E P Thompson v Roger Scruton on wine
I drank a glass or two of real ale with EP Thompson over the years (mainly from memory Courage Directors bitter in Worcester) but not wine.
I was motivated to check his view on wine while looking at the controversy surrounding the late Roger Scruton’s comments about him in the 1985 volume Thinkers of the New Left and Thompson’s subsequent response.
Scruton published a book on philosophers and wine.
But what of Thompson and wine?
Perry Anderson in a note after Thompson’s untimely death in 1993 noted a time when Thompson stayed with him in London in 1962 (LRB 21st October 1993):
Coming home one evening in the last weeks of 1962, I found a bottle of wine in the vacated room, with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English Working-Class.
Thompson’s criticism of staying in the old EEC published in the Sunday Times in 1975 (27th April 1975), Going into Europe, noted that one thing Europhiles liked about Europe was the ‘vintage wines’.
Thompson’s views on wine in his classic Making of the English Working Class were mixed. He noted that one of those who rode with the Yeomanry at Peterloo on 16th August 1819 was a wine merchant. On the other hand the leading Chartist Bronterre O’Brien (1805-64) was the son of an Irish wine merchant.
Scruton in I Drink Therefore I am argued that ‘while societies differ over which intoxicants should be encouraged…there has been a convergence of opinion around one all important rule: that the result must not threaten public order’
That is certainly what the wine merchant did at Peterloo and what the son of a wine merchant Bronterre O’Brien intended in some degree, although in different ways.
It may be presumed that Scruton liked wine, and Thompson was less keen. In his diary for 2019 published in the Spectator in early December Scruton revealed that at 75 (before his final illness had been diagnosed) he had given up hunting foxes. As Alex Callinicos noted on social media the fox hunting activity seemed to be about Scruton’s attempt to portray himself as a country gentleman, and a Tory, rather than an academic.
Again neither academic or gentleman rules out wine. Whether however Scruton’s views on wine matched historical reality is another matter.
We might conclude that philosopher though he may have been (as well as a number of other much less satisfactory things) historian Scruton was not.
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