Arguments Within English Marxism - Perry Anderson

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given us the preferable reply—superior because sufficiently firm and definite to be falsifiable.

      To sum up: Thompson’s definition of the object of history is casual and circular; his prescription for historical concepts, in a traditional emphasis on the approximate character of the discipline, is finally uncompelling; but the opening sections of The Poverty of Theory eclipse these shortcomings in their superb vindication of historical evidence, and of its authority over historical materialism. The lack of empirical controls which Thompson rightly perceives in Althusser’s work in fact forms part of a wider pattern within Western Marxism, as I have argued elsewhere, from whose speculative slide only Gramsci escaped. The period of that long proclivity is passing today, as a sounder and more inquisitive socialist culture has started to emerge in the 70s. The eloquence of Thompson’s admonitions should henceforth stand between it and the temptation of any return to the past.

       2

       Agency

      The second major theme of The Poverty of Theory is no longer procedural—what is the nature of historiography?—but substantive: what is the part of conscious human choice, value, action in history? Readers of William Morris or The Making of the English Working Class will be aware that this is the key organizing theme of Thompson’s entire work. The passion he has brought to it over twenty-five years transpires from every page of what now takes its place as his most extended theoretical statement of the problem. His argument essentially runs as follows. Althusser’s cardinal sin is his repeated assertion that ‘history is a process without a subject’,1 in which individual men and women are ‘supports of relations of production’.2 Although presented as the last word in contemporary Marxism, ‘this is a very ancient mode of thought: process is fate’.3 Today, far from being a proposition of historical materialism, it is in tune with the most reified and decadent bourgeois ideology, which must be resisted by every committed socialist. For, on the contrary, both the genuine heritage of Marx’s theory and the actual findings of historical research teach us that men and women are the ‘ever-baffled and ever-resurgent agents of an unmastered history’.4 No one saw this or expressed it better than Morris, when he wrote: ‘I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’.5 History is not a process without a subject: it is ‘unmastered human practice’,6 in which each hour is ‘a moment of becoming, of alternative possibilities, of ascendant and descendant forces, of opposing (class) definitions and exertions, of “double-tongued” signs.’7 The crucial medium in which men and women convert objective determinations into subjective initiatives is through their

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