E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics ed. by Cal Winslow (review)

Before E. P. Thompson was a historian or a peace activist, he was a Communist; and he remained some sort of communist all his life. He joined the movement as an eighteen-year old in 1942, when it was stolidly Marxist-Leninist and at war. But Thompson’s commitment to Marxism—and especially to any version of Marxism-Leninism, however interpreted—was always weaker than his commitment to communism, which he took to mean, following William Morris, a “system of neighborly common sense” (253). In April 1943, his older brother Frank would observe (in a wartime letter to Iris Murdoch): “My younger brother is tremendously keen on [the question of building a new communal ethic] and talks very soundly about it” (E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], 76). The younger Thompson, in short, became a Marxist because he was a communist, rather than the other way around. Moreover, as the years passed, while his commitment to common sense remained unflagging, he identified less and less with the Marxist tradition. At the end of his life, he spoke more often and more admiringly of dissident, nonconformist Christians than of Marxists, especially those Christians who stressed the mendacity of states and the importance of moral witness, like his parents, Christian colleagues in the peace movement, and William Blake (as in his Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law [1993]).

Between 1956 and 1963, however, when he wrote the essays and polemics that Cal Winslow has collected and introduced in E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, Thompson still thought Marxism a resource for those like himself who wanted to build the world’s communal ethic. This was the period in which he emerged as a significant figure in the English—indeed, the international—“New Left.” He already had three books to his credit (There Is a Spirit in Europe [1947], The Railway [1948], and William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary [1955]). He would soon add a fourth (Out of Apathy [1960]). According to Eric Hobsbawm, Thompson was then “to all appearances, a devoted and unquestioning Communist activist, a brilliant, handsome, passionate, oratorically gifted young man, plainly regarded by the party leadership as an obvious asset” (Eric Hobsbawm, Proceedings of the British Academy [Oxford: British Academy, 1996], 525). He had served in World War II as captain of a tank squadron in North Africa and Italy and did not regret his service. But after the war, following a brief stint as commander of a British railway work brigade in Yugoslavia, his main political preoccupation was peace. From his base in the industrial north of England, Thompson and his local party comrades, including his wife, Dorothy, opposed a series of what he later described as “almost forgotten wars (in Greece, Algeria, Malaya, Cyprus, and Kenya).” He also got himself elected to his local Communist Party District Committee. Thompson always remembered these activities as “right and necessary” and never repented his part in them (E. P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers [London: Merlin, 1985], 222). But he was also always something of a dissident. (Many years later, Thompson reported being reminded that in 1947 he and V. Gordon Childe, the prominent archeologist, were among the few to rise to the defense of a well-known Communist Party member whom the hierarchy had denounced as a “revisionist heretic” before an enlarged assembly of the party’s Writers’ Group [E. P. Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: New Press, 1994), 234–5].) It was as a dissident, first inside and then outside the Communist Party, that he would make his name.

E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left includes essays and reviews written between 1956, when he left the Communist Party along with thousands of others in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and 1963, the...