A Major Work in Radical History

...He has done prodigious research in the sources...

...Though the author considers himself a Marxist, in this he stands closer to the Tory Radical William Cobbett than to Marx...

...Industrial society was born in Great Britain in the years between 1780 and 1832...

...here Thompson is overly indulgent and persistently inclined to exaggerate the extent of their working class support...

...A case might be made against the potato as a source of nutrition, but Thompson is less interested in this "objective" question than in subjective feelings about the potato...

...So fresh and ambitious a work as this, of course, is likely to raise as many questions as it answers...

...That the potato was increasingly substituted for wheat in working class diets during this period, for instance, is not very persuasive evidence of the horrors of the new way of life, Cobbett (and presumably the workers) to the contrary notwithstanding...

...Certainly his emphasis on the political context in which the Industrial Revolution took place is an advance over the traditional treatment...

...Only a few of the points on which I find The Making of the English Working Class unsatisfactory can be suggested here, with the caveat that this is a book to read rather than merely to read about, a book which raises a host of issues of interest to every DISSENT reader...

...Nevertheless, Thompson's enormously detailed account of the "secret history" of working class protest in the period is very uneven...

...Nor is it very clear just how popular the sentiments Thompson attributes to "the working class" actually were...

...Thompson writes in opposition to a host of prevailing orthodoxies—the orthodoxy of empirical economic historians who reject the very notion that a cataclysmic social transformation occurred during these years on the grounds that the statistical indices fail to register it, the Fabian orthodoxy which sees only peaceful evolutionary change under the far-sighted guidance of respectable trade unionists, the "Pilgrim's Progress" orthodoxy "in which the period is sacked for forerunners— pioneers of the Welfare State, progenitors of a Socialist Commonwealth," early exemplars of rational industrial relations or whatever...

...That Cobbett and certain other leaders of the early nineteenth century saw the old society (or their nostalgic image of the old society) as infinitely preferable to the new is beyond dispute...

...This is a magnificent book, a book that will be read for many generations to come...

...it is to suggest that a fairer balance sheet of the losses and gains of the working people of England during these years might have been drawn up by either a liberal or a more conventionally Marxist historian...

...But certain of his arguments seem tortured...

...This is not to charge that the book is simplistically nostalgic in the fashion of so much American social criticism...

...Thompson argues vigorously that the French Revolution triggered a counter-revolutionary panic that gave the English ancien regime a new lease on life for forty years, and that it was the coincidence of intensified economic exploitation and political oppression that was the key to the catastrophic character of the period for ordinary Englishmen...

...To have rescued this tradition from the undeserved obscurity—or in the case of the Luddites, from the undeserved notoriety— to which it was consigned by Fabian and Whiggish historians was an important service, as was Thompson's demonstration that Home Office fears of an imminent revolutionary uprising were based on something more than wild fantasy...

...E. P. Thompson's brilliant new work is the best single account of the effects of that remarkable transformation on the common people of England...

...he has a sure instinct for the important detail...

...he writes with furious eloquence...

...As a dramatist of the struggles and suffering of the working people of England in those bitter years Thompson has no peer...

...History from the point of view of the victims, in this instance and others, can too easily become a restatement of popular prejudices and mythologies...

...This perspective has its advantages—Thompson is less bourgeois than Marx, and he writes vividly of the Brechtian virtues that flourished (he believes) among the common people of an older England...

...So powerful is Thompson's animus against industrial civilization, indeed, that one comes to long for some hint of the old-fashioned —Thompson would say vulgar—Marxist appreciation of the liberating aspects of the Industrial Revolution...

...Excesses of this kind, however, do not call into question Thompson's great achievement...

...that most ordinary English workmen judged the social and economic changes of the period so negatively has yet to be shown...

...But too much space is devoted to the reconstruction of the trivial activities of tiny conspiratorial sects...

...One important defect of Thompson's study is the somewhat idyllic image it projects of pre-industrial England...

...Thompson's analysis of "uneven development" pursues some of the clues first advanced by Marx and Engels in Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution and developed by Trotsky, and his book is probably the most stimulating source for comparative Marxist analysis published since Trotsky...

...THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, by E. P. Thompson...

...His discussion of the changes in the pace and rhythm of work that took place during the years of the Industrial Revolution—the abolition of "Saint Monday," the growth of an inner compulsion (as well as severe external compulsions) to work, the uses of religion as an instrument of work discipline—is superb...

...About half of this massive volume is devoted to a chronicle of radical political protest from the French Revolution to the Reform Bill of 1832, and it is here that some of Thompson's most original contributions but also some of his shakiest interpretations are to be found...

...He seeks rather to write history from the point of view of the victims— vigorously and heroically protesting victims in this case, but victims nonetheless...