Edward Palmer Thompson (February 3, 1924 - August 28, 1993), was an English historian, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, in particular his book The Making of the English Working Class (1963), but he also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist as well as publishing one novel and a collection of poetry. He was one of the main intellectual members of the Communist Party who left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and he played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964-70 and 1974-79, and during the 1980s he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... is the 34th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1924 (MCMXXIV) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 240th day of the year (241st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1993 Gregorian calendar). ... For other uses, see England (disambiguation). ... Socialism refers to a broad array of doctrines or political movements that envisage a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the community[1] for the purposes of increasing social and economic equality and cooperation. ... The Making of the English Working Class is an influential work of English social history, written by E. P. Thompson a notable a New Left historian; it was published in 1963 (revised 1968) by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and later republished at Pelican, becoming an early Open University Set Book. ... William Morris, socialist and innovator in the Arts and Crafts movement William Morris (March 24, 1834 – October 3, 1896) was an English artist, writer, socialist and activist. ... William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. ... The Sykaos Papers is a science fiction novel by the historian E. P. Thompson, first published in 1988. ... The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist party in the United Kingdom. ... Year 1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Combatants Soviet Union ÁVH Hungarian government, various nationalist militias Commanders Yuri Andropov Pál Maléter, Béla Király, Gergely Pongrátz, József Dudás Strength 150,000 troops, 6,000 tanks 100,000+ demonstrators (some later armed), unknown number of soldiers Casualties 720 killed according to official...

Early life

Thompson was born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents. He was educated at Kingswood School, Bath. During World War II he served in a tank corps in Italy, and then studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he joined the Communist Party. In 1946 he formed the Communist Party Historians Group along with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr and others. This group launched the influential journal Past and Present in 1952. Oxford is a city and local government district in Oxfordshire, England, with a population of 134,248 (2001 census). ... The Methodist movement is a group of denominations of Protestant Christianity. ... Kingswood School is a day and boarding school in Bath, Somerset. ... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist party in the United Kingdom. ... Year 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full 1946 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... A subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), from 1946-1956 the Communist Party Historians Group formed a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who pioneered history from below. ... John Edward Christopher Hill (February 6, 1912 - February 23, 2003) was an English Marxist historian and the author of many history textbooks. ... Eric John Earnest Hobsbawm CH (born June 8, 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a British Marxist historian and author. ... Rodney Hilton was an English Marxist historian of the late medieval period. ... Dona Torr (1883- 1957) was a British Marxist historian, and a major influence on the Communist Party Historians Group. ... --Rlandmann 06:43, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC) Categories: Possible copyright violations ... Year 1952 (MCMLII) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...

William Morris

Thompson's first major work was his biography of William Morris, written while he was a member of the CP. Subtitled From Romantic to Revolutionary, it was part of an effort by the CP Historians' Group, inspired by Torr, to emphasise the domestic roots of Marxism in Britain at a time when the CP was under attack for always following the Moscow line � but it was also an attempt to take Morris back from the critics who had emphasised his art and downplayed his politics for more than 50 years.

Although Morris' political work is well to the fore, Thompson also used his literary talents to comment on aspects of Morris' work, such as his early Romantic poetry, which had previously received relatively little consideration.

As the preface to the 2nd edition (1976) notes, the first edition (1955) appears to have received relatively little attention from the literary establishment because of its then unfashionable Marxist viewpoint. However, the somewhat rewritten 2nd edition was much better received.

The first New Left

After Nikita Khruschev's "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which revealed that the Soviet party leadership had long been aware of Stalin's crimes, Thompson (with John Saville and others) started a dissident publication inside the CP, called The Reasoner. Six months later, he and most of his comrades left the party in disgust at the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Nikita Khrushchev in 1962 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (Russian: Ники́та Серге́евич Хрущёв) (nih-KEE-tah khroo-SHCHYOFF) (April 17, 1894 – September 11, 1971) was the leader of the Soviet Union... On the Personality Cult and its Consequences (Russian: ), commonly known as the Secret Speech was a report to the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in which he denounced the actions of Joseph Stalin. ... The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Russian: Коммунисти́ческая Па́ртия Сове́тского Сою́за = КПСС) was the name used by the successors of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party from 1952 to 1991, but the wording Communist Party was present in the partys name since 1918 when the Bolsheviks became the Russian... Year 1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... John Saville (born 1916) is a British Marxist historian, now Professor emeritus of the University of Hull. ...

But he remained what he called a "socialist humanist", and with Saville and others set up the New Reasoner, a journal that sought to develop a democratic socialist alternative to what its editors saw as the ossified official Marxism of the Communist and Trotskyist parties and the managerialist cold war social democracy of the Labour Party and its international allies. The New Reasoner was the most important organ of what became known as the "New Left", an informal movement of dissident leftists closely associated with the nascent movement for nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During the crisis of the 1950s within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), John Saville and Edward Palmer Thompson created a journal of dissident Communism named the Reasoner. ... Marxism is both the theory and the political practice (that is, the praxis) derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ... Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production. ... Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. ... The New Left is a term used in different countries to describe left-wing movements that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. ...

The New Reasoner combined with the Universities and Left Review to form New Left Review in 1960, though Thompson and others fell out with the group around Perry Anderson who took over the journal soon after its launch. The fashion ever since has been to describe the Thompson et al New Left as "the first New Left" and the Anderson et al group, which by 1968 had embraced Tariq Ali and various Trotskyists, as the second. In 1960 in the UK, the editors of the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review merged their boards and formed the New Left Review. ... In 1960 in the UK, the editors of the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review merged their boards and formed the New Left Review. ... Perry Anderson (born 1938) is a leading Marxist intellectual. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Thompson subsequently allied himself with the annual Socialist Register publication, and was (with Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall) one of the editors of the 1967 May Day Manifesto, one of the key left-wing challenges to the 1964-70 Labour government of Harold Wilson. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 - 26 January 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. ... Stuart Hall (born 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a cultural theorist from the United Kingdom. ...

The Making of the English Working Class

Thompson's most influential work was and remains The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 while he was working at the University of Leeds. It told the forgotten history of the first working class left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below: The Making of the English Working Class is an influential work of English social history, written by E. P. Thompson a notable a New Left historian; it was published in 1963 (revised 1968) by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and later republished at Pelican, becoming an early Open University Set Book. ... The University of Leeds is a major teaching and research university, one of the largest in the United Kingdom with over 32,000 full-time students. ...

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'Utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties".

A major work of research and synthesis, it was also important in historiographical terms: with it, Thompson demonstrated the power of an historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers. It remains on university reading lists 40 years after its publication. The Luddites were a social movement of English textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested — often by destroying textile machines — against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt threatened their livelihood. ... Joanna Southcott (or Southcote) (April, 1750 - December 27, 1814), was a self-described religious prophetess. ... Historiography is the study of the way history is and has been written. ...

Thompson wrote the book whilst living in Siddal, Halifax, West Yorkshire and based some of the work on his experiences with the local Halifax folk. For other uses, see Halifax. ...

Freelance polemicist

Thompson left Warwick University in protest at the commercialisation of the academy, documented in the book Warwick University Limited (1971). He continued to teach and lecture as a visiting professor, particularly in the United States, but increasingly worked as a freelance writer. He turned to freelancing, contributing many essays to New Society, Socialist Register and historical journals. In 1978 he published The Poverty of Theory, (here he famously describes counterfactualism as "unhistorical shit") which attacked the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers in Britain on New Left Review, and which provoked a book-length response from Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism. University of Warwick Motto: Mens agitat molem Logo © University of Warwick The University of Warwick is a world-class campus university which, despite its name, is located mainly inside the southern boundary of Coventry, England, some 11 km ( 7 miles) from the town of Warwick, the remainder of the campus... Year 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link displays the 1978 Gregorian calendar). ... See also structural analysis and structural functionalism. ... Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation: altuË¡seʁ) (October 16, 1918 – October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. ... Perry Anderson (born 1938) is a leading Marxist intellectual. ...

During the late 1970s he acquired a large public audience as a critic of the then Labour government's disregard of civil liberties � his writings from this time are collected in Writing By Candlelight (1980). The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, also called The Seventies. ...

Voice of the peace movement

From 1980, Thompson was the most prominent intellectual of the revived movement for nuclear disarmament, revered by activists throughout the world. In Britain, his pamphlet Protest and Survive, a parody on the government leaflet Protect and Survive, played a major role in the revived strength of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Just as important, Thompson was, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, an author of the 1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, calling for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, which was the founding document of European Nuclear Disarmament. Confusingly, END was both a Europe-wide campaign that comprised a series of large public conferences (the END Conventions), and a small British pressure group. Year 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link displays the 1980 Gregorian calendar). ... U.S. and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945-2006 Nuclear disarmament is the proposed dismantling of nuclear weapons, particularly those of the United States and the Soviet Union (later Russia) targeted on each other. ... The front cover text reads: This booklet tells you how to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack. Protect and Survive was the title of a series of booklets and a public information film series produced by the British government during the late 1970s... Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament logo In British politics, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has been at the forefront of the peace movement in the United Kingdom and claims to be Europes largest single-issue peace campaign. ... Ken Coates (1930 - ) is a British Marxist. ... A nuclear-free zone is an area where nuclear weapons and/or nuclear power are banned. ... European Nuclear Disarmament (END) was a 1980s British peace movement group, led by E. P. Thompson, Mary Kaldor and others. ...

Thompson played a key role in both END and CND throughout the 1980s, speaking at innumerable public meetings, corresponding with hundreds of fellow activists and sympathetic intellectuals, and doing more than his fair share of committee work. He had a particularly important part in opening a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which he was denounced as a tool of American imperialism by the Soviet authorities.

He wrote dozens of polemical articles and essays during this period, which are collected in the books Zero Option (1982) and The Heavy Dancers (1985). He also wrote an extended essay attacking the ideologists on both sides of the cold war, Double Exposure (1985) and edited a collection of essays opposing Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars (1985). “Reagan” redirects here. ... The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983[1] to use ground-based and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. ...

An excerpt from a speech given by Thompson featured in the computer game Deus Ex Machina (1984). Deus Ex Machina is a computer game developed and published by Automata UK for the ZX Spectrum in 1984. ...

William Blake

The last book Thompson finished was Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993). The product of years of research and published shortly after his death, it shows convincingly how far Blake was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English civil war.

Personal life

Thompson married fellow left wing historian Dorothy Towers in 1948. She has contributed major studies on women in the Chartist movement, and of Queen Victoria (subtitled 'Gender and Power'), and was Professor of History at the University of Birmingham. They had three children. Kate Thompson, the award-winning children's writer, is their youngest child.^[1] Dorothy Thompson (nee Towers) (born 1923) is the historian wife of the late E. P. Thompson. ... Year 1948 (MCMXLVIII) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the 1948 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... A movement for social and political reform in the United Kingdom during the mid_19th century, Chartism gains its name from the Peoples Charter of 1838, which set out the main aims of the movement. ... Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837, and the first Empress of India from 1 May 1876, until her death on 22 January 1901. ... Website http://www. ... Kate Thompson is an award-winning writer for children and adults (not to be confused with the Irish romantic novelist of the same name). ...

Reputation

Keith Thomas, former President of the British Academy, wrote of "Customs in Common", "This book signals the return to historical writing of one of the most eloquent, powerful and independent voices of our time. At his best he is capable of a passionate, sardonic eloquence which is unequalled." (The Observer)

Key Works

• William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1st ed. London: Lawrence & Wishart 1955, revised 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon, 1976).
• The Making of the English Working Class London: Victor Gollancz (1963); 2nd edition with new postcript, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, third edition with new preface 1980.
• Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, 1971
• Warwick University Limited, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
• Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski,Socialist Register, 1974
• Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, London: Allen Lane, 1975; with a new poscript, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
• (editor) Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, London: Allen Lane, 1975.
• The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London: Merlin Press, 1978.
• Writing by Candlelight, London: Merlin Press, 1980.
• Protest and Survive, London: Penguin, 1980.
• Zero Option, London: Merlin Press, 1982.
• The Heavy Dancers, London: Merlin Press, 1985.
• Double Exposure, London: Merlin Press, 1985.
• Star Wars, London: Penguin, 1985.
• The Sykaos Papers, London: Bloomsbury, 1988.
• Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, London: Merlin Press, (1991).
• 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, (Poetry, first pub. 1999).

The Making of the English Working Class is an influential work of English social history, written by E. P. Thompson a notable a New Left historian; it was published in 1963 (revised 1968) by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and later republished at Pelican, becoming an early Open University Set Book. ... Photograph of Leszek Kolakowski. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... The Sykaos Papers is a science fiction novel by the historian E. P. Thompson, first published in 1988. ...

Further reading

• Anderson, Perry Arguments within English Marxism, London: Verson, 1980.
• Johnson, R. "Edward Thompson, Eugence Genovese and Socialist-humanist History" pages 79-100 from History Workshop Journal, Volume 6, 1978.
• Kaye, Harvey The British Marxist Historians, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984.
• Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, editors E.P.Thompson: Critical Perspectives Polity Press, London, 1990.
• Merrill, M. "Interview with E.P. Thompson" pages 5-25 from Visions of History edited by H. Abelove, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976.
• New Left Review pages 3-25, Volume 201, 1993.
• Palmer, B.D. The Making of E.P. Thompson: Marxism, Humanism, and History, Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1981.
• Palmer, B.D. E.P. Thompson Objections and Oppositions, New York: Verson, 1994.
• Radical History Review, pages 152-164, Volume 58, 1994.