E.P. Thompson's Customs in Common

...Just as Burke saw history as a chain of SPRING • 1993 • 257 Books links forged by our masters for our benefit, so this kind of radical sees history as a chain we forge ourselves (albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing...

...He was once self-consciously a voice in the crowd, but now sounds more like a voice in the wilderness...

...The further we get from the eighteenth century, of course, the harder it is to see this apprentice relationship holding...

...For a time he was one of the best-known radio personalities in Britain (in a place and a time when being a "radio personality" still meant something), so much so that political pressure was applied to deny him a prestigious lecturing opportunity on the BBC...

...They could use the same "modern" tools to construct fruitful syntheses of past and present: to re-present unwritten customs as the "rights of man," for instance, or to re-form the mutualities of the traditional rural community in urban settings, in trade unions or friendly societies or political parties...

...Far from concluding that migration, urbanization, population growth, industrialization, and "mass society" had cut off the English working class from their forebears, he depicted the Industrial Revolution as a period when custom was not dissolved but re-presented and re-formed as class consciousness...

...When scholars younger than he cast doubt on his earlier findings and accuse him of sentimentalizing his protagonists, he responds with superior indignation: they haven't spent enough time in the archives, they haven't got to know these people well enough...

...Local newspapers of the 1950s often featured reminiscences by old people of the 1880s, telling stories of "rough music" and other premodern rituals little changed in form or content from centuries earlier...

...Historiographical fashions turn round like the seasons, theories come and go, but Thompson has his tendrils sunk down into historical bedrock—into real experience—and it would be a betrayal of his eighteenth-century friends to revise his views...

...It is a satire on the bourgeois Englishman's habit of writing letters to the newspaper complaining about the imminent decline of Western civilization, in 1886 after the Trafalgar Square Riots and in 1970 during a power strike that caused the indignant correspondent to scribble his jeremiad by the light of a candle...

...Re-reading these political essays, it is hard to contain one's admiration...

...It is traditional because it harks back to the small, rooted, roughly egalitarian communities of a premodern age...

...On the evidence of these pages it is clear that Thompson still feels personally connected to these people and these events...

...It was relatively easy for Cobbett to champion the agricultural laborer's "traditional" rights and customs in the early nineteenth century, when capitalist modernization had hardly begun to roll...

...He insists on the value of history as a reminder of contingency, the depth of ordinary lives, the potential of agency, the possibility of alternatives to capitalism and state communism, but he doubts whether these reminders will have any contemporary purchase, except perhaps in Asia and Africa...

...In this way "tradition" might survive even in the bowels of modernity, a reservoir of consciousness remaining to be drawn upon to help us respond to change and to remind us of alternative ways of life...

...Much of the spirit of those eighteenthcentury communities was preserved in the practices and institutions of the English working class...

...In less overtly nostalgic and romantic forms, however—in the radicalism of William Cobbett, for instance—it often finds a more comfortable home in the eighteenth century...

...Indeed, his source is an epic poem, "The Chamwood Opera," written "in a mid-eighteenth century hand," discovered—early this century...

...In the 1930s and 1940s another tradition-bent radical, George Orwell, could compare his England to more rapidly modernizing nations like Russia or Germany and still feel the chain of connection to his great-great-grandparents...

...In the eighteenth century local communities were already able to use "modern" tools—literacy, a degree of prosperity, democratic ideas—to win themselves some autonomy from the control of the rich and powerful, yet these same communities had not yet been leveled by the more lethal forces of "modernization": the tyranny of private property, the subordination of customary rights and responsibilities to ruthlessly rapid economic growth, the homogenization of the local community by the centralizing State...

...It is radical because harshly critical of the revolutionary impact of capitalism on the everyday life of the common people...

...by a Nottingham bookseller, passed on to one historian, who then transcribed it and passed it on to Thompson "many years ago...

...This is undoubtedly appropriate for a work of eighteenth-century history: the light cast is partial but authentic and it hugs the author close, binding him to his subjects and shutting out disturbing contemporaneity...

...At this point we must 258 • DISSENT Books recall that, far from being an other-worldly scholar retreating ever further into his archives, Thompson devoted most of the 1980s to an exhausting personal engagement with the movement for nuclear disarmament...

...The industrial workers he encountered as an adult education teacher in Yorkshire in the 1950s were recognizably the descendants of the handloom weavers, the agricultural laborers, and the urban artisans of the 1830s...

...What he does in this book is to send his tendrils down further, to reach ever subtler details of lived experience in the eighteenth century, but all in the same analytical framework of customs held by the mass of the people "in common" and defended against men of power and authority...

...it is constantly over-trumping the corrupt present with the purer past...

...Dropped hints at a thread running from eighteenthcentury defenses of "customs in common" to the twentieth-century left are hard to take seriously...

...And why should he revise his views...

...What are we to make of the episode in The Sykaos Papers, Thompson's cold war novel, in which late twentiethcentury villagers celebrate "rough music," a ritual whose extinction in the late nineteenth century Thompson eulogizes in Customs in Common...

...He will remain the scholar-artisan, faithful to his materials...

...Is there really any connection between agricultural laborers defending their rights to common land and the Greenhorn Common women's protest against the siting of Cruise missiles in Berkshire...

...Here I leap over his fifteen years of political engagement in the peace movement, but I'll return to it...

...He has collected and synthesized his writings of the past two decades on the eighteenth century into a fierce and moving prequel to The Making, a panorama of plebeian culture in the period when "tradition" was most articulately defined and defended...

...Evidently, Thompson's rage against the forces of order is undimmed, but the warmth he feels for the popular forces of the eighteenth century cannot extend as far as our own century...

...On a technical level, I think Thompson is right to challenge the latest historiographical fashion, which tends to view eighteenth-century society as consensual to a high degree, dominated neither by patricians nor plebeians but by a "polite and respectable" middling sort...

...In its more Tory guises (in Carlyle, for instance, and often in Ruskin), it harks right back to mythically integrated Catholic, feudal communities...

...He published several volumes of political essays, not simply on the cold war but on the rise of the security state, on threats to civil liberties, on Thatcherism and Reaganism...

...The sententious cadences of the prose (I mean this in the wholly respectful sense), the cascades of scorn poured down upon the complacently powerful, the rents torn in the veil of raison d'etat: this is what oppositional writing should be, very much in the vein of William Hazlitt, one of Thompson's great heroes...

...It is grumpy, exasperated, and rather exclusive...

...And in England, the first industrial nation, these forces actually rolled more slowly than elsewhere...

...But what is curious and a bit alarming about these essays is how much they have to say about the structures of power and the constraints on action, and how little about the bases for opposition...

...In a period when, some have argued, the English working class has been unmade, can we still feel the blood of our ancestors throb in our veins in quite the same way...

...For that we may need a different kind of illumination...

...He tells a story of the villagers of Charnwood in Leicestershire defending their common pasturage against aristocratic incursion in 1749 almost as if it were a piece of well-known village gossip...

...They reverse the priorities of his historical writing: it is all enemies, few friends...

...He envies the late Victorian folklore collectors, who were so much closer to the real thing, though they didn't appreciate adequately the world they had lost...

...Successive generations . . . stand in an apprentice relation to each other," writes Thompson in his latest book, but he is standing Burke on his head: his generations are composed not of rulers but of subjects...

...Another generation on, and can we still say the same thing...

...And in this context the traditional tone he adopts is marked and, to a degree, limiting...

...Nor were these communities limited to passive resistance...

...In Customs in Common he is highly complimentary about a few fellow laborers in the academic vineyard, but pretty scathing about everyone else...

...He was, in short, the British Noam Chomsky, but less marginal...

...One of Thompson's choicest essays of the 1970s was entitled "Sir, Writing by Candlelight...

...Thompson began to think out his classic history, The Making of the English Working Class (ultimately published in 1963...

...Customs in Common is written by candlelight, too...

...But my concern here is to capture Thompson less as a professional historian than as a political writer...

...Tellingly, in his new book, Thompson has not moved forward but backward...

...If postwar society has progressively distanced itself from its traditional roots, Thompson will hold out...

...He is not yet seventy, yet at times he sounds as old as the hills...

...Where does this put Thompson in relation to the world we actually live in...

...But what does this kind of history tell us about our present or our future...

...Then, in Orwell's lifetime, E.P...