Thompson, E. P. (1924–1993)

English historian, socialist, and peace activist, E. P. Thompson is best known for his book, The Making of the English Working Class, a groundbreaking study of the working class in Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Thompson was born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents. During World War II, he served in the British Army in Italy. After the war, he studied at Corpus Christi College, a part of Cambridge University. While there, he joined the Communist Party. In 1946, he formed the Communist Historians Group along with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr, and others. This group was among the leading British historians of the postwar era.

In 1956, Thompson and others started a dissident publication within the Communist Party, called the Reasoner. Later that year, he and many others left the party in disgust over the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

His group coalesced around a democratic socialist movement, known as the New Left. This movement and its journal, the New Reasoner, explored a democratic socialist alternative to what its editors saw as the rigid authoritarianism of the Communist and Trotskyist Parties and the managerialist Cold War social democracy of the Labour Party.

In 1963, he published The Making of the English Working Class, a radical book in several ways. First, he focused, not on the political and military leaders of the day, as history studies of the day generally did, but instead on the workers themselves. He portrayed the workers, not as an unpoliticized faceless mass, but as well-organized forces determined to protect what they saw as their ancient rights to working conditions and pay against encroaching mechanization and pay cuts. The book also serves as perhaps the best example of the application of Marxist thought to the real historical experience of a group of people.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Thompson taught at the University of Leeds and then the University of Warwick, while maintaining a leading position in the academic left of Great Britain. In 1971, he resigned from his position at Warwick and became essentially a freelance polemicist for the radical left of the British political system. From 1980, Thompson became the most prominent voice of the growing nuclear disarmament movement in Britain and Europe.

In addition to The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson wrote numerous other books, including biographies of William Morris and William Blake, as well as dozens of essays, pamphlets, and articles, supporting socialist causes and nuclear disarmament.