E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was first published as Pelican paperback (price 90p) on 27th September 1968. It remains in print 58 years later
The extract below is a good way of understanding Thompson’s approach to both history and politics. He looked not at fixed categories but ats relationships at specific times and contexts. The extract is from his 1965 essay Peculiarities of the English but it also appears as the conclusion to the 1968 Postscript of the paperback edition of The Making of the English Working Class.
Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine-room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time – that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1965/english.htm
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