George Derwent Thomson

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George Derwent Thomson ( Irish Seoirse Mac Tomáis , * Dulwich , London 1903, † February 3, 1987 in Birmingham ) was an English classical philologist , Marxist literary scholar and Celtologist .

Classic studies

George Thomson studied Classical Languages ​​at King's College , Cambridge, where he received a first class degree in Classical honors tripos , and then won a scholarship at Trinity College , Dublin. There he worked on his first book, Greek Lyric Meter, and began visiting the Blasket Islands (Na Blascaodaí) in the early 1920s . He became a visiting lecturer and then professor of Greek at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway).

In 1934 he moved back to England, where he returned to King's College to teach Greek. He became a professor at the University of Birmingham in 1936 and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the same year . Thomson provided the first Marxist interpretation of the Greek drama . His works Aeschylus and Athens and Marxism and Poetry also attracted international attention. In the latter he advocated the thesis of a connection between work songs and poetry ; the pre-industrial songs, on the other hand, are associated with rituals .

Thomson exerted an important influence on Alfred Sohn-Rethel and his thesis of the emergence of Western thought in ancient Greece through the introduction of coinage.

Connections according to Blasket

He visited the Na Blascaodaí off the Irish west coast for the first time in 1923. “Mac Tomáis”, by which name he quickly became known among the islanders, had only received rudimentary Irish lessons from a branch of the Conradh na Gaeilge in London before he went to Cambridge. When he arrived on the island, he was fully immersed in the language. After six weeks of walking around and talking to Muiris Ó Súilleabháin and others, Mac Tomáis was able to speak the language almost perfectly fluently.

He spent several years with the inhabitants of the islands to research their language, history and culture. He carried out a special study of the now extinct community in Ireland, where he still perceived elements of surviving cultural resonances in a society as it existed before the development of private property as a means of production. In the meantime he achieved a masterful command of the Irish language.

He participated in the publication of the memoirs of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, Fiche Bliain Ag Fás in 1933. The introduction to Ó Súilleabháin's autobiography by EM Forster can also be attributed to Thomson.

When he applied for the newly created position of a lecturer for Greek at the NUI Galway in 1931, he was able to impress the application committee, according to Richard Roche, with his fluent Blasketer Irish ("astonished the interview board with a flow of Blasket Irish").

Party politics

1951 agreed Thomson is the only member of the board of the British Communist Party against the party program "British Road to Socialism" ( "The British Road to Socialism"), because he is "the dictatorship of the proletariat missed" ( "the dictatorship of the proletariat which missing ").

The 1949 Chinese Revolution made a strong impression on him and led to differences with the British Communist Party, from which he eventually distanced himself. He devoted himself to workers' education, including giving lectures to factory workers at the Austin Motor Company's Birmingham plant . Up until old age, his preference and support was for the daily newspaper The Morning Star .

Thomson also authored two popular Introductions to Marxism published by the China Policy Study Group in the early 1970s. Two of his introductory writings were published in German translation by the Neuer Weg publishing house, which was affiliated with the KABD .

Thomson was married to Katherine Thomson. Their daughter is the neo-Greekist and comparativeist Margaret Alexiou .

Publications (selection)

  • Greek Lyric Meter
  • The first philosophers
  • Early history of Greece and the Aegean Sea. Berlin 1960.
  • Aeschylus and Athens (Aeschylus and Athens)
  • Marxism and Poetry , 1945
  • From Marx to Mao Tse-tung: a study in revolutionary dialectics , China Policy Study Group, 1971
  • From Marx to Mao Tsetung , Stuttgart, Verlag Neuer Weg, 1978
  • Vom Wesen des Menschen , Stuttgart, Neuer Weg publishing house, 1976
  • Capitalism and After: the rise and fall of commodity production , China Policy Study Group, 1973

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Richard Roche: On Island Life and Strangling Goats, The Irish Times , September 26, 1998
  2. ↑ Gerald Porter: 'The World's Ill-Divided': the Communist Party and Progressive Song, in: Andy Croft (Ed.): A Weapon in the Struggle , 1998, p. 181
  3. ↑ Muiris Ó Súilleabháin ( Memento of November 23, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Morning Star , January 9th, 1989

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Thomson, George Derwent
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thomson, George; Thomson, George D .; Mac Tomáis, Seoirse
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English classical philologist, Marxist literary scholar and Celtologist
DATE OF BIRTH 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Dulwich , London
DATE OF DEATH 3rd February 1987
Place of death Birmingham