LITMIR.BIZ

      Contents

      1.Historiography

      2.Agency

      3.Marxism

      4.Stalinism

      5.Internationalism

      6.Utopias

      7.Strategies

      Bibliography

       Index

      The historian may tend to be a bit too generous because a historian has to learn to attend and listen to very disparate groups of people and try and understand their value-systems and their consciousness. Obviously in a very committed situation you can’t always afford that kind of generosity. But if you afford it too little then you are impelled into the kind of sectarian position in which you are repeatedly making errors of judgement in your relations with other people. We have seen a lot of that recently. Historical consciousness ought to assist one to understand the possibilities of transformation and the possibilities within people.

      EDWARD THOMPSON

Edward Thompson is our finest socialist writer today—certainly in England, possibly in Europe. Readers of The Making of the English Working Class, or indeed Whigs and Hunters, will always remember these as major works of literature. The wonderful variety of timbre and rhythm commanded by Thompson’s writing at the height of its powers—alternately passionate and playful, caustic and delicate, colloquial and decorous—has no peer on the Left. Arguably, too, the strictly historical achievement of the series of studies that extends across the 19th and 18th centuries from William Morris to the rich group of recent essays whose collection is promised in Customs in Common is perhaps the most original product of the corpus of English Marxist historiography to which so many gifted scholars have contributed. Setting aside any other consideration, it is rare for any researcher to become equally at home in two such contrasted epochs. Whatever comparative estimate is made in this respect—where doubtless no final judgement is attainable—two distinctive characteristics of Thompson’s practice as a historian stand out. Throughout, his has been the most declared political history of any of his generation. Every major, and nearly every minor, work he has written concludes with an avowed and direct reflection on its lessons for socialists of his own time. William Morris closes with a discussion of ‘moral realism’; The Making of the English Working Class recalls our debt to the ‘liberty tree’ planted by the early English proletariat; Whigs and Hunters ends with a general revaluation of the ‘rule of law’; an essay like ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’¹ speculates on the possible synthesis of ‘old and new time-senses’ in a communist society of the future that has surpassed the ‘problem of leisure’. Each of these texts has been in its own way a militant intervention in the present, as well as a professional recovery of the past. The massive consistency of their direction, from the mid 50s to the late 70s, visibly attested in the long Postscript to the new edition of the study of Morris (1977) is profoundly impressive. At the same time, these works of history have also been deliberate and focused contributions to theory: no other Marxist historian has taken such pains to confront and explore, without insinuation or circumlocution, difficult conceptual questions in the pursuit of their research. The definitions of ‘class’ and ‘class consciousness’ in The Making of the English Working Class; the critique of ‘base and superstructure’ through the prism of law in Whigs and Hunters; the reinstatement as disciplined imagination of ‘utopianism’ in the new edition of William Morris—all these represent theoretical arguments that are not mere enclaves within the respective historical discourses, but form rather their natural culmination and resolution.

The claim on our critical respect and gratitude, then, is one of formidable magnitude and complexity. Some appraisal of Thompson’s central ideas and concerns is, however, long overdue. The publication of The Poverty of Theory provides an occasion to begin such an assessment.² Released over a year ago, it has received a generally favourable press in England. But at the date of writing, no extended response to it has so far appeared. Given the challenge of the book, this seems like something of an anti-climax. In many ways, I cannot be regarded as the most apposite interlocutor. The Poverty of Theory contains four essays, three already published and one unpublished. The former include the famous critique of views of English society and history developed in New Left Review, entitled ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, to which I rejoined over a decade ago. The latter is an attack across two hundred pages on the thought of Louis Althusser, and by its scale and novelty inevitably dominates the book. The appropriate respondent to it would obviously be an Althusserian. However, in the absence for the moment of more indicated candidates, it seems worthwhile at this point to review the theses Thompson sets out in the book-length essay which gives its title—and manifesto—to the volume. For ‘The Poverty of Theory—or an Orrery of Errors’ is not only a polemic against Althusser: it is also the most sustained exposition of Thompson’s own credo, as a historian and as a socialist, that he has given us to date. The purpose of the essay here, then, will be threefold. It will look at Thompson’s criticisms of Althusser, and try to determine their justice. Simultaneously, and more importantly, it will seek to elicit some of the cruces of Thompson’s substantive work, through the grill of the principles and procedures he recommends in The Poverty of Theory. Скачать книгу