The Privilege of History

In 1963, Victor Gollancz, the British leftist press, published E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Most readers are likely more familiar with the revised edition published by Penguin’s Pelican division in 1968¹, and those of my vintage are most likely to have the 1980 edition, with its new Preface. 1980 was the year in which I began undergraduate studies at Memorial University. Within a few years, Greg Kealey had arrived, bringing his enthusiasm for the social history associated with Thompson and the many other great historians of the left who were transforming our understanding of Anglo-American history. The Making, for students interested in social history, became immediately influential for a number of reasons. Thompson’s prose, sparkling with clarity and vigour, made the book a pleasure to read. More important, the democratization and empowering implications of his emphasis on agency in class relations was a breath of fresh air to students otherwise exposed to stodgy, older forms of political and economic history. As well, the influence of Thompson was obviously coursing through the pages of the influential journals of social history, and we were proud that one of these, what was then called Labour/Le Travailleur, had found its home at Memorial.

On the 50th anniversary of the first edition of The Making, it is fitting to think about the many contributions of Thompson’s text. It has inspired a huge volume of work, which has in turned resulted in an even greater volume of criticism. My purpose is not to try to comment on all of this, but rather to point out essential lessons I learned through my reading of Thompson. The elements of these lessons are embedded in the key concepts of the books’ title: “making,” “English,” and “class.” In bringing this together, Thompson advanced an argument for the privileged place of history in a politically engaged pursuit of knowledge.

The most important part of Thompson’s title is “class,” the working class in particular. It is difficult to imagine that anyone would be unfamiliar with Thompson’s Marxist roots, but his emphasis on class may not be simply explained as an ideological preference. Rather, it was a choice required by the ubiquity of the experience of class. Common to every form of society has been the need to produce. What must be produced to ensure a particular society’s reproduction over time varies considerably as did the social relations arising from access to the means of production. The obviousness of productive relations, however, was problematic because of the temptation to explain history deterministically as arising from particular structures of production. Thompson chose to emphasize the importance of the specific social experiences of class relationships as “embodied in tradition, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms.” At the moment when people became aware of their common experiences in relation to those of others we could see the beginning of class consciousness. While historians could perhaps see a logic in how similar experiences could draw people together in a class relationship, this could not be determined as following “any law.” (10) The struggles of common experiences constituted the motor of history as people pushed against the inequalities and concomitant injustices of their relationships.

In 1963, Thompson chose to emphasize the “agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed by conscious efforts to the making of history” (13) as the defining element of a historical dynamic. Consideration of the agency of working people revealed that the actions of the powerful and the privileged were less causes of change and more consequences of the struggles of the exploited. In the specific case of England, in the period from the 1790s through the 1830s, craftspeople and artisans drew on deep-rooted notions of the rights of freeborn Englishmen and their entitlement to popular forms of justice to resist the more exploitative and regimented forms of production associated with the Industrial Revolution. The French revolutionary era fostered newer radical ideas. At the same time, the bourgeoisie and the gentry played on the ideology of loyalty and the instruments of the wartime...