SOCIAL HISTORY: Thompson

Abstract

[Since 1945, there has been a marked revival of interest in social history. Responding to new directions in sociology and politics, historians have been particularly concerned with examining and reconstructing the life and aspirations of the neglected classes of earlier times. It could hardly be considered surprising that some of this history embodies or stimulates a neo-Marxist concern with the impact of changing material conditions on human consciousness and with the emergence of class struggles and revolutionary movements in history. This genre of history has been especially important in postwar France and England, and in the latter no work has been more widely hailed as a massive contribution to scholarship from a new perspective than The Making of the English Working Class (1963) by E. P. Thompson (b. 1924). To convey something of E. P. Thompson’s scope and method, a part of the Preface to his work and the concluding section of his final chapter on class consciousness are reprinted below.]