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7 - E. P. Thompson: Understanding the Process of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Theda Skocpol
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

Most historical sociologists know E. P. Thompson as the author of The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. Most have probably read part, but not all, of this book, which they view as a superb work of social history and a welcome departure from a simplistic or economist Marxism. Widely praised for its contribution to the new “history from below,” which in a sense the book itself helped to create, Thompson's masterpiece tells the story of the “blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves” that history usually forgets. Yet, however much they might admire him as a social historian and a compelling literary stylist, most historical sociologists do not see theoretical relevance in Thompson's work. A perceived lack of theoretical generalization and explicit methodology in Thompson's social history has been used to account for his meager impact on sociologists, despite his influence among historians.

Embedded in The Making of the English Working Class, however, is an implicit theory and method that Thompson subsequently has explicated through criticism of, and lively polemics with, other Marxists. The publication in 1978 of four of these long essays in one book, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, facilitates access to Thompson's perspective. The assumptions underlying Thompson's theory and method, however, still make them difficult to assimilate within sociology. Thompson offers a fundamental challenge to the positivism and empiricism that have shaped Anglo-American sociology and that have also influenced a large part of twentieth-century Marxism.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1984

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