Dipesh Chakrabarty: Fifty Years of E.P. Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class'

Dipesh Chakrabarty: Fifty Years of E P Thompson's the Making of the English Working Class by TigersEye99

When Marxism becomes a dogmatic abstraction rather than a critical praxis

Marxist theory… can become a false consciousness if, instead of being used for the methodical investigation of reality through theory and practice, it is misused as a defence against that very reality… Those who wish to deprive Marxism of its critical, subversive power and turn it into an affirmative doctrine, generally dig in behind a series of stereotyped statements which, in their abstraction, are as irrefutable as devoid of result.

-E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays (1978)

All Knees and Elbows Of Susceptibility and Refusal

by Tom Roberts and Anthony Iles

This pamphlet is a sketch of some elements of what might constitute a 'history from below'. In it we have assembled quotations from esteemed historians, their lowly subjects and sometimes even their critics. Here, Thompson's phrase, 'all knees and elbows of susceptibility and refusal', from which we have made our clumsy title will help us express the necessary awkwardness of affecting transformation by writing history. For there are many attractions for the would-be radical historian here, but also obstacles and 'traps' of interest too. Firstly, we will attempt to reconstruct what is 'history from below' before we explore some tensions inherent in such a project. The phrase 'history from below' is the product of a group of French historians known as the Annales school. It is their description of an approach to subjects and areas previously considered historically unimportant. In England this approach was taken up by a group of Marxist historians who developed a set of methodologies and a world view at odds with the existing Marxist and historiographical orthodoxies.

The Making of the English Working Class

"Thompson's book has been called controversial, but perhaps only because so many have forgotten how explosive England was during the Regency and the early reign of Victoria. Without any reservation, The Making of the English Working Class is the most important study of those days since the classic work of the Hammonds." --Ben B. Seligman, Commentary

 

  "Here is a true masterpiece..." --Michael Foot, London Tribune