Book review: Politics by Candlelight E.P. Thompson’s search for a new Popular Front
E.P. THOMPSON: A
TWENTIETH-CENTURY ROMANTIC
By Christos
Efstathiou
Reviewed By Stefan Collini
Even in a world tightly
trussed by neoliberal dogma and basted by surges of populist anti-elitism, the
role of the left intellectual has lost none of its fascination. There remains a
yearning to find figures who combine intellectual distinction with radical
politics, and who can bring their ideas and theories, analyses and eloquence,
to the service of progressive causes. Few figures in the second half of the
20th century fit the romantic version of this profile better than the British
historian E.P. Thompson. In the United States, Thompson probably remains best
known as the author of The Making of the English Working Class, an
indisputable classic of modern historiography and the founding document of a
whole school of radical social history in the 1960s and ’70s. But such
historical work constituted only one strand of Thompson’s career. No less
important were his roles as an activist, polemicist, and writer—though in
practice his abundant, restless talents could never be neatly divided or
pigeonholed in this way.
Thompson’s activities
were constantly energized by a sense of political purpose. After an initial
period as an active communist in the late 1940s and early ’50s, he became one
of the animating presences of the early New Left, which emerged in Britain in
response to the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and to
mounting discontent with the Labour Party’s modest reformism. In the years to
come, Thompson would also become one of the New Left’s most emphatic fraternal
critics.
In the 1970s, partly
spurred by a growing awareness of state surveillance, he put much of his energy
into championing civil liberties; and in the 1980s, he metamorphosed into one
of the best-known British campaigners against nuclear weapons. So prominent was
Thompson in this last role that, as one commentator noted, “polls placed him
high in the ranks of the most admired, trailing only the ‘first women’ of the
nation: [Margaret] Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth, and the Queen Mother.”
Like his political
work, Thompson’s writings were also diverse -sometimes in unexpected ways. After
his early biography of William Morris, a figure whose example remained a
lifelong source of inspiration, he wrote a late study of William Blake, another
spirited dissident. Alongside his magnum opus on the origins of the English
working class, he also wrote influential studies that examined the suppression
of popular rights in the 18th century and the supersession of older notions of
a “moral economy” by the unforgiving exactions of industrial capitalism. .. read more:
https://www.thenation.com/article/e-p-thompsons-search-for-a-new-popular-front/
