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