E.P. Thompson

E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) was a British historian, socialist activist, and peace campaigner. His full name was Edward Palmer Thompson. He was born in Oxford into a family with strong connections to India: his father had been a Methodist missionary and a friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and Thompson grew up with an internationalist outlook. He studied at Cambridge, served in the Second World War in Italy, and then worked as an adult education tutor for the Workers Educational Association in Yorkshire, teaching history to working-class communities. This experience of teaching history to people whose own ancestors rarely appeared in it profoundly shaped his work. He left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and became one of the founders of the New Left in Britain. His monumental work The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963, transformed how historians thought about their subject. He was also a leading figure in the European Nuclear Disarmament movement in the 1980s. He died in 1993.

Origin

England, United Kingdom

Lifespan

1924-1993

Era

20th century

Subjects

Social History Labour History Historiography Class British History

Skills

Research Skills Critical Thinking Citizenship Cultural Heritage And Identity Systems Thinking

Why They Matter

Thompson matters because he transformed what history was about and who it was for. Before his generation of social historians, history was largely the history of states, rulers, armies, and elites: what kings decided, what governments enacted, what battles were won or lost. Thompson argued that this was not history but the history of one part of humanity, and that the lives, experiences, and struggles of ordinary working people were equally worthy of historical inquiry and equally important for understanding how the world had come to be as it is. His concept of rescuing people from the enormous condescension of posterity, one of the most memorable phrases in historical writing, captured what he was trying to do: restore to the record the people who had been forgotten or dismissed. He also showed that working-class people were not simply passive victims of economic forces but active agents who made their own culture, their own organisations, and their own traditions of resistance. This had profound implications not only for historiography but for politics and education.

Key Ideas

Rescuing people from the condescension of posterity

Thompson's most memorable phrase comes from the preface to The Making of the English Working Class: he was trying to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand-loom weaver, and the utopian artisan from the enormous condescension of posterity. His point was that these people, who had lived through the industrial revolution and had tried to resist or shape it in ways that ultimately failed, had been dismissed by history as losers, as people on the wrong side of progress, as obstacles to the inevitable march of industrial capitalism. Thompson argued that their experiences, their hopes, their organisations, and their moral arguments deserved serious historical attention, even if they had lost.

Class as something people make, not something done to them

Thompson's most important theoretical contribution was his redefinition of class. The standard Marxist view treated class as an objective economic position: you were working class because of your relationship to the means of production. Thompson argued this missed what was most important about class: it was a relationship that people made through experience, consciousness, and collective action. The English working class was not produced by the industrial revolution as an inevitable byproduct of factory production: it was made by real people who developed shared experiences, shared cultural traditions, and shared organisations through which they came to understand themselves as a class. Class was a historical process, not a structure.

History from below: the experience of ordinary people

Thompson was one of the founders of what became known as history from below: historical inquiry that focuses on the experiences of ordinary people rather than on rulers, elites, and formal institutions. He argued that this was not a politically motivated distortion of history but a correction of an existing distortion: conventional history had always been political, always reflecting the perspectives and interests of those who had power. History from below was an attempt to restore the full picture of the human past by including the perspectives of those who had been excluded from the historical record.

Key Quotations

"I am seeking 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."

— The Making of the English Working Class, Preface, 1963

This is Thompson's most famous statement and one of the most important in the history of historiography. He is listing the kinds of people who had been dismissed by conventional history: the losers of the industrial revolution, the people on the wrong side of what seemed like inevitable progress. His project is to take their experiences seriously, to understand what they believed and why, to restore their moral seriousness even when their causes failed. The word condescension is precise: it describes the attitude of dismissal and superiority that conventional history showed towards ordinary working people.

"The working class made itself as much as it was made."

— The Making of the English Working Class, Preface, 1963

Thompson is making his central argument about class and agency in a single sentence. The standard economic determinist view said that capitalism made the working class: the factory system produced a proletariat as an objective consequence of industrial production. Thompson says this is only half the story. The working class also made itself: through its own choices, its own organisations, its own cultural traditions, its own moral frameworks. Human beings are not only the products of economic forces: they are also agents who respond to those forces creatively and who shape the world they inhabit.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Research Skills When asking whose voices appear in historical sources

How to introduce

Ask: whose voices are represented in the history you have learned at school? Whose stories are told? After discussion, introduce Thompson's question: if we only have sources written by literate, powerful people, how do we know what ordinary working people thought and experienced? Introduce his methods: court records, trade union records, newspapers written by and for workers, diaries, songs, and oral traditions. Ask: what can each of these sources tell us that others cannot? What is still missing?

Citizenship When examining how ordinary people have shaped history

How to introduce

Challenge the assumption that history is made by great leaders. Introduce Thompson's argument: working-class people made themselves through their own organisations, their own culture, their own political action. Ask: can you think of examples of ordinary people collectively shaping history? Labour movements, civil rights movements, independence movements. Ask: what made collective action possible? What made it difficult? Connect to Gramsci's organic intellectuals and to Freire's argument about the agency of the oppressed.

For a short overview

Bryan Palmer's E.P.

Thompson

Objections and Oppositions (1994, Verso) is the most accessible account of his life and work.

For his historical essays

Customs in Common (1991, Merlin Press) collects his most important shorter pieces including the moral economy essay.

Key Ideas

The moral economy of the crowd

In his essay The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, Thompson argued that popular food riots in eighteenth-century England were not simply outbursts of hunger-driven desperation but expressions of a moral framework: a set of traditional norms about fair prices, the obligations of traders, and the rights of the community to food at prices they could afford. The rioters were not irrational: they were enforcing a moral code that they believed was legitimate. Thompson's concept of the moral economy opened up a new way of understanding popular protest: not as blind reaction but as the expression of alternative values and rights.

The Luddites were not anti-technology

The Luddites, nineteenth-century textile workers who destroyed new machinery, have become a byword for irrational resistance to technological progress. Thompson showed that this was a profound misreading. The Luddite machine-breakers were not opposed to machinery as such: they were defending specific rights and customs that were being destroyed by the way machinery was being introduced, specifically by employers who used it to bypass agreements with skilled workers, reduce wages, and destroy the craft traditions that gave workers both income and dignity. They were not anti-technology but pro-justice: their target was the use of technology to undermine workers' rights, not technology itself.

Agency: ordinary people as makers of history

One of Thompson's most important contributions was his insistence that working-class people were not simply the passive products of economic and social forces but active agents who made their own history. They created trade unions, friendly societies, radical political organisations, newspapers, chapels, and communities. They developed their own intellectual and cultural traditions. They made moral arguments and political demands. Thompson showed that the tradition of working-class self-organisation and self-education was rich, sophisticated, and long-standing, and that ignoring it distorted the historical record and impoverished the political imagination.

Key Quotations

"Sociological theories of industrialisation and modernisation have led many historians to lose sight of this struggle, by concentrating attention on structural change to the exclusion of experience."

— The Making of the English Working Class, 1963

Thompson is identifying what he sees as the fundamental error of sociological and structuralist approaches to history: they focus so much on large-scale structural change that they lose sight of the actual experiences of the people living through it. Structural analysis tells you what the general shape of change was, but it cannot tell you what it felt like to be a hand-loom weaver watching your livelihood destroyed, or a factory worker being forced to accept new time disciplines. Experience, Thompson argues, is as important as structure in understanding historical change.

"People do not only experience their own experience as ideas, within thought and its procedures, or as proletarian instinct. They also experience their own experience as feeling, and they handle their feelings within their culture."

— The Poverty of Theory, 1978

Thompson is arguing against the reduction of human experience to either rational calculation or class interest. People also feel: they have emotional responses to their situation, they have moral commitments, they have cultural frameworks through which they interpret and handle their experiences. Culture is not a superstructure sitting on top of the economic base: it is part of how people actually live and respond to their conditions. This insistence on the full humanity of the people he studied, their feelings and moral commitments as well as their economic interests, is central to Thompson's approach.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Critical Thinking When examining the Luddites and what they were actually arguing

How to introduce

Ask: what do you think the Luddites were against? After discussion, introduce Thompson's analysis: they were not against technology but against the use of technology to destroy their rights, wages, and craft traditions. Ask: does this change how you understand the word Luddite? What does calling someone a Luddite assume about their position? Connect to the broader question: when is resistance to change a form of ignorance and when is it a moral argument about justice? Who decides which it is?

Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining working-class culture and traditions

How to introduce

Introduce Thompson's argument that working-class people had their own rich culture: their own songs, their own educational traditions, their own organisations, their own forms of solidarity. Ask: do you know examples of cultural traditions associated with working people or with particular occupations or communities in your country? Why are these traditions sometimes not taught in schools? Ask: whose culture gets treated as culture and whose gets treated as folklore or tradition? Connect to Ngugi's argument about which cultures are valued and which are dismissed.

Systems Thinking When examining the relationship between economic change and cultural change

How to introduce

Introduce Thompson's argument: there is no economic growth that is not also cultural change. Apply to a contemporary example: the digital revolution has changed not only how people work but how they relate to time, to each other, to privacy, and to knowledge. Ask: what cultural changes are produced by economic changes in your community or country? Who decides what these cultural changes are, and who bears their costs? Connect to McLuhan's parallel argument: the medium of work, like the medium of communication, shapes culture independently of its content.

Further Reading

Whigs and Hunters (1975, Allen Lane) is Thompson's most focused single work, examining the Black Act of 1723 and the use of law to defend property rights against rural workers. For the time-discipline essay: it is collected in Customs in Common. For the broader context of social history: Harvey Kaye's The British Marxist Historians (1984, Polity Press) places Thompson alongside his colleagues Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm.

Key Ideas

The poverty of theory: against abstract structuralism

Thompson was a fierce critic of what he called the poverty of theory: the tendency of certain Marxist and structuralist thinkers to construct elaborate abstract theoretical frameworks that reduced human beings to the effects of economic or discursive structures, leaving no room for human agency, experience, or moral judgment. In his polemic against the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, he argued that history could not be reduced to the working out of structures: real people with real experiences made historical change, and their moral commitments and cultural values were not mere reflections of economic position but genuine forces in history.

Time, discipline, and industrial capitalism

In his essay Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, Thompson argued that industrial capitalism required not only a transformation of how people worked but a transformation of how they related to time. Pre-industrial workers had worked by task: you worked until the job was done and then stopped. Industrial capitalism required time-discipline: working for specified hours regardless of whether the task was finished, synchronising labour to the machine rather than to the natural rhythm of the work. This transformation of the experience of time was one of the deepest cultural changes of industrialisation, and Thompson showed it was achieved through a combination of economic coercion, moral pressure, and the internalisation of new habits.

Nuclear disarmament and the historian as citizen

In the 1980s Thompson became one of the leading voices of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement, writing Protest and Survive as a response to the British government's nuclear civil defence pamphlet Protect and Survive, and helping organise mass demonstrations across Europe. He argued that historians had a particular obligation as citizens: their knowledge of how wars started, how populations were mobilised, and how the logic of armament escalated could contribute to public understanding of the nuclear danger. This was a direct application of his historical work: just as he had insisted on the agency of ordinary people in history, he insisted that ordinary people had both the right and the responsibility to participate in decisions about war and peace.

Key Quotations

"Class is a relationship, and not a thing. It is fluent, it evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment."

— The Making of the English Working Class, Preface, 1963

Thompson is making a sophisticated methodological argument about the nature of class. It is not a fixed category, a box that you put people in based on their economic position. It is a relationship that develops over time, through experience, through the formation of shared consciousness and shared organisations. You cannot understand it by taking a snapshot of economic structure at a given moment: you have to follow it through time, watching how it develops, how people come to understand themselves as sharing common interests and common enemies. This is why Thompson needed such a long book to make his argument: class could only be shown through its historical making.

"There is no such thing as economic growth which is not, at the same time, growth or change of a culture."

— The Making of the English Working Class, 1963

Thompson is making an argument against purely economic accounts of industrialisation and development. Economic change does not happen in a cultural vacuum: it always involves changes in how people live, what they value, how they relate to each other and to time. The industrial revolution was not only an economic event: it was a cultural transformation that changed what it meant to be human in ways that went far beyond the level of income. This argument connects Thompson's historical work to contemporary debates about development: economic development cannot be assessed only in economic terms but must be evaluated for its effects on the whole culture and way of life of the people it affects.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Global Studies When examining development and its cultural costs

How to introduce

Apply Thompson's argument about the cultural costs of industrial capitalism to contemporary development. Ask: when poor countries develop economically, what cultural changes are required or forced? Who decides which cultural traditions are compatible with development and which must give way? Connect to Tagore's critique of industrial modernity, to Gyekye's argument about tradition and modernity, and to Thompson's analysis: economic development always involves cultural transformation, and the question of whose culture is preserved and whose is destroyed is a political question, not only an economic one.

Critical Thinking When examining the relationship between theory and historical evidence

How to introduce

Introduce Thompson's polemic against structuralism: abstract theoretical frameworks that reduce people to the effects of structures leave out agency, experience, and moral commitment. Ask: do you think this is a valid criticism? Can you think of cases where applying a theoretical framework helped explain something, and cases where it obscured what was actually happening? Connect to Kuhn's analysis of how paradigms can make some things visible and others invisible. Ask: how do you decide when a theoretical framework is illuminating and when it is distorting?

Common Misconceptions

Common misconception

History from below is politically motivated and therefore less objective.

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What to teach instead

Thompson acknowledged that all history involves choices about what to include and whose perspective to take seriously. His argument was that conventional history, focused on rulers and elites, was equally politically motivated: it reflected the perspectives and interests of the powerful. History from below is a corrective to an existing distortion, not a distortion of a previously neutral history. The question is not whether historians make choices but whether they are honest about the choices they make and whether the resulting history is supported by evidence.

Common misconception

Thompson argued that working-class people were always right and elites were always wrong.

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What to teach instead

Thompson was committed to understanding working-class people on their own terms and taking their moral arguments seriously, but this did not mean he thought they were always correct. He was a serious historian who followed the evidence. He acknowledged the limitations and failures of various working-class organisations and movements. His point was that their experiences and arguments deserved serious engagement, not that they should be romanticised or that their opponents' positions were without merit.

Common misconception

Thompson's work is only relevant to English or British history.

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What to teach instead

While Thompson's most famous work focused on the English working class, his methodological contributions, including history from below, the concept of the moral economy, and the analysis of class as a relationship rather than a thing, have been applied across many different national and historical contexts. Historians of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States have all drawn on his methods and concepts. His argument about taking seriously the experiences of those who have been left out of the historical record is a universal methodological principle.

Common misconception

Thompson was simply a Marxist historian who applied Marxist theory to history.

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What to teach instead

Thompson was a socialist but his relationship to Marxism was critical and independent. His polemic against Louis Althusser's structural Marxism was one of the most sustained critiques of orthodox Marxism produced by any historian of the left. He argued that structural Marxism, with its reduction of human experience to the effects of economic forces, was a betrayal of Marx's own historical method. Thompson insisted on the importance of human agency, experience, and moral commitment in a way that differed significantly from the determinism of orthodox Marxist historiography.

Intellectual Connections

In Dialogue With

Antonio Gramsci

Thompson and Gramsci are two of the most important thinkers in the Western Marxist tradition, and their work is closely related. Gramsci's concept of hegemony, how dominant groups maintain power through cultural means, connects to Thompson's analysis of how industrial capitalism transformed working-class culture. Gramsci's organic intellectual parallels Thompson's argument for historians who come from and remain accountable to the communities they study.

In Dialogue With

Paulo Freire

Both Thompson and Freire argue that oppressed and marginalised people are not passive victims of the forces that shape their lives but active agents capable of understanding their situation and transforming it. Thompson demonstrates this through historical scholarship about working-class self-organisation and culture. Freire argues it through educational theory and practice. Both insist that genuine emancipation requires starting from the actual experience and knowledge of the people involved.

Complements

Walter Rodney

Both Thompson and Rodney did history from below in the sense of taking seriously the experiences of people who had been marginalised in conventional historical accounts. Thompson focused on the English working class; Rodney focused on African and Caribbean peoples under colonialism and its aftermath. Both argued that understanding the present required understanding the full history of how it was made, including the contributions and struggles of those who were not the powerful.

In Dialogue With

Howard Zinn

Thompson and Zinn were contemporaries working in parallel traditions of people's history. Both argued that history looked completely different when told from the perspective of the marginalised rather than the powerful. Both were also political activists who saw their historical work as connected to their political commitments. Their work together represents the transformation of historical practice in the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century.

In Dialogue With

Amartya Sen

Thompson's argument that there is no economic growth without cultural change connects to Sen's capabilities approach: economic development must be evaluated not only in terms of income growth but in terms of what it does to the full range of human capabilities and the conditions for a dignified human life. Thompson showed historically what happens when development destroys culture and community; Sen provides the philosophical framework for why this matters.

In Dialogue With

Herodotus

Both Herodotus and Thompson expanded the scope of historical inquiry beyond the powerful and the officially recorded to include the experiences of a wider range of humanity. Herodotus did this geographically, insisting on recording the deeds of non-Greek peoples. Thompson did it socially, insisting on recording the experiences of working-class people. Both worked against the tendency of history to reflect the perspectives of those with power to write and commission historical accounts.

For scholarly engagement with his legacy

Harvey Kaye and Keith McClelland's edited collection E.P.

Thompson

Critical Perspectives (1990, Polity Press) provides the best overview of his contributions and their debates.

For his political writing

Writing by Candlelight (1980, Merlin Press) and The Heavy Dancers (1985, Merlin Press) collect his political journalism and peace movement writing.

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