Kmflett's Blog

With a number of pieces and a conference to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of E P Thompson on 3rd February 1924 I’ve been pondering a point made by Julian Harber in an appreciation on the Verso blog. Thompson died in 1993,30 years ago, so how relevant his work and approach to history and politics is now is perhaps questionable.

In an age dominated by performance indicators and statistics its actually quite difficult to find information on the impact of Thompson and the Making.

We might tentatively differentiate between the English speaking world and elsewhere. Certainly Thompson’s work (like Eric Hobsbawm before him) has growing interest in the Spanish speaking Americas. Thompson of course noted in the Making that causes lost in England in the nineteenth century might yet be won elsewhere.

The Making was not translated into German until 1987 (two volumes), while the five part Radio 3 series on the Making broadcast in December 2023 received wide interest, certainly if the number of hits the Society for the Study of Labour History got on a link it posted is a guide.

The Guardian recently published an Editorial pointing to the adult education work Thompson did and the link between the rescuing of the views and thoughts of working in the Making, however inconvenient, and current work by English Heritage to make sure working class voices are not lost.

There was another dimension to Thompson’s work as a peace and anti-nuclear campaigner first with CND and then with END. He noted that he had left his historical work to campaign, grasping no doubt that a continuing supply of history depended on it.

This all seems if not anecdotal not definitive either. A question which remains unanswered as yet is how much interest Thompson finds, for example, amongst current undergraduate students. Reports welcome

Julian Harber on the Verso Blog

But fighting beyond the grave is another matter. In his obituary of Edward, Eric Hobsbawm noted that “In the 1980s Thompson was the most widely cited 20th century historian in the world according to the Arts and Humanities Citations Index and one of the 250 most frequently cited authors of all time.” As I understand it this citation index now takes a different form, but whatever its current manifestation is, I would imagine the situation is now much changed as history has gone in other directions. Some of these directions Edward would I am sure have welcomed, but much else he would have seen as a retreat and in particular a retreat from matters that were his central concern – understanding and reporting the experiences, cultural resources, resistances and struggles of ordinary people against the rich and powerful. His work could only have been written by someone who believed or at least hoped that the world could have a radically more democratic and equal future. The steep decline in such a belief – both in its revolutionary and in its social-democratic versions – is the backdrop to this retreat. The extent to which his work is now neglected, out of favour or dismissed as romanticism is at least partially a reflection of the political ascendancy of those who Edward regarded as the enemy.

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/e-p-thompson-maker-of-history