Welcome to Monday Methods!
This week's theme on our subreddit is socialism and so, in line with and honor of this theme, we'll take a look at one of the best known British socialist historians next to Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson.
Since we recently had a discussion about various allegations of a "cultural Marxist" leveled against this sub as a whole, I think it makes a good starting point to emphasize that while the modern discipline of history is not Marxist in nature, it can also not escape the influence Marxian theories had in terms of theory and method. As /u/alriclofgar put it succinctly in the linked thread:
Marx's theories of the relationship between individuals and social structures have influenced I think it's fair to say the majority of the modern social theory that people in the humanities use. This is especially true for historians: we are all, through the questions we ask, building on those asked by Marx -- usually not directly, but through the mediation of later theorists like Bourdieu or Giddens for example. Methodological relationalism dominates the academy, and that has a genealogy that goes back to Marx.
Part of what does make a place like this Marxian is that Marx is, quite simply, a central pillar of modern thought about how humans work, in the past and present.
And one of those important mediators building on Marxian thought was E.P. Thompson.
Thompson, born in 1924, went to Cambridge where he joined the British Communist Party. There, he together with Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill formed the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946. This group not only aimed at seeking out a popular revolutionary tradition in history with the goal to inspire the present but also spearheaded the approach we know today as social history, meaning to look at history from the perspective of ordinary people from below rather than the great men. Their journal Past and Present remains one of the well-known and most respected scientific journals in history to this day. The group lasted until 1956 when many of its members left the Communist Party over conflicts surrounding their opposition to the Soviet intervention in Hungary and the revelations of Stalinist crimes.
While Thompson left too, he stayed committed to socialism and in 1963 published his best-known work based on a historical approach inspired by socialism: The Making of the English Working Class.
As the title already suggests, his book is not merely a history of the English working class or a treatise on the origins of the working class, it is a book about its making. And within that, one reason Thompson's book was so influential can be discerned. Thompson understood class not simply as a category. For him it was neither solely a predetermined given nor something that resulted "naturally". He understood class as a relation between people and other people as well as between people and structures that needs to "happen", needs to be experienced.
As he writes in his introduction:
Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. There is, of course, a difference. "Working classes" is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes.
By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a "structure", nor even as a "category", but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.
More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure. The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.
That means that according to Thomspon "class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs". And even more importantly, what Thomspon refers to as "class consciousness" is how these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value systems, ideas, and institutional forms.
This is what he focuses on in The Making of the English Working Class: The experiences made and shared by the weaver here, the cobbler there, and the the tailor there and how they are handled culturally.
The first way, this was an important and new approach is simple. As The Guardian wrote celebrating the 50th anniversary of the book:
In 1963, weavers and artisans were not the stuff of history books. Pioneering social historians had been studying working people since the early 20th century, but the focus remained squarely on the tangible, the measurable, the "significant" – wages, living conditions, unions, strikes, Chartists. Thompson touched on the trade unions and the real wage, of course, but most of his book was devoted to something that he referred to as "experience". Through a patient and extensive examination of local as well as national archives, Thompson had uncovered details about workshop customs and rituals, failed conspiracies, threatening letters, popular songs, and union club cards. He took what others had regarded as scraps from the archive and interrogated them for what they told us about the beliefs and aims of those who were not on the winning side. Here, then, was a book that rambled over aspects of human experience that had never before had their historian.
This "raw originality" as The Guardian calls it, unsurprisingly was a big, big step in historical academia. Like Brubaker's writings on Groupism that Thompson inspired, the approach of Thompson understood history as a process with individual actors (rather than groups with assumed homogenous interest, the nation, or a handful of great men) taking the center stage. He already teaches us that a category such as class becomes real and influential because people integrate their experiences in it, because it becomes a cultural, political etc. framework; and not because it exist independent of actors.
This lesson whether applied to class, culture, et. al. is important because structures often have been assumed to be independent of actors and to exist in a sort of ether being just there, waiting to be filled and fulfilled. The centrality of individual actors and their experience that is already present in Thompson's work is something that has in the meantime been fleshed out and further theorized to a point where in the context of the modern cultural turn and post-structural approaches, it remains an important part of how we approach history today.
E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class - pdf
I read this book a year or two ago.
What stood out most for me was the way Thompson sidesteps the debates about quantitative measures by looking at people's perceptions. So he spends less time on the question of whether workers were better paid, fed or housed and more on the fact they perceived a fall. I think this is a really insightful approach for several reasons.
We simply may not have the data to answer the econometric questions. But we don't necessarily need to answer them. If we want to know, say, what's driving changes in life expectancy, then we really need to know facts about diet, housing and suchlike. If we want to understand what drives political and social movements then what people think is more important. As always, the approach has to suit the purpose.
This approach also reminds us to pay attention to what people in the past valued rather than imposing our own measures (often chosen more for ease of measurement). Loss of status, loss of autonomy, eating corn not potatoes - all these might matter more than the "real terms" value of a wage.
If I can stray into modern politics briefly, these seem like important lessons for understanding what's going on today.
Aside from that, the picture of impoverishment and repression lends a vividness to an era I only knew before from dry A-level history.
I will note that the autonomist movement, such as operaismo, workerism and the brigades in Italy took a lot of inspiration from Thompson. A lot of the militant research, going into the factories was based on his social history and the theory of experience.
"when confronted by anti-Marxists, he defended Marxism, firmly. Yet when he met orthodox Marxists, he denounced them, angrily."
I just bought this yesterday! What timing!