The Essential E. P. Thompson

by E.P. Thompson, Dorothy Thompson (Editor)

E.P. Thompson was one of the most visionary and influential historians of the last century, acclaimed as the innovator of "history from below"―the immersion in the many details of everyday life, particularly among the working class, as a vital means of understanding the past and the patterns of history itself. His classic work, The Making of the English Working Class , changed the ways in which not only historians but a whole new generation looked at the past. The Essential E.P. Thompson , the largest collection of Thompson's historical work published in one volume, gives us the full range of his scholarly output, from William Romantic to Revolutionary and The Making of the English Working Class , to Albion's Fatal Tree and Customs in Common . Both a superb introduction for those new to Thompson's work, and an invaluable addition to any history lover's collection, The Essential E.P. Thompson is a stirring testament to the range, complexity, and vision of "one of the most eloquent, powerful, and independent voices of our time" ( The Observer , London).

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World History

498 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2001

About the author

Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, marxist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry.

Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a "historian in the Marxist tradition," calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives". Thompson 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.

Reviews

[Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a historian, I struggle to find anything to dislike about E. P. Thompson, even if I do not share his historical materialist perspective. He was a famously sympathetic interpreter of his historical subjects, and his writing is peppered with wit and insight. His theoretical essays are mainly critiques of Althusser and went over my head for the most part, but I remain impressed by his example of what a historian can be, especially as demonstrated in the excerpts from The Making of the English Working Class and William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, which make up slightly over half of this volume.

[Lboogiepeace]

I've owned this book since I was in college, but I do not believe I've actually really READ it. So, I flip through it once and again and one day I will sit down for a thorough.

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

isn't everything by EP Thompson "essential"?!