Frame-breaking Then and Now

Minds which thirst for a tidy Platonism very soon become impatient with actual history.

E.P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English.”

I imagine many historians of social movements could trace turning points in their intellectual development to encounters with the works of E.P. Thompson.¹I know that I can. Needless to say, each of those reading encounters occurs in moments of the reader’s own making. Re-readingThe Making of the English Working Class in 2013 I had expected to gain a retrospective perspective on “where we are now” in cultural history, but was instead impressed by the immediate applicability and indeed necessity of Thompson’s arguments with the neoliberal historical analysis of Frederick Hayek and others regarding the “standard of living debate” of the 1950s. What Thompson described as the “polarization of human consciousness” peculiar to the 1950s did not end with that decade, or even with the end of the Cold War. ²

It was at the edge of the supposed “End of History” that I first encountered Thompson’s The Making. It was the spring of 1988. I was a sophomore in college, enrolled in a European history seminar that pitted Thompson’s chapters on starving weavers and framework knitters against Peter Laslett’s “scientific” The World We Have Lost. I much preferred Thompson and was told I would probably not like social history. The reading of songs and poems was a more complete way to understand the world, I said, than numbers and graphs.

As it turns out, I was primed for Thompson before I arrived at university. In a high school history class, I had begun an essay on English industrialization with an epigraph of lyrics from Billy Bragg’s “The Home Front.” Charting a course of study and deciding to major in History, I was inspired by The Making. I rejected the required concentration of courses defined by time or place, and instead constructed my major around the approach of “history from the bottom up.” This orientation, deemed lacking in rigor by some of the faculty, allowed me to take courses in Latin American, African American, and French Medieval, as well as British history with the incomparable Henry Abelove. This was my secret strategy for taking classes from the people I understood to be the most radical and stimulating professors in the department. It is amusing, given the caricature of Thompson as a parochial nationalist, that his fine-toothed combing of the records of English radicals should have been an inspiration for my internationalist approach to studying working-class history back in the 1980s.

Illustrating the idea that class consciousness could be seen emerging through consumer action with the evocative image of “whole cheeses rolling down the street” during “The Great Cheese Riot of 1764”, while explaining that this was part of a “deep-rooted pattern of behavior,” Thompson’s work remains relevant both as activist inspiration and methodological guide.³ His analysis was not based on a reading of crowd actions as revolutionary in themselves. Rather, Thompson’s understanding of class identity stressed that it was formed by relations of production and property, and he noted the difference between genuine popular crowds and paid bands of “picked hooligans.” In the same discussion, he remarks as well that “patriotism, nationalism, even bigotry and repression were all clothed in the rhetoric of liberty,” a point with significance for contemporary historians of anti-abolitionist mobs, lynchers, and right-wing populist forms such as the neoliberal Tea Party. (75–78) Thompson points out several times the divergence of memberships’ beliefs from the leaders. So, while Cobbett might announce loyalty to King, Church and Constitution, his “followers” did not. (757) Much of The Making similarly shows how workers’ creative reinterpretations of ideas are part of intellectual history: Robert Owen’s ideas were “raw materials that workers made into different products.” (789) These empirical discussions give us a richer understanding of how ideas interact with experience than many more tortured theoretical accounts. Filtered through the work of Paul Buhle, the idea that members of movements interpret official ideologies in their own contexts helped me...