nm0086: right [4.5] so this is a picture of Edward Thompson er at a peace 
movement rally [0.3] in nineteen-eighty-one i think [0.4] er [0.4] in Trafalgar 
Square [2.2] and i put it up there to make as it were [0.4] very pointedly the 
point from the start that Thompson is nothing if not a committed [0.4] 
historian [0.9] let me start by telling you a bit about his biography [1.0] er 
[1.2] he grew up in a household that was full of Indian independence [0.4] 
agitators [0.2] his father was a writer a poet [0.3] a missionary [0.3] in 
India [0.6] er [0.2] an anti-imperialist campaigner a friend of Nehru's [1.0] 
so [0.3] Thompson's er childhood spent near Oxford [0.5] was er [0.3] very much 
in a kind of political [0.3] anti-imperialist world [0.7] he was educated at a 
Methodist public school he went to Cambridge [0.7] er he started [0.5] reading 
English [1.1] which is significant and then he switched to History [0.6] er [0.
2] he was called up [0.3] this was during the war he was called up [0.8] er he 
fights in a tank regiment in Italy and then in France [0.5] and he goes back to 
Cambridge after the war to finish his degree [1.5] in his first er [1.0] er er 
period in Cambridge [0.5] 
he joined the Communist Party [0.6] er following the example of his elder 
brother [0.7] who again is significant Frank Thompson [1.1] Frank Thompson was 
a kind of romantic hero for his [0.3] for Edward [0.4] er [0.5] during the war 
Frank served in the Special Operations Executive [0.7] er which was er 
organizing [0.2] er [0.2] er liaison with partisans in the Balkans [0.4] er [0.
7] er he was parachuted in behind enemy lines [0.6] and he was er [0.5] shot by 
the Germans [0.9] er [0.3] after he'd er [0.3] teamed up with some Bulgarian 
partisans in nineteen-forty-four and they got themselves captured by the Nazis 
and he was executed [1.5] Frank's death [1.1] er cemented an emotional link [0.
5] for his younger brother who admired him hugely [0.4] er an emotional link [0.
2] with the wartime resistance movements in occupied Europe [1.0] that were to 
be the touchstone of Thompson's politics throughout his life [2.3] okay war's 
over [0.5] he's got his degree from Cambridge nineteen-forty-eight [0.2] he 
moves to Halifax with his wife [0.6] Dorothy Thompson who's another Cambridge 
historian and also a communist [0.7] er they take 
up jobs in the W-E-A in adult education [1.1] and er over the next decade or so 
Thompson is active as a communist [0.4] in the West Riding peace movement and 
labour movements [0.9] er and [0.3] out of that comes his sense of who he's 
writing history for [0.7] his sense of a popular audience [0.5] it isn't 
academia that Thompson wants to address primarily [1.3] his first two books 
were written out of his adult education teaching [0.6] er and for that audience 
[0.3] a biography of William Morris in nineteen-fifty-five [1.1] which evokes 
the kind of fervour of [0.5] the religion of socialism of socialist commitment 
[0.3] in the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties [0.5] and his second book 
his most famous book [0.3] The Making of the English Working Class in nineteen-
sixty-three [0.9] which is about the formation of [0.6] and many of you will 
have looked at it about the formation of working class consciousness [0.6] in 
England in the seventeen-nineties to the eighteen- [0.4] thirties [0.4] very 
much rooted in evidence from West Yorkshire [0.2] where he was living and 
teaching [1.2] now one key influence on Thompson's writing [0.8] during the 
late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties [0.3] was the Communist Party 
[1.8] British communism of course was a very marginal [0.2] political force [1.
1] but it had [0.9] a highly significant impact on intellectual life [0.5] both 
in Britain and beyond [0.8] because the Communist Party fostered a group of 
Marxist historians [0.4] who were among the most distinguished of Britain's 
post-war historians [1.1] Rodney Hilton [0.6] medieval history Christopher Hill 
[0.4] and the English Revolution [0.3] Eric Hobsbawm [1.4] er [1.1] and Edward 
Thompson would be the biggest names among them but there were others as well 
other significant historians coming out of the Communist Party [1.5] er [0.9] 
for most of these people [0.4] nineteen-fifty-six [0.3] was the crunch year 
when they did their reckoning [0.5] with official communism [0.4] that's to say 
the year when Khrushchev [0.4] made his famous speech about Stalin's crimes [0.
4] and when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary [1.8] Thompson was to play a 
leading role in the [0.5] 
breakaway [0.6] of intellectuals from the Communist Party [0.2] at that time [1.
0] and he was central with other ex-communists [0.3] in establishing [0.2] what 
became known as the new left [1.4] an attempt to work out a [0.2] kind of post-
Stalinist democratic [0.6] Marxism [0.5] that was non-sectarian [0.2] and above 
all was non-aligned in the Cold War that didn't see [0.8] Moscow as any better 
than Washington [2.5] Thompson's [0.4] a-, and the major political intervention 
[0.4] of this new left [0.4] coming out of the er [0.3] the breakaway from 
communism in nineteen-fifty-six [0.3] was the first wave of the Campaign for 
Nuclear Disarmament [0.8] ch-, [0.2] between [0.5] late fifties nineteen-fifty-
nine nineteen-sixty-four [2.1] and in fact it was just at the end of that 
period i first met [0.4] Edward Thompson on an Aldermaston march [0.9] the f-, 
[0.6] second one i went on i think but i was amazed to find myself er [0.4] 
walking alongside this fellow [0.2] whose book i'd [0.3] just been reading and 
he talked exactly like he wrote i couldn't understand how a man could be [0.3] 
quite that eloquent in just ordinary 
conversation [1.5] i'll give you more of these little personal insights as we 
go along [0.3] right [0.6] er [0.8] in the same year [0.4] er nineteen-sixty-
five [0.7] that i [0.2] met him on an Aldermaston march he was appointed as one 
of the first members of [0.4] namex's History department [0.5] and he stayed at 
namex [0.3] until nineteen-seventy-two establishing the [0.2] Social History 
Centre [1.7] and developing the insights of The Making of the English Working 
Class back in time essentially [0.7] er [0.6] working on [0.2] crime [0.3] and 
the link between crime and popular protest [0.7] er he got together a group of 
graduate students [0.5] er they [0.3] collectively published [0.3] a book o-, 
[0.2] of essays Albion's Fatal Tree in nineteen- [0.3] seventy-five [0.3] and 
in and in the same year Thompson published [0.5] the book that will be the text 
[0.6] for the course [0.4] er Whigs and Hunters in nineteen-seventy-five [2.5] 
now [0.4] the job at namex [0.2] was Thompson's only full time academic 
appointment [1.2] er he subsequently after he left namex [0.3] lived on 
royalties journalism the occasional American lecture tour [0.4] his wife 
Dorothy remained [0.2] in academia [0.6] and had a distinguished career herself 
as a historian of Chartism [2.0] while at namex [0.3] Thompson [0.2] didn't [0.
5] and er simply devote himself [0.4] to [0.4] er [0.3] academic work [0.3] he 
was also [0.2] he went on being a political activist [0.9] er [0.6] he writes a 
series of er [0.2] er sorry [0.3] i've lost my [0.2] place there [0.4] er [0.2] 
[sniff] [3.6] in the early sixties [0.6] the new left which i just described as 
this formation of [0.2] b-, of of anti- [0.2] Stalinist Marxism that comes out 
of the break up of the C-P and [0.4] er the Communist Party in nineteen-fifty-
six [0.5] er [0.3] the new left [0.2] splits apart [0.3] er in the early 
nineteen- [0.2] sixties [0.4] and there's particularly a fall out between 
younger Marxists on New Left Review [0.5] and that group of people who are now 
much older Marxists very much older Marxists still control [0.2] New Left 
Review [0.6] and [0.2] the people who'd set it up originally Thompson and his 
friends [0.8] the younger Marxists [0.2] embrace a kind of structuralist 
Marxism [0.3] that's coming out of France at that time [0.2] i'll say more 
about that later [0.4] but Thompson [0.6] 
defines during the er [0.5] er [0.2] er these years he defines a distinctive 
relationship to Marxism [0.4] he writes a series of [1.0] er polemical essays 
[0.2] directed at [0.6] these structuralists on New Left Review notably his 
essay on the peculiarities of the English [0.3] in nineteen-sixty-five [0.3] 
and it culminates in his book [0.3] or collection of essays but also the big 
essay in the book [0.2] The Poverty of Theory [0.8] in nineteen-seventy-eight 
and the an extract from The Poverty of Theory [0.8] is also part of the text 
for the seminar [1.1] and that [0.5] essay [0.4] was a polemic against the 
French Marxist philosopher [0.4] Althusser [0.6] who was all the rage among 
young younger Marxists [1.2] so Thompson was doing [1.2] Marxist argumentation 
as it were [0.2] while he was [0.2] teaching at namex [0.4] he was also playing 
a leading role [0.4] in the unsuccessful campaign of resistance to what [0.3] 
he called [0.3] namex University Limited [0.9] that's to say the very close 
relations the university has always had from the start [0.4] with er local and 
national and international [0.4] business organizations [0.7] er [0.6] 
you probably all have some idea of the story of what happened perhaps you don't 
perhaps it's just disappeared in the mists of times i don't know but there was 
[0.3] a student occupation of the registry they found a lot of files [0.4] er 
that er some of those files [0.2] er showed the Vice-Chancellor of the time [0.
4] er [0.5] er going along with Rootes [0.5] of [0.3] Rootes [0.2] yeah [0.4] 
er and r-, and Rootes Hall [0.3] er [0.2] paying er a lawyer to spy on visiting 
academics who were talking to Coventry workers [0.4] and stirring up trouble in 
Coventry factories [0.5] so er [0.5] that stuff came out [0.2] er [1.3] in fact 
[0.2] i went along with Edward the night [0.3] those files were found to the 
registry which was occupied by students [0.6] er [0.6] we lifted the files we 
took them home i organized the illegal distri-, those the university took out 
an injunction [0.6] i organized the illegal distribution of these files while 
Edward wrote the polemics [0.5] er about how the liberal university was abusing 
its [0.2] position [1.4] that [0.5] little local campaign [0.9] was er part of 
a much broader issue 
for Thompson about civil liberties [0.7] and throughout the nineteen-seventies 
he's writing polemical journalism [0.3] attacking the secret state [0.8] er 
defending the right to strike defending the jury system which is under threat 
and so on [0.6] and that in a way is [0.6] quite surprising the the all this is 
informed by a quite surprisingly un-Marxist sense [0.6] of the law [0.7] as an 
instrument [0.2] not just of repression [0.9] but also as an instrument of 
resistance to repression [1.1] there were real liberties to be defended he 
believed [0.3] the final period of Thompson's life was dominated by the new 
Cold War [0.7] from nineteen-seventy-nine [0.5] by the second wave of the 
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the early nineteen-eighties which owed a 
great deal to Thompson's [0.2] skills as a pamphleteer [0.3] and a public 
speaker [1.0] and if i can put myself in the picture once again why not [0.3] 
er [0.6] er [0.4] i went along to hear Edward talk in Leamington Spa that swept 
me [0.2] off my feet and i spent the next six years [0.3] more or less full 
time doing peace 
movement work and occasionally coming in here to lecture and somehow [0.3] 
holding down the job [0.6] er [1.5] Thompson [0.3] gave up history altogether 
[0.6] er [0.7] he helped to found and lead an organization called European 
Nuclear Disarmament which was [0.4] all about getting up some kind of non-
aligned dialogue between dissidents in the East [0.4] and dissidents like 
himself in the peace movement in the West [0.7] er [2.2] and his critical 
intervention in all that was [0.2] to talk about the importance to theorize 
about the importance of popular revolt on both sides of the Iron Curtain 
against what he saw [0.2] and defined as the [0.2] exterminist was the word he 
used [0.2] the exterminist logic [0.2] of the bloc system [0.5] we all at that 
time of course [0.2] thought [0.3] that nuclear war [0.3] was quite possible 
and would quite possibly happen quite soon [0.9] that danger might seem quite 
remote now [0.7] er but in the early eighties [0.3] as twenty years earlier [0.
7] the idea that the Cold War confrontation had built into it a structure of 
exterminism [0.9] had compelling 
force for millions of people and [0.3] as i say Thompson gave up history [0.2] 
altogether [0.3] full time commitment to the peace movement [1.8] he's 
eventually killed [0.7] by a disease that he picked up while travelling in 
India [0.8] which was always part of his kind of one of his places [0.6] 
because of the importance of how he grew up as i [0.2] er said [0.4] er [0.6] 
he died but before he died in nineteen-ninety-three he had time to complete a 
book on William Blake [2.0] which was part of a lifelong engagement with the 
Romantic poets when he was here he taught a special subject [0.5] on er [0.3] 
the making of the English working class and the poets [0.6] Wordsworth and so 
on [0.6] er the book on Wordsworth was never written [0.6] Thompson had 
originally intended to be a poet [0.8] like his father and his brother [1.1] er 
[0.2] not a historian [0.9] and he did write poetry he wrote a novel [0.5] a [0.
4] not terribly good novel actually [0.4] er [0.5] but his poetic sensibility 
[0.2] and craftsmanship went above all into his writing of history [9.1] a 
contrast there between what i'm calling [0.5] 
Thompson a poet of the past and what Marx said about where poetry [0.2] has to 
come from [0.6] i will come back to [1.3] now it's clear i think from the 
sketch i'd given you already that there's an intimate link between history and 
political commitment [0.6] for Thompson [2.5] i'll talk about [0.3] his take on 
Marxism a bit later 
nm0086: what i want to stress now is the kind of politics [0.5] that turned 
Thompson on [1.6] it certainly wasn't orthodox electoral politics [0.8] he 
joined the Labour Party some years after he left the Communist Party but he was 
never active [0.4] and he tended to be contemptuous [0.2] of the kind of 
machine politics [0.4] of [0.2] the established parties [0.5] though he did 
actually have Robin Cook [0.2] working with him closely in European Nuclear 
Disarmament [0.6] how things change [0.8] [laughter] er [1.9] it wasn't 
electoral politics it wasn't revolutionary politics either which probably is 
where i was coming from at the time i was [0.6] with Edward and [0.2] got 
rather impatient with him [0.2] he was very critical of 
younger revolutionary Marxists [0.3] in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-
seventies [0.6] er [0.6] though he continued to think of himself as a communist 
[1.2] er [0.2] and imagined a future transformation of society on liberal [0.3] 
libertarian democratic communist lines [1.0] he never thought the time was 
right for that though [1.3] the key to Thompson's politics and to the politics 
actually of a whole generation [0.5] of leftists [0.2] that he belonged to [0.
3] was anti-fascism [1.3] er [0.8] he'd grown up in the late nineteen-thirties 
and the nineteen-forties [0.7] in when the compelling [0.6] thing was to be 
part of a popular front against fascism [1.1] it was a politics of socialism in 
defeat [0.8] the highest goal [0.2] for the time being [0.3] was to resist 
fascism [1.0] and to defend democratic values [0.7] the revolution the dream of 
October nineteen-seventeen [0.3] hadn't been abandoned [0.8] but it'd been 
pushed forward into [0.3] you know a pretty unreal future [0.4] and it remained 
there for [0.2] throughout Edward's life [0.2] so far as he was concerned [0.9] 
the emotional touchstone of his politics 
as i said before [0.7] was the cause for which brother Frank died [0.3] the 
European resistance movements against fascism [1.0] and whatever opportunities 
existed [0.6] for a move towards some kind of democratic socialist outcome of 
the Second World War [1.3] which Thompson would have argued there were real 
opportunities for [0.2] for that to happen [1.0] er those were decisively 
closed down of course by the emergence of the Cold War [1.5] Thompson always 
had a profound sense that this wasn't actually a very good time to be alive [1.
9] one was if one was coming from where he was standing struggling on the 
margins of history to defend [0.2] what you could of human values [0.3] against 
a new Dark Ages [0.3] that the Cold War threatened [0.5] extermination [0.4] 
possibly [0.9] er [1.2] when Thompson issued calls for political action he did 
it not in the language of socialism [1.6] and social transformation [0.5] he 
did it more in a in a more modest language of the defence [0.3] of democratic 
values [0.3] and of human survival [1.1] the key terms are always 
resistance [1.8] and the English working class is imagined in Thompson's study 
as a resistance movement [0.4] against industrial capitalism [0.6] just like [0.
5] Frank had fought in a resistance movement [0.2] against Nazism [1.1] 
resistance on the one hand and the other key word is protest [0.5] yeah [0.6] 
the whole of his politics is in fact summed up [0.2] in the title of the 
pamphlet he wrote that had enormous [0.3] mobilizing power in the early 
nineteen-eighties [0.2] in the peace movement [0.2] which was called Protest [0.
2] and Survive [2.7] in difficult times [1.5] the survival of human values or 
of humanity itself was about as much as you could expect [1.8] but it req-, [0.
2] require a huge mobilization of human spirit and effort [1.9] protest wasn't 
a one-off march down the street or a rally in Trafalgar Square [0.3] it was a 
lifelong commitment to untiring activism 
nm0086: okay so er [1.6] why does Thompson matter [1.9] why am i going on about 
him [0.3] well you can see one reason is that i'm totally intoxicated with the 
man and always was [0.7] er [0.6] and [0.5] given his history it would be 
impossible 
for a course on historiography in the namex History department [0.2] to leave 
him out [0.5] or it will be impossible at least so long as i'm around [0.6] er 
[0.6] but where does he fit in [0.2] to get more serious where does he fit in 
to the [0.2] trajectory of the course [1.7] i think the key [0.5] point about 
Thompson is his rejection of [0.9] structuralism [0.4] all kinds of 
structuralism [0.7] in the name of human agency [1.7] when he's [0.5] working 
in particularly in a Marxist tradition he's [0.8] rejecting a s-, structuralist 
versions of Marxism [1.5] but [0.3] he's working at a time [0.2] in the mid-
twentieth century [1.3] when [0.3] much of social theory not only in Marxism [0.
3] but in non-Marxist social theory as well [0.5] is very much into 
structuralist understandings of the way society works [0.6] Weber's iron cage 
[0.8] Talcott Parsons and American structural functionalism [1.7] or the 
Annales Braudel's idea of the longue durée [1.3] all these [0.3] point [0.6] 
to [0.7] underlying often unrecognized determinants of human behaviour [0.2] as 
being the secret [0.8] of 
history [2.2] against that [1.1] Thompson is committed [0.2] politically [0.3] 
and historically [0.6] to [1.0] what [0.2] is perhaps a very attractive [0.2] 
reassertion [0.4] of [0.2] human agency [0.8] against [0.7] the power of the 
structures [1.5] men were free within limits to make their own history [2.0] 
Thompson as Thompson put it [0.4] i think the the quote here is on the sheet i 
handed round [0.3] er [1.5] the conce-, he was defending [0.6] the precious 
space of partial of partial free agency [0.9] against structuralist notions of 
a history without subjects [0.8] yeah [0.3] a history in which we're just the 
playthings [0.2] of the big forces [2.3] now the most famous statement of er [0.
4] this humanist [0.9] position [0.3] is in the preface to The Making of the 
English Working Class [1.0] which he saw as a process happening between the 
seventeen-nineties eighteen-thirties [1.3] and he describes that process as an 
a-, an active process [0.4] which owes as much to agency [0.7] as it does to 
conditioning [0.9] the working class he says did not arise like the sun at 
the appointed time [0.7] it was [0.2] present at its own making [1.9] a very 
paradoxical phrase [0.3] present at its own making [0.9] that's to say it 
didn't simply this whole process doesn't simply reflect changes in the economic 
base [1.0] Thompson was embattled against crude mechanical [0.4] models of 
working class [0.2] formation that you might draw out of The Communist 
Manifesto for instance [0.5] er as being all about simply a process of 
massification in towns and factories [2.1] for Thompson class consciousness [0.
6] far from being [0.2] working class consciousness [0.3] far from being an 
automatic reflex [0.8] of [0.2] workers' objective positions in the relations 
of production [2.1] involved [1.8] new ways in which individuals perceive 
themselves in relation to other people [0.2] new senses of the self [1.2] and a 
whole [0.4] cultural revolution as it were [0.6] in people's heads [0.2] 
achieved through protracted struggles involving [0.5] moral energy and tenacity 
intelligence [0.4] creative reinterpretation [0.3] of the social environment [0.
7] difficult choices of 
allegiance [0.4] all kind of individual crises of conscience [0.9] so it was a 
very morally [0.8] er weighted [0.3] process the process of the formation of 
class consciousness [3.3] Thompson's insistence on situating [1.4] on saying 
it's present at its own making [0.6] the working class [0.2] doesn't come from 
nowhere it's situated in long traditions [0.3] of popular protest stretching 
back to Christopher Hill's [0.4] radical movements [0.4] in the seventeenth 
century and before [1.6] now here [0.2] this is the Communist Party history 
group talking this is Thompson working in a [0.2] frame of reference that was v-
, common to all the people in the Communist Party history group [0.3] it 
actually [0.8] much of it comes from Maurice Dobb's studies in the development 
of capitalism the details are on your sheet [0.3] er [2.0] but for Thompson [1.
0] late eighteenth early nineteenth century [0.5] workers inherit a [0.3] old 
and sophisticated popular culture [0.7] er [0.9] they aren't a blank sheet on 
which capitalism writes its agenda [0.3] these men he writes didn't pass in one 
generation from the peasantry to the new industrial town [0.6] they suffered 
the experience of the Industrial Revolution as articulate free born Englishmen 
[1.5] like the people he'd been teaching in his W-E-A classes in West Yorkshire 
[2.9] now Thompson's equally [0.2] dismissive [1.0] of [1.4] the economic 
reductionism that's apparent in many non-Marxist accounts of popular protest [0.
5] Chartism was not a knife and fork question [0.4] it's not simply hunger that 
drives popular protest [0.3] popular protest can't be understood as many non-
Marxist historians [0.6] er understood it at the time [0.3] as irrational 
outbursts of desperate people [1.8] popular protest is [0.4] about moral 
outrage [0.3] at the imposition of [0.5] above all for Thompson the anti-human 
values of the market [2.1] the imposition against customary practices [0.2] 
embodying values of human community [1.0] so it's a great drama of a 
traditional moral economy [0.2] up against [0.2] the expansion of the 
capitalist marketplace the [0.4] alternative rationality [0.4] of the cash 
nexus [2.5] probably the 
most [0.4] famous er phrase in the preface to The Making of the English Working 
Class is er which you will all have heard i'm sure [0.4] is [0.3] i am seeking 
to rescue the poor stockinger the Luddite [0.3] the obsolete handloom weaver [0.
2] the utopian artisan [0.3] to rescue them [0.2] from the enormous 
condescension of posterity [2.0] now he doesn't just mean that we should seek 
[0.6] to reconstruct the rationality of the actions of the poor [1.3] rather 
than simply seeing them as victims [0.6] of the great steamroller of progress 
[2.5] he's also trying to say there's something more positive than that [0.5] 
it's not just that they're not victims [0.6] they actually [1.1] may have 
something to teach us [2.0] the history of popular protest [0.8] may make us 
aware that apparently defeated [0.2] and futile protest [0.7] can embody values 
that speak to our own times [1.6] the big structure of Thompson's thought is 
all about [0.4] traditional attitudes [0.7] precapitalist if you like attitudes 
to economic life [0.3] being swept aside by the logic of the capitalist 
market [0.5] but perhaps those precapitalist [0.4] moral economies [0.2] hold 
clues to what a post-capitalist society might be like [3.8] so working class 
consciousness the working class consciousness he evokes in the making [0.8] er 
[0.3] represented a refusal of the value system or rather the amorality [1.1] 
of market forces [0.9] it is [0.3] he writes at one point a resistance movement 
there's resistance again [0.2] a resistance movement to the [0.2] annunciation 
of acquisitive man [0.7] and an insistence that [0.3] human and community 
values [1.2] er were of more worth than the anti-human categories [0.9] of 
political economy of economic man 
nm0086: it would be easy to be swept along [1.2] and i can say this with 
authority [0.2] it would be easy to be swept along by the force of Thompson's 
rhetoric [2.8] but criticism [0.4] from more orthodox Marxists [1.1] of 
Thompson's position from those er [0.2] younger [0.4] men [0.2] er attracted to 
French structuralism on New Left Review [0.3] is also worth listening to [0.7] 
i've listed i think on the 
on the handout er some of those [0.2] criticisms [0.2] particularly Perry 
Anderson [0.9] er [1.5] Thompson's approach [1.2] to class [0.9] involved a 
rejection of the notion employed by moth mar-, by most Marxists [0.5] that 
class has an objective existence prior to any [0.3] subjective awareness [0.9] 
of class [1.3] you know [0.2] the the distinction between class in itself and 
class for itself [0.3] class as defined objectively [1.4] and [0.9] c-, c-, a 
class consciousness as representing people's consciousness a coming to [0.2] a 
consciousness of their class position and interests [0.9] now most Marxists [1.
1] use [0.7] some kind some such distinction between objective and subjective 
[0.2] class class in itself class for itself [1.8] Thompson refused that 
language [1.1] he argued that as soon as you concede that [0.2] class that a 
class can exist [0.3] without being conscious in some way [0.2] of its 
existence [0.7] then you're on the road to a mechanical Marxism [0.6] in which 
class consciousness is simply given by the economic base not made by human 
agency [1.0] class he insists in another of his famous 
phrases [0.5] is not a thing [0.3] it's a happening [4.0] on the face of it 
this is rather a curious argument [1.3] there's absolutely no [0.3] reason in 
logic [0.8] why [0.6] making an analytical distinction [1.2] between [0.2] 
objective and subjective class class in itself class for itself [0.5] must lead 
[0.5] to proposish-, to the proposition that class consciousness [0.4] that the 
process of a class becoming aware of itself as it were [0.2] is mechanically 
determined by productive relations [0.9] a structural definition of class 
doesn't necessarily imply any mechanical [0.3] notion [0.2] of how class 
consciousness happens [0.7] class consciousness is a happening not a thing [0.
8] class in itself could be structurally determined class for itself [0.4] 
could still be [0.3] understood [0.6] as [0.2] a process [1.0] a dr-, an open 
drama of the historical process to use one of [0.3] Thompson's phrases [0.3] 
something which emerges or fails to emerge [1.0] but in so far as it emerges is 
human agency at work [1.6] it seemed to more orthodox Marxists that by 
placing so much stress on agency [0.6] Thompson was effectively rejecting the 
basic claim of Marxism altogether [0.7] the claim that class struggle [1.4] was 
very important in history and was rooted in relations of production [0.5] and 
that that was the motor driving historical change [6.2] Thompson always denied 
that he was [0.2] er departing totally from his Marxist formation he always 
claimed to be some kind of a Marxist [1.1] er [0.7] he rejected the notion that 
class could exist objectively [0.3] without [0.2] existing subjectively [0.5] 
and his rejection of that was not [0.7] because he wanted to deny [0.6] that 
class was all about the relations of production [1.5] are you following me here 
[0.3] not that he wanted to deny [0.4] that class [0.8] was rooted [0.5] in the 
processes of production and the relations of production [1.0] but [0.7] that he 
wanted to insist that the relations of production themselves economic life 
itself [1.6] wa-, [0.4] was nothing but human relationships [1.0] this was not 
[0.2] there wasn't an economy which was an objective structure out there [0.7] 
that human beings 
couldn't [0.2] influence that determined what they did [0.4] the economy itself 
was all about human subjectivity and agency [3.4] what Thompson rejected was 
the mechanical implications of that favourite Marxist [0.2] metaphor of the 
base and the superstructure [0.7] the economic base political legal cultural 
superstructure [2.2] Thompson the poet [0.4] reacted very sharply against that 
metaphor [0.7] so he writes on one occasion any poet could tell in an instant 
[0.4] that trying to contain the fluidity [0.2] of human existence [0.2] in a 
metaphor out of a textbook of constructional engineering [0.9] base 
superstructure [0.2] must be constricting and deforming [1.8] base 
superstructure [0.2] the accompanying language of causal relationships between 
different levels of the social formation [0.3] economy here [0.4] polity [0.3] 
law [0.2] religion whatever [1.2] that thinking about [1.1] a society in terms 
of levels [0.9] does violence [0.3] Thompson says to the interaction of social 
being and social 
consciousness [1.1] because it suggests a s-, distinct f-, sphere of the 
economic from which culture law [0.2] social consciousness are in some sense [0.
2] absent [2.2] in reality Thompson argues [0.3] economic life directly 
involves [0.2] all kinds of things [0.5] relegated by the metaphor to the 
superstructure [0.8] it involves the law you can't have an economy without law 
[0.5] or not for long [0.7] it involves religion [0.4] it involves custom and 
practice rooted in cultural attitudes [1.3] as he puts it in The Poverty of 
Theory [0.3] reflecting on his study of [0.2] the eighteenth century [0.5] le-, 
system [1.5] normally thought of by Marxists of of eighteenth century law [0.8] 
which would normally be thought of by Marxists as belonging to the non-economic 
[0.2] superstructure [0.7] law he says [0.3] didn't keep politely to a level [0.
9] but was at every bloody level [1.6] it was [0.3] imbricated [0.8] whatever 
that means [0.9] er it was [0.2] mixed up with [0.3] the mode of production and 
productive relations themselves [0.3] as 
property rights definitions of agrarian practice and so on [1.1] now he 
wrestles throughout his life with [0.4] how you can express the relationship 
between social being [0.7] and [0.2] the material [0.3] existence [0.2] and 
social consciousness [0.5] allowing the fluidity and the subtleties of real 
life [0.6] how you can do that without abandoning which he didn't want to 
abandon [0.3] a materialist insistence on the primary importance [0.2] of the 
way in which a society feeds itself [0.4] the way in which a society [0.4] 
produces [0.7] er [0.4] on its er in d-, in in determining in in shaping [0.3] 
the whole structure of its culture and mentality and the dynamics of the 
conflicts [0.2] within that society [2.3] the solution he found was to talk 
about not a separate e-, economic sphere [0.5] but [0.2] relations of 
production as a kind of kernel of everything else that happened in the society 
a bit of an [0.2] acorn and oak [0.5] imagery 
nm0086: whether in or not he found a more satisfactory way of avoiding a merely 
economic determinist Marxism [2.4] than the 
structuralist Marxists who he criticized [0.6] now appears to be much less 
important [0.2] than the implications of his critique of economic determinism 
for any kind of Marxism [3.4] the key argument of much of Thompson's work [1.5] 
is [1.1] that the [0.3] abstract conception of the economy [1.2] as something 
other than men and women working together [0.2] in greater or lesser degrees of 
conflict and harmony [1.7] and something which stands over and against human 
relationships [0.5] an iron cage if you like [1.0] with its own imperatives and 
demands its own laws of the market [2.0] before which human beings have to bow 
down [0.7] that that notion of [0.2] an economy [0.2] was itself very recent [1.
5] it was itself [0.8] a historical product [0.5] of precisely the rise of [0.
3] modern capitalist industry [3.2] the major critique [0.2] of that ideology 
[1.4] this notion of an economy was itself highly ideological [0.2] that was 
his point [0.4] yeah [0.8] er the major critique of that ideology would be 
found precisely in the alternative value system sustained by resistance 
movements of working people [0.4] refusing to be dehumanized [0.2] as hired 
hands [0.3] refusing to become mere proletarians [1.7] so that Thompson what's 
thomp-, Thompson's writing about is the discursive origins of economic man [0.
4] how did that phrase come into the discourse [0.7] why did it come to seem a 
reality that the cou-, you could talk about the economy [0.4] as something that 
wasn't [1.1] that was different [0.3] simply from [0.9] certain kinds of human 
relationships [1.8] now the process [2.0] he's talking about is the process by 
which for example the word industry [1.6] industry [1.4] moves [0.9] from being 
a word that refers essentially to a human activity [0.9] industry is about 
industriousness [0.9] and you're all being very industrious in still paying 
attention at this point in the lecture [0.3] that's industry [0.6] huh [0.8] 
industry moves from that to being [0.2] a thing a structure an institution an 
iron cage [0.6] or the word society [2.1] oh [0.2] society [0.3] what's society 
human fellowship [0.8] it's a word that primarily [0.4] in an earlier period 
describes fellowship companionship [0.4] 
relationships among individuals [0.5] yeah [0.9] by the nineteenth century 
society [0.9] is a big thing out there isn't it it's a structure [2.3] mm [1.0] 
er it's an object a system operating according to its own laws of motion [1.3] 
so the point i'm making here is that Thompson's critique [0.2] of the economic 
[0.6] of the idea of an economy and of economic man and of laws of political 
economy [1.8] Thompson's critique of the economic can be seen as opening the 
way [0.5] to a historicization [1.2] of all the foundational concepts of social 
science [1.3] yeah [1.5] the polity [1.1] society [1.3] the culture [0.8] the 
culture nature distinction [0.5] er this is [0.3] er m-, much of the way we 
think that [0.5] happened in the eighteenth century [0.6] male female [0.8] 
yeah [0.4] the way we think that [0.4] is a social product [0.3] and s-, in its 
current form quite recent [0.9] all this [1.1] of course can be seen as 
pointing the way towards a post-structuralist [0.5] historical practice [1.0] 
yeah [0.6] in which the point [0.2] of [0.2] critical history [0.7] is not to 
find out what the structures were and how they operate [0.6] right [0.7] 
the economy society [0.6] and so on not to find out these what these structures 
are [0.5] but to explain how those concepts came into existence [0.9] mm [1.4] 
so you're not working with the concepts of social science [0.7] you're 
explaining how social science is just the ideology of modern society [2.0] yeah 
[1.4] then you get into territory that we will get into next term when we turn 
to look at Foucault [1.1] in which [0.2] what the job of the historian is to do 
is to mine down and uncover the origins of the discourses [0.5] by which we 
speak about [0.2] the way power operates [1.2] yeah [1.2] but we can't then say 
well we'll explain how societies society whatever that is is developing by 
talking about the economy [0.8] these concepts are themselves [0.2] what we 
need to investigate how did we come to think [0.6] in that way [0.6] now that's 
a route Thompson didn't want to go down [0.3] and i don't want to go any 
further down it now [0.2] we will explore that much more next term [0.4] yeah 
[0.8] as to a history [0.3] which is essentially an analysis of the production 
and 
reproduction of discourses [1.1] yeah [0.6] Thompson didn't want to go round 
down that road [1.5] he clung to the Marxist notion [0.5] that relations of 
production were fundamental to the ways in which society worked [0.6] and he 
was content to avoid economic reductionism [1.0] by insisting that the economy 
[2.3] was not [0.2] a separate level [1.8] that it involved [0.3] as he said 
all the bloody levels [2.9] when more orthodox Marxists objected that this 
wasn't [0.7] what Marx meant [1.4] then Thompson began to lose [0.4] patience 
with [0.2] theological [0.3] takes on Marxism [0.9] Thompson was well aware 
that [0.3] after the eighteen-forty-eight defeats [1.2] Marx himself had moved 
away from a humanist position [0.3] as expounded in his early writings [0.4] 
towards more structuralist [0.2] positions [2.3] Thompson would argue that 
Marx's [1.1] the writing of Das Kapital [0.3] Marx's engagement with [0.3] 
structuralist engagement with political economy investigating the laws of 
motion of the capitalist economy [0.8] represented [0.4] for Marx something of 
a capitulation [1.3] to the very categories of thought [1.4] which the 
working class movement and the early Marx [0.2] had set out to challenge in the 
name of humanity and human agency [1.6] when Thompson cites [0.6] that [0.5] 
passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire [0.4] men make their own history but they 
do not make it just as they please [0.2] he puts the emphasis on the first part 
of the sentence [2.3] a more orthodox reading of The Eighteenth Brumaire [0.2] 
stresses the second half of the sentence [2.0] now you've all read The 
Eighteenth Brumaire [0.6] haven't you [0.7] so [0.4] you should [0.2] er be 
able to make a judgement [0.2] about this [0.5] but let me just sketch out for 
you so you can situate Thompson [0.2] in relation to orthodox more orthodox 
Marxism [1.1] the structuralist reas-, reading [0.5] of The Eighteenth Brumaire 
is going to stress the but [0.2] aren't they men make their own history but [0.
2] only under certain conditions [1.6] for the orthodox Marxist agency [0.8] 
self-determination [0.5] are what are going to happen in the future [1.0] 
that's what the socialist revolution will produce [0.2] in the 
meantime however [0.4] men are doomed to be playthings of forces they don't 
understand [0.5] locked in false consciousness [0.5] inherited attitudes ideas 
traditions which [0.4] Marx writes weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the 
living so you know in The Eighteenth Brumaire they [0.7] they do the English 
Civil War out of the Bible and the French er first French Revolution out of the 
Roman Republic and eighteen-forty-eight out of the first French Revolution and 
so on [0.2] they're living in a mental prison of tradition [0.4] the players in 
these games [0.8] and that's a major source of their inability to understand 
what they're really at [0.3] and therefore to be in control [0.4] of the 
consequences [0.2] of their own actions [1.5] for Marx the past is a nightmare 
[0.7] from which we're struggling to wake up [0.4] and the revolution will be 
that wake up process [0.8] that and the nightmare's a land of false 
consciousness a land of [0.2] vast impersonal forces [0.7] the poetry of the 
proletarian 
revolution [0.3] he says [0.4] yeah [0.8] will be drawn not from the past but 
from the future [0.6] let the dead bury their dead [0.3] says Marx talking 
about all that junk past history [2.8] a humanist reading of The Eighteenth 
Brumaire on the other hand would privilege the first part of the sentence men 
make their own history [0.3] but only under certain conditions [1.2] agency 
that is to say [1.0] for Thompson [0.2] is already with us [0.9] and [0.2] it's 
in agency that the ultimate meaning of history is to be found [1.8] human 
agency for Thompson is too important to be booted into the future [1.8] the 
past [0.2] is not just a vale of necessity [0.6] in which men are pathetic 
victims at the mercy of impersonal forces [1.3] class struggle [0.9] is [0.6] 
an open undetermined process what comes out what eventuates [0.8] does so 
through blood sweat intelligence energy [2.3] now he's not arguing of course 
that [0.3] men [0.4] or women are in complete control [0.3] the second half of 
the sentence is still there the outcome is often unintended [3.1] 
nevertheless the meaning of history [0.4] is to be found in [0.3] the will and 
the action that precious space of partial [0.3] free agency [1.0] not in the 
triumph of impersonal laws of motion over the puny and [0.3] confused efforts 
of human beings [1.1] Thompson rescuing the poor from the condescension of 
posterity [1.3] well it's the condescension that Marx among others that he's 
trying to rescue them from [0.8] Marx's contemptuous dismissal [0.2] let the 
dead bury their dead those old struggles are done and gone [1.0] for Thompson 
the investigation of previous movements of protest and resistance [0.2] wasn't 
just a record of failure [0.9] it was a major resource [0.2] for the future [1.
5] as i pointed out earlier [0.8] Thompson never thought the revolution was 
round the corner [0.3] he didn't expect to hear Marx's poetry of the future [1.
6] the time wasn't right for the audacity of revolutionaries kind of junking 
history [0.2] starting off from year one and reinventing society out of pure 
reason [0.8] time wasn't right for that kind of stuff [1.0] 
for Thompson [0.4] and this is true of the whole British school of Marxist 
historians much more generally [0.9] the poetry [0.7] was to be found precisely 
in the past [1.8] in the capacity of human beings over centuries of oppression 
[0.4] to resist [0.5] to resist the iron logic of the structures [0.7] that 
held out hope for the future [0.5] it was a record of [0.4] will and struggle 
and only partly defeated human values [0.9] men Thompson writes are the [0.8] 
and the phrase is there [0.2] the ever baffled [0.2] and ever resurgent agents 
[0.2] of an unmastered history [1.2] there's everything to play for [1.4] ever 
baffled ever resurgent [0.7] there's a deep sense of the tragedy of human 
existence [0.5] in the way Thompson approaches thing [0.5] alongside [1.6] 
people's capacity to change the world or at least to resist [1.4] any final 
triumph of the anti-human changes wrought by such malevolent forces [0.2] as in 
his view [1.3] free market capitalism [1.0] or indeed exterminism what he 
labelled the [0.4] 
military industrial complexes of East and West confronting each other [0.2] 
with nuclear missiles [0.2] in the nineteen- [0.3] er - [0.3] seventies and 
eighties [1.0] now this is radically different from Marx's version of the idea 
of progress [0.6] yeah [0.3] for Marx [2.1] come the revolution men will [0.8] 
become their own agents they'll escape from the realm of necessity prehistory 
will end real history will begin [0.2] you'll move into the realm of freedom [1.
1] you're not ever baffled ever ever resurgent [0.5] you're finally triumphing 
over the weight of the past this nightmare that weighs down on the brains of 
the living [0.5] you're taking conscious control of your destiny [0.5] that's 
Marx's vision [1.3] it wasn't one that Thompson [0.6] attuned to the depressing 
realities of mid-twentieth century history [0.7] er could give much meaning to 
[1.2] Thompson had a decidedly jaundiced view of progress what did progress 
mean [0.4] Soviet industrialization and the Gulag [1.0] or [1.5] the United 
States military industrial [0.3] complex and exterminism [1.3] ecological 
disaster [0.8] capitalist globalism [1.5] 
for Thompson [0.7] the best hope and [0.2] of both re-, surviving and resisting 
the anti-human logic [0.5] of these systems [0.9] wa-, lay in recovering some 
of the human values [0.5] which had been defended by those who [0.2] resisted 
[0.2] the rise of that world system [0.2] from the outset [1.3] their battles 
[0.2] clearly were unsuccessful [0.9] but the values they fought for [0.3] 
weren't altogether lost [0.8] and Thompson [0.5] history was all about [1.0] 
recovering it [0.8] mounting defences on the basis of those values confident 
not perhaps of any ultimate victory but that something could be atre-, [0.2] 
achieved [0.3] at least you could keep the struggle alive [0.8] so that human 
beings could go on [0.9] surviving which means being ever baffled but also ever 
resurgent [2.3] and that really [0.3] brings me [0.5] to the end and it brings 
me to [0.2] where i'm going to start my next [0.3] 
lecture [0.2] because that's the standpoint from which Whigs and Hunters [0.5] 
set out to recover the history [0.7] in Whigs and Hunters Thompson sets out to 
recover the history [0.3] of a really very obscure group of people [0.8] er [0.
7] foresters [0.4] in win-, around Windsor [0.2] in the early eighteenth 
century [0.4] who are reacting against the onrush of capitalist property 
relations in and around the forest [1.0] what i'll do [0.4] in the first week 
of next term is explore [1.4] some of the methods and the arguments of Whigs 
and Hunters [1.0] and look at the some er but also [1.0] look [0.8] er perhaps 
more critically than i've done in this lecture [0.8] at some of the major 
tensions and difficulties [0.4] in Thompson's approach to history [0.9] and on 
the bottom of the handout you'll see i've given you some advice [0.3] about how 
to skip read Whigs and Hunters [0.5] if you er [0.8] can't bear to read it all 
[0.4] er [0.5] though you need to read a good deal of it but the advice is there