Thompson is a bit of a slog and definitely a product of the 1960s. The Making of the English Working Class uses the term is something of a catchall phrase for radical agitation among the urban poor and their supporters in groups like the London Corresponding Society. Such radical working class activists were directly inspired by the events in France, whose radical leaders were at the time called Jacobins (named after the Jacobin Club in Paris- originally a haunt of Stuart exiles) and Thompson portrays these activists as part of a generalized European radicalization among the lower orders, hence Thompson's use of "Jacobin" to describe them. While there were some eighteenth century English radicals who called themselves Jacobins, Thompson applies the term very loosely to just about any labor activists in the late eighteenth century. Thompson's interpretation of English social history was a departure from the prior historiography of this period which maintained that Britain was immune to revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth century by virtue of its constitutional order. In this sense, the book is quite novel. However, many generations of social historians since E. P. Thompson such as Anna Clark have tended to portray the emerging working class in a much more nuanced and heterogeneous fashion.