal presence, to not efface
himself in text or hide behind theory and interpretation.
So there is Edward Thompson, as we all want to remember
him, a palpable presence, peering across two or three hundred years of historical evidence and intuition, speaking to
the English working class, and speaking as well to us:

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Studies in Political Economy

I sit here at my desk (he said in Whigs and Hunters), at the

age of fifty, the desk and floor piled high with five years of
notes, xeroxes,rejected drafts, the clock once again movinginto
the small hours, and see myself,in a lucid moment,as an anachronism. Why have I spent these years trying to find out what
could, in its essential structures, have been known without any
investigation at all?
He went on to answer his own question, of course: to answer
it with characteristic sympathy and affection for working
people - but also with equally characteristic intellectual
rigour and moral force.
It is typical of him, absolutely bloody typical, that in his
recent book, Customs in Common, after recapturing yet another lost chapter in the history of English plebeian society,
after convincingly recasting our fundamental assumptions
concerning popular discontent and its manifestations, he
should end, not with a sentimental flourish, but with a warning. Remember, he tells us, that people, ordinary people,
English working people, may have reason to welcome "liberation from the tyranny of one's own."
Imbrication: multiple layers of fact, of meaning, of symbolism. But also a hint of how the man himself seemed to
be constructed: layer on layer, scholar on activist, chronicler
on critic, progressive on country squire, believer on agnostic
- all fitting tightly, inevitably, elegantly to make a life of
integrity and strength and passion.
Thank you, Edward Thompson, for teaching me about
imbrication.

ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD

here are many aspects of Edward Thompson's life,
both as a writer and as an activist, as a historian and
as a founder of what has come to be called the New
Left, that could be cited as major contributions to the socialist project. But as valuable as all his various accomplishments have been, I want to concentrate on something
with a specific and immediate relevance to where we are at
this particular historical moment, and especially on what

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WoodlE.P. Thomspon

Thompson, as a historian, has to say to left intellectuals

now.
Here, first, is an assessment from an obituary published
in The Independent by another distinguished Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm:
B.P.Thompson, socialist, poet, campaigner, orator, writer - on
his day - of the finest polemical prose this century, and historian, would probably wish to be remembered as the last of
these. And indeed, when his various campaignshave been forgotten, The Making of the English Working Class and several
of his other works will still be read with admirationand excitement. (August 30, 1993)
Something about this worried me, and I puzzled for a
while about what it was. Thompson was certainly all those
things - socialist, campaigner, literary figure, historian and there is nothing obviously missing in this catalogue.
Nor do I doubt that he would have wanted to be remembered
above all as a historian. In the end, I decided that what was
worrying about this - and, for that matter, about other appreciations of Thompson's contribution that have appeared
since his death - is the suggestion of a counter-position
between his role as a historian and as a political figure,
between his historical scholarship and his political project.
Now obviously the political dimension of his history is
not entirely missing in these accounts. For one thing, whenever people quote - and everyone does - his marvellous
phrase about rescuing ordinary people from "the enormous
condescension of posterity," they surely recognize its political
implications, what it has to say about the historical agency of
the working class, and so on. It is true that this kind of
history is sometimes made to look like simple nostalgia,
with no political resonance in the present, but on the whole,
everyone surely recognizes something political in what
Thompson is saying here.
Yet I still find something missing. I really do think our
culture - and I mean even, and increasingly, the culture of
the left - is losing sight of the historian's craft as a political
project. What I mean is not the subordination of historical
scholarship to ideological preconceptions, or anything like
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Studies in Political Economy

that. On the contrary. I am talking about history as critique,

as a way of exposing ideological presuppositions, a means
of achieving critical distance from what is commonly taken
for granted.
This critical project has been in decline for quite a while
on the left. The writing of history is not a particularly favoured critical "discourse" at the moment. But I think it is
more now than just a matter of history (and maybe even
political economy) being displaced by, say, cultural studies
as the privileged discourse of left intellectuals. I guess we
all know that this is part of a larger picture - what for
lack of a better word people have been calling postmodernism,
with its rejection of grand narratives, totalizing knowledges,
even conceptions of causality, and so on. But this too is
part of an even larger picture, a picture that I would characterize as a general submission to what is. And what is,
of course, is capitalism. Capitalism is triumphant and universal. The market is an inevitable natural law. History is
over.
The critique of capitalism is out of fashion; and here there
is a curious convergence, a kind of unholy alliance, between
capitalist triumphalism and socialist pessimism. The triumph
of the right is mirrored on the left by a sharp contraction
of socialist aspirations. Left intellectuals, if they are not actually
embracing capitalism as the best of all possible worlds, have
little hope for anything more than a bit more space within
the interstices of capitalism; and they look forward, at best,
to only the most local and particular resistances. And there
is another curious effect of all this. Capitalism is becoming
so universal, so much taken for granted, that it is becoming
invisible.
Now clearly we have plenty to be pessimistic about. Recent events have given us plenty of cause. But there is something curious about the way many of us are reacting to all
this. If capitalism has indeed triumphed, you might think
that what we need now more than ever is a critique of capitalism. Why is this the right moment to embrace modes of
thought which seem to deny the very possibility not only
of surpassing capitalism but even of critically understanding
it? How are we supposed to gain access to a critical knowledge
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WoodlE.P. Thomspon

of capitalism if we start with modes of thought which see

only contingency, fragmentation, difference, and are generally hostile to any notion of capitalism as a systemic unity,
any notion of a systemic .logic, or even any notion of causality?
I really do think we are in an unprecedented situation
now, something we have not seen in the whole history of
capitalism. What we are.experiencing now is not just a deficit
of action, or the absence of the necessary instrumentalities
and organization of struggle (though those are certainly thin
on the ground). It is not only that we do not know how to
act against capitalism but that we are forgetting even how
to think against it.
This is why I think that Thompson's historical project is
more important now than it has ever been. This may be the
most important political legacy of his historical work: that
more than any other historian, or maybe even any other
scholar or writer of any kind, he brought to life the specificity, historicity, and contestability of capitalism as an economic, social, and moral system. I cannot think of anyone
more skilful at achieving the kind of anthropological distance
a critique of capitalism requires, anyone better at bringing
the otherness of capitalism into sharp relief, or anyone better
at displaying it to us as a contested terrain.
Thompson never takes capitalism for granted. He never
just submits to its presuppositions, as many other Marxists
have done. In his work, the capitalist mode of production,
its forces and relations of production, stand out in all their
distinctiveness and difference, and they appear as real historical products, real social practices, always in process, always contested.
So, for example, a lot of his work is devoted to challenging market rationality, to demonstrating its specificity
and historicity - and not just as an abstraction but as a set
of social practices and moral principles. The most obvious
instance is his classic essay on the "Moral Economy of the
Crowd," where he asks us to observe the contestation of
market rationality, in the process of being resisted by opposing customs and expectations, different conceptions of
the right to subsistence. Or consider his work on changing
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Studies in Political Economy

definitions of property and the contestation of capitalist definitions. The most recent example is the essay in Customs
in Common on "Custom, Law and Common Right." Here
we see new capitalist definitions of property asserting themselves against, and being resisted by, different conceptions
of use-rights, as capitalist conceptions of productivity, particularly in the notion of "improvement," begin to establish
themselves, even in law, as a title to property. (Incidentally,
as a historian of political thought, I found all this particularly
useful. Anyone who wants to make sense, say, of Locke's
theory of property could do no better than to read Thompson
on the historical opposition between custom and the political
economy of "improvement.")
Or take his attack on the concept of "industrialization,"
the tendency to treat industrialization as a single, neutral,
ahistorical, technologically determined process, and his insistence on the specificity of industrial capitalism, as a development determined not just by some neutral process of
technological progress but by the specific logic of capitalism
and its specific mode of exploitation, its specific drive for
productivity and labour-discipline. His essay on "Time,
Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism" is one of the best
examples of what I have in mind. It does a brilliant job of
conveying the specificity of capitalism, not only the great
transformation in work practices and social relations it entailed but also the tremendous existential changes it involved,
in something as fundamental as our experience of time.
I use Thompson's essays a lot in teaching an undergraduate course on the rise of capitalism, where my main objective
is to detach students from their unquestioned assumptions
about the universality and trans-historical quality of the society in which they live, its conceptions of human nature,
rationality, and social values. I use these essays, in spite of
their difficulty, because I have not found any better critical
liberation than Edward Thompson's history. But no one should
think for a minute that it is only unsophisticated undergraduates who need this kind of lesson. There are Marxists who
could do with some of his cautionary lessons about the portrayal of capitalist development as a neutral, ahistorical, technological process. And that, of course, is nothing compared
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WoodlE.P. Thomspon

to the dominant, mainstream conceptions of historical process

and the development of the modem world. You only need to
read some of the standard historical literature to see how thoroughly enclosed the most sophisticated scholars are in the assumptions of the capitalist order, so that the contestation of
capitalist principles is literally unthinkable for them. They think
about capitalism and its historical development in capitalist
categories, assuming the very things that need to be explained.
Yet, it must be emphasized that Thompson is not just
engaging in a nihilistic deconstruction of capitalist categories. He is treating them as historically determinate phenomena with a systemic origin, responding to some identifiable
causalities, which, by the same token, are contestable by
human agencies. The opponents of capitalism have certainly
lost many contests in history, but they can also win.
There is a powerful contrast here between Thompson's history and other currently hegemonic theories which claim to
focus on the historicity of capitalism and its discursive practices
but which end by submitting completely to the force majeure
of the capitalist system. I have in mind in particular the ideas
of Foucault, especially their later development, in which the
emphasis is on the coercive power of institutions and forms
of knowledge that can be countered only by an equally coercive counter-power; but where power is conceived abstractly,
without any real social foundation or systemic origin. In fact,
it has become part of this dominant discourse to deny the
systemic origins of power, and therefore also to deny its
contestability. Where power has no identifiable cause but
just is, where in fact there is no causality but only contingency, there can be no resistance and no contest.
Thompson's main political legacy as a historian, then, is
teaching us to think in non-capitalist ways and to envisage
the possibility of contestation. He acknowledges that "We
shall not ever return to pre-capitalist human nature," but,
he continues, "a reminder of its alternative needs, expectations and codes may renew our sense of our nature's range
of possibilities." And restoring our sense of the range of
possibilities is at least a start in challenging the universal
triumph of capitalism.

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