E. P. Thompson in Memoriam

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Edward Palmer Thompson

1924-1993In Memoriam


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Edward PalmerThompson: In

Memoriam*

NICHOLAS ROGERS

Edward 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 certainlyone 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, "Pa-

trician Society, Plebeian Culture" (published much later in

Customs in Common). It was a remarkable contribution, fullof 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 uncom-

fortably, 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 re-inforced his colourful, textured and impassioned prose.

*The following are adapted from remarks delivered at the E.P.Thompson Memorial Roundtable at York University on September15, 1993.

Studies in Political Economy 43, Spring 1994 7


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Studies in Political Economy

Whether writing essays on contemporary issues, or on theo-

retical or historical themes, Thompson's command of the

English language was astonishingly rich. His prose bristledwith arresting metaphors and witty asides. He was a con-

summate narrator, who layered his arguments with poetic

imagination, Swiftian satire, and deft quotations.

The tone of Thompson's writing was immensely compel-

ling 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 post-war 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 modern-

ization models abounded.

Thompson's specific contribution to this collective enter-

prise was his rejection of economistic modes of historicalexplanation, his restatement of the importance of human

agency to Marx and Marxist historiography, and his won-

derfully nuanced redefinition of class formation, which al-

lowed "the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obso-

lete' hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the

deluded followers of Joanna Southcott" their role in history.As EllenWoodnotes in her appreciationof his work,Thompson

continually reminded his readers of the historicity and em-

battled 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, Al-

bion's Fatal Tree, or Customs in Common, reaffirm the cul-

tural resources of the poor in the age of primitive accumu-

lation, 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

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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 theacademy, 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 com-

mitments to Third World liberation and European socialism.

Indeed, it could be said that he carried his brother's com-mitment to the Bulgarian partisans and his own participation

in the building of the Yugoslav Youth railway into his cam-

paign against the Cold War.Thompson's socialism was fash-

ioned in the vortex of the Second World War resistance

movements. He detested the division of Europe and the ideo-

logical 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 gen-

ius 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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King of my freedom here, with every propA poet needs - the small hours of the night,

A harvest moon above an English copse ...

Backward unrationalised trade, its furthest yetTechnology this typewriter which goesWith 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 manAnd monarch of my incapacity

To aid my helpless comrades as they fall -Lumumba, Nagy, Allende: alphabetApt to our age! In answer to your call

I rush out in this rattling harvesterAnd 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 seizeMy verses for subversion of the state:

Even the little dogmas do not barkI leave my desk and peer into the world.Outside the owls are hunting. Dark

Has harvested the moon. Imperial eyesQuarter the ground for fellow creaturehood:Small as the hour some hunted terror cries.

I go back to my desk. If it could fightOr dream or mate, what other creature wouldSit making marks on paper through the night?

September, 1973

Notes

1. E.P. Thompson, "My Study," The Heavy Dancers (London: 1985),pp. 338-9.

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BRYAN PALMER

It 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 so-

cialist, 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 insteadout of pieces less appreciated and less widely read. My pur-

pose 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 combat-

iveness. No one used invective, satire, hyperbole, and ridi-

cule 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 po-

lemical 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 wasin Thompson's refusals that his imaginative histories, pow-

erful polemics, and sustained sense of the necessity of al-

ternatives 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 transmittedthrougha dis-interested 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 nearrelative of Mr. Eliot, so distinguished as to have become aninstitution:TheTradition.There shesits, with thatwhite starched

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affair on her head, knitting definitions without thought of rec-ognition or reward (some of them will be parcelled up and sent

to the Victims of Industry) - and in her presence how one mustwatch one's - LANGUAGE! The first brash word, the leastsuspicion of laughter or polemic in her presence, and The Tra-dition might drop a stitch and have to start knitting all thosedefinitions over again. ... What is evident here is a concealed

preference - in the name of genuine "communication" - forthe language of the academy.

Thompson did not care much, to put it mildly, for this lan-

guage 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 rekin-

dling 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 degen-

erated workers' states of Stalinist "socialism." Along the way

he revived those buried in obscurity, forgotten, or underap-

preciated. His remembrances often touched an exposednerve, 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 hostilityto Grundyism, the warm espousal of sex equality, the rich in-ternationalism - owed much to Maguire. It is time that thisforgotten "provincial" was admitted to first-class citizenship ofhistory ...

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 badfaith all around us, did not poets have the duty to warn? McGrathwas right. But that did him no kind of good. Come 1956 andall that, and surely McGrath was at last liberated, freed from

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PalmerJE.P. Thomspon

the Stalinist shackles, in touch once again with the new andebullient 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 col-

leagues:

Wright Mills had few disciples. He didn't ask for intellectualallegiance, nor did he respect those who offered it too readily.

His work provoked a critical admiration. We had come to assumehis presence - definitions, provocations, exhortations - as afixed point in the intellectual night-sky. His star stood abovethe ideological no-man's land between the orthodox emplace-ments of West and East, flashing urgent humanist messages. Ifwe couldn't always follow it, we always stopped to take bear-ings.s

Such men, and women of the stature of Mary Wolle stone-

craft and Dona Torr, earned Thompson's respect because of

their relentless oppositional character, their tone of resis-

tance. They made their choice, not for acquiescence and ac-

commodation, but for change, and they acted to that end:

Whatever evil there isI declare was first let inBy timid men with candlesAnd abstract talk of sin.Man is what he has made,

Chipping bone with bone,Shaping the teaching spade:Urged by his human needsChanges the world, and thenTransfigured by his deedsChanges 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 de-

termination. This did not mean that his voice became "whole

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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, gib-

beted 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 relationsof 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, ex-

ploded 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 secondNew Left; and where he alienated many with the uncom-

promising 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, coun-

tering 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 hisoutsider status, but he resented it as well. He saved the se-

riousness 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'

E. P. Thompson in Memoriam

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