Edward P. Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson (born February 3, 1924 in Oxford , † August 28, 1993 in Worcester ) was a British historian and peace activist . He is considered to be one of the pioneers of a story from below and, along with Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm, belonged to the group of Marxist historians in Great Britain who, according to Hans-Ulrich Wehler , owed English history mainly its worldwide influence since the 1960s.

Thompson was best known for extensive work on the British radical movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, notably The Rise of the English Working Class from 1963, which historians, not just the labor movement , all over the world influenced. He has written influential biographies on William Morris (1955) and William Blake (published posthumously in 1993), and was a prolific journalist and essayist. Thompson has also published a volume of poetry and the novel The Sykaos Papers .

Edward Thompson was one of the most prominent intellectuals in the Communist Party of Great Britain , which he left because of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 , and he played a key role in the New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a left-wing critic of the Labor Party- led British governments from 1960 to 1964 and 1974 to 1979, and during the 1980s he was a leading intellectual of the anti- nuclear movement in Europe. In 1979 he was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1992 to the British Academy .

Beginnings

Thompson was born to Methodist missionaries . During World War II he served in a tank unit in Italy and then studied at Corpus Christi College , Cambridge , where he became a member of the Communist Party. In 1946 he formed the Communist Party Historians Group with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton , Dona Torr and others . This group founded the influential socio-historical journal Past & Present in 1952 .

William Morris

His first book was the biography William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955). Under the banner From Romantic to Revolutionary , it was part of an effort by the group of communist historians, especially von Torr, to describe the indigenous roots of Marxism . At the same time, the book was intended to steal Morris from the dominant, flavourful criticism that failed to understand Morris' reference to craft, art and the past and neglected his progressive politics. As Thompson emphasizes in the preface to the second edition from 1976, the book was ignored by the establishment, the Marxist approach was not yet socially acceptable. The revised new edition in 1976 was received much better.

The first New Left

After Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which "revealed" that the Soviet party leadership had long known about Stalin's crimes, Thompson founded a dissident publication within the CP with John Saville and others , the Reasoner . Six months later, he and most of his friends left the party out of indignation over the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union .

Thompson remained what he called a socialist humanist ; with Saville and others, he founded the New Reasoner , a magazine designed to provide a democratic socialist alternative to the official Marxism of the communist and Trotskyist parties and to the social democracy of the Labor Party. The New Reasoner was the main mouthpiece of the informal current that was to become the New Left , left-wing dissidents who, like Thompson, were closely associated with the nuclear disarmament movement that emerged in the late 1950s and was immediately popular.

The New Reasoner merged with the Universities and Left Review to form the New Left Review in 1960 , although Thompson and others disagreed with Perry Anderson 's group that took over the journal soon after it was founded. Thompson's group is therefore sometimes called the “First New Left”, Anderson and comrades, whom Tariq Ali and various Trotskyists had joined around 1968 as the “Second New Left”.

Thompson worked on the Socialist Register in the early 1960s and was one of the editors of the May Day Manifesto (1967) with Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall , one of the major leftist challenges facing the Labor government under Harold Wilson , Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976.

The Making of the English Working Class

Be published in 1963 Thompson's magnum opus The Origin of the English working class ( The Making of the English Working Class ), which was created in his time at Leeds University. It told the forgotten story of the radical movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. An impressive work as research and synthesis, it was also important from a historiographical point of view: Thompson demonstrates the power of historical Marxism through the experience of real workers. It is still a standard work today.

Freelance polemicist

Thompson left academia after a heated, public argument with his employer, Warwick University . Thompson did not want to go along with the commercialization of the university, documented in Warwick University Limited (1971). As a free person, he wrote essays for New Society , Socialist Register, and historical journals. In 1978 he published the polemic The Poverty of Theory , which attacked the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers in the New Left Review . Perry Anderson responded with Arguments within English Marxism (1980). Thompson won a large audience as a critic of the Labor government's disregard for civil liberties - his contemporary writings are collected in the volume Writing By Candlelight (1980).

Voice of the peace movement

Thompson was a prominent and tireless spokesman for the new movement for nuclear disarmament in the early 1980s, and in Great Britain his pamphlet Protest and Survive (1980), parodying government propaganda Protect and Survive , played an important role in the rebirth of the disarmament movement. Thompson wrote, with Ken Coates , Mary Kaldor and others, the European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which advocated a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal. Its role in opening the dialogue between the Western European peace movement and the dissidents of Eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, was very important. The Soviet rulers, of course, denounced it as an instrument of American imperialism.

During this time, Thompson wrote dozens of polemical articles that were collected in the books Zero Option (1982) and The Heavy Dancers (1985). He wrote a long essay, Double Exposure , attacking ideologues on both sides of the Cold War (1985), and in the same year edited Star Wars on Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

William Blake

Thompson's last completed book was Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993). The product of years of research and released shortly after his death, it convincingly demonstrates how much Blake was inspired by religious dissidents whose ideas were rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English Civil War. The research for this book was also significant for the reason that Thompson met Phillip Noakes, the last living member of the Muggle-tonian religious community, shortly before his death in 1979 , and the research of this small group that emerged in the 1650s was crucial advanced.

Personal life

Thompson married the leftist historian Dorothy Towers (* 1923) in 1948 . She had authored major studies on women in the Chartist movement and Queen Victoria (subtitled 'Gender and Power'). She was a professor of history at the University of Birmingham.

effect

In addition to Raymond Williams , Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall , the origins of cultural studies can be traced back to EPThompson .

literature

• EJ Hobsbawm: Edward Palmer Thompson, 1924-1993 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 90 , 1996, pp. 521-539 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

See also

• Moral Economy

Works

German

• Plebeian Culture and Moral Economy. Essays on English social history in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. u. a. 1980, ISBN 3-548-35046-1 .
• Exterminism as the last stage of civilization. (Essay) First in: New Left Review , London 1980. German: Berlin 1981, DNB 830339043
• Racek – Thompson: Correspondence on Exterminism. In: Liberation. H. 22/23, 1981, p. 52 ff.
• The rise of the English working class. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-11170-1 .
• The misery of theory. For the production of historical experience. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-593-32650-7 .
• with John Holloway : Blue Monday: about time and work discipline. Translated from English by Lars Stubbe. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-89401-538-1 .

English

• William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. 1955, 1976
• The Making of the English Working Class. 1963.
• Warwick University Limited. 1971
• Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. 1975
• The Poverty of Theory. 1978
• Writing by candlelight. 1980
• Protest and Survive. 1980
• Zero option. 1982
• The Heavy Dancers. 1985
• Double exposure. 1985
• Starwars. 1985
• The Sykaos Papers. 1988 (science fiction)
• Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. 1991
• Persons & Polemics. Merlin Press, London 1994, ISBN 0850364396 , published in the USA as: Making History: Writings on History and Culture. 1994
• Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. 1993
• The Romantics. England in a Revolutionary Age. 1997
• The Collected Poems. 1999 (poetry)
• EP Thompson and the Making of the New Left. Essays & Polemics. 2014

literature

• Christos Efstathiou: EP Thompson. A Twentieth-Century Romantic , The Merlin Press, London 2015, ISBN 978-0-85036-715-7 .
• Christoph Jünke : The tears of Edward P. Thompson , in: Christoph Jünke: Forays through the red 20th century. Hamburg: Laika-Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-94423-300-0 , pp. 151-186, first published: The tears of Edward P. Thompson . In: SoZ . No. 18, September 3, 1998.
• Mary Kaldor : Obituary: EP Thompson . In: The Independent . August 30, 1993
• Dominik Nagl: Edward P. Thompson, the New Left and the Crisis in British Marxism of the 1960s and 70s. In: AK Loukanikos (ed.): History is Unwritten. Left history politics and critical science. Edition Assemblage: Münster 2015, pp. 85–101.

Web links

• Literature by and about Edward P. Thompson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary: EP Thompson, 69, British Leftist Scholar in the New York Times, August 30, 1993.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wehler : Historical thinking at the end of the 20th century. 1945-2000. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-89244-430-7 , p. 29 f.
2. ↑ Thompson 1980 (Exterminism) - Against the rocket race, 20 pages. First print in German: Liberation , No. 19/1980. Also in: The argument . No. 127, 1981.