E.P. Thompson: historiography and socialist humanism

1 The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed hour. It was present at its own making.  I do not see class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships...The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure definition of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963, p.1)  

2 There is the Fabian orthodoxy, in which the great majority of working people are seen as passive victims of laissez faire...There is the orthodoxy of the empirical economic historians, in which working people are seen as a labour force, as migrants, or as the data for statistical series. There is the “Pilgrim's Progress” orthodoxy, in which this period is ransacked for forerunners-pioneers of the Welfare State, progenitors of a Socialist Commonwealth, or (more recently) early exemplars of rational industrial relations. Each of these orthodoxies has a certain validity...My quarrel with the first and the second is that they tend to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed by conscious efforts, to the making of history. My quarrel with the third is that it reads history in the light of subsequent preoccupations, and not as in fact it occurred. Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten. I am trying to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity...Our only criterion of evolution should not be whether or not a man's actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves. (The Making of the English Working Class, p.13)

3 We have to try to understand both things – the continuing traditions and the context that has changed. Too often, since every account must start somewhere, we see only the things which are new. We start in 1789, and English Jacobinism appears as a by-product of the French Revolution. Or we start in 1819 and with Peterloo, and English Radicalism appears to be a spontaneous generation of the Industrial Revolution. Certainly the French Revolution precipitated a new agitation, and certainly this agitation took root among working people, shaped by new experiences, in the growing manufacturing districts. But the question remains – what were the elements precipitated so swiftly by these events? And we find at once the long traditions of the urban artisans and tradesmen...We may see something of the complexities of these continuing traditions if we isolate three problems: the tradition of Dissent, and its modification by the Methodist revival; the tradition made up of all those loose popular notions which combine in the idea of the Englishman's “birthright”; and the ambiguous tradition of the eighteenth-century “mob”...which Hardy was trying to organize into committees, divisions, and responsible demonstrations. (The Making of the English Working Class, p.27)

4 It is quite possible for statistical averages and human experiences to run in opposite directions. A per capita increase in quantitative factors may take place at the same time as a great qualitative disturbance in people's way of life, traditional relationships, and sanctions. People may consume more goods and become less happy or less free at the same time...Thus it is perfectly possible to maintain two propositions which, on a casual view, appear to be contradictory. Over the period 1790-1840 there was a slight improvement in average material standards,. Over the same period there was intensified exploitation, greater insecurity and increasing human misery. By 1840 most people were 'better off' than their forerunners had been fifty years before, but they had suffered and continued to suffer this slight improvement as a catastrophic experience. (The Making of the English Working Class, p.231)

5 This was, perhaps, the most distinguished popular culture England has known. It contained the massive diversity of skills, of the workers in metal, wood, textiles and ceramics […] From this culture of the craftsman and the self-taught there came scores of inventors, organizers, journalists and political theorists of impressive quality [...] True enough, one direction of the great agitations of the artisans and outworkers, continued over fifty years, was to resist being turned into a proletariat. […] During all this time they were, as a class, repressed and segregated in their own communities. But what the counter-revolution sought to repress grew only more determined in the quasi-legal institutions of the underground...Segregated in this way, their institutions acquired a peculiar toughness and resilience. Class also acquired a peculiar resonance in English life: everything, from their schools to their shops, their chapels to their amusements, was turned into a battleground of class. The marks of this remain. Such men...fought, not the machine, but the exploitive and oppressive relationships intrinsic to industrial capitalism. In these same years, the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism was running its parallel but altogether separate course. After William Blake, no mind was at home in both cultures, nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other [...] these years appear at times to display, not a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement, in which both the Romantics and the Radical craftsmen opposed the annunciation of Acquisitive Man. In the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers. (The Making of the English Working Class, p.914)

6 The dean of the spasmodic school is of course Rostow, whose crude 'social tension chart' was first put forward in 1948. According to this, we need only bring together an index of employment and one of high food prices to be able to chart the course of social disturbance. This contains a self-evident truth (people protest when they are hungry) : and in much the same way a 'sexual tension chart' would show that the onset of sexual maturity can be correlated with a greater frequency of sexual activity. The objection is that such a chart, if used unwisely, may conclude investigation at the exact point at which it becomes of serious sociological or cultural interest: being hungry (or being sexy), what do people do? How is their behaviour modified by custom, culture, and reason? And (having granted that the primary stimulus of 'distress' is present) does their behaviour contribute towards any more complex, culturally-mediated function, which cannot be reduced – however long it is stewed over the fires of statistical analysis – back to stimulus once again? (Customs in Common, p.187)  

7 When prices were high, more than one-half of the weekly budget of a labourer's family might be spent on bread. How did these cereals pass, from the crops growing in the field, to the labourers' homes? At first sight it appears simple. There is the corn: it is harvested, threshed, taken to market, ground at the mill, baked, and eaten. But at every point within this process there are radiating complexities, opportunities for extortion, flash-points around which riots could arise. And it is scarcely possible to proceed further without sketching out, in a schematic way, the paternalist model of the marketing and manufacturing process – the traditional platonic ideal appealed to in Statute, pamphlet, or protest movement – against which the awkward realities of commerce and consumption were in friction. (Customs in Common, p.193)

Key Concepts Experience and agency Experience: continually poses new questions to people caught up in their circumstances, questions to which they fashion new answers in different contexts and generations. Agency: ‘large’ historical processes are never simply ‘decided’ once and for all, but are the subject of ongoing, creative struggles in which people create social experiences, communities, meanings, traditions.