E. P. Thompson, 1924-1993

The great bustard has winged off, removing as he went one of the prime attractions of these shores, and one of the few remaining reasons for still proclaiming intellectual allegiance to them. Thompson liked to present himself as an earth-bound English creature incapable of much soaring. But he had enough of the lark in him to have died singing, as Blake is said to have done; and who knows but that he did in his own fashion, for he was of that spirit. Thompson's trust in `experience' shared common roots with Blake's Auguries of Innocence. He knew what the poet meant when he warned that `He who shall teach the Child to Doubt, The rotting Grave shall neer get out', and he has escaped that rot, and will live with us now as one of the most inspirational voices of English culture. Thompson has been rightly acclaimed the greatest English historian of the post-war period, and his stature as a peace activist aptly compared to that of Bertrand Russell. But as a polemicist and radical visionary, he may be ranked in a canon which transcends our own century. Thompson was not simply a rill, to invoke Coleridge's metaphor, flowing with a perforation in the tanks of Blake, and Morris, Swift and Cobbett. He was himself a fountain comparable to theirs.

But perhaps the watery image is not the most appropriate. In many respects he was more like a power house; and although illness had already reduced some of the force before he died, now that he has been finally extinguished, one feels the cut in energy all the more acutely. In fact, to realise that the switches have been flicked, and that we are not going to get any more of his historical illumination, his brilliant polemic, his moral clarity, his particular spotlight on the past, the present, the future ... is to feel a certain indignation. One is not normally moved to pen a letter to that Nobodaddy editor of our times up aloft, but in this case, `Sir, May I, writing by candlelight, protest against this latest, excessive demand on the forces of dissent, which leaves so many of us radicals so extremely inconvenienced. The alarm call to action won't go off, the Cold War's done on one side only, the realist principles are deconstructing, the Labour apparatus has gone dead on us, the rest of the protest's at best lukewarm, and there's nothing to do but to go early to a loveless bed and squint in the gloom at our copies of Fukuyama.'

Lest this provoke an epistolary levée en masse among the readers of Radical Philosophy, let me hasten to add that I have no wish to divinise Thompson as the only light in a naughty world. I intend only to pay tribute to the incandescent quality of his interventions, and to the extent to which, whether we agreed with him or not, we had come to rely on his continual recharging of the batteries.

The man who devoted his life to preempting the real termination and contesting the rhetorical `end' of history began his own history in 1924 in Oxford, in an ambiance of Methodist dissent with strong Indian connections. Former missionaries in India, his parents were on friendly terms with Gandhi and Nehru, and one of Thompson's last projects was a study of his father's close involvement in the life and work of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. The other great family influence was exerted posthumously by his brother, Frank, whose vision of a democratic socialist Europe remained essentially Edward's own, and whose life (sacrificed at 21 while fighting for the Bulgarian partisans) had in some sense, impossibly, to be realised through his survivor.

Thompson, like his brother, was already a member of the Communist Party by the time of the war, which he spent serving with a tank regiment in Italy. From there he returned to complete a `war degree' in history from Corpus Christi, Cambridge. (The college, somewhat belatedly one may feel, was to honour him with a fellowship in 1989.) In 1948 he married Dorothy Towers, who remained his collaborator and companion till death, and without whose full-time career in the academy he could not have abandoned his own as early as he did. The period 1948-1965 spent in the West Riding, with Thompson working as an extra mural Lecturer at Leeds University, was to issue first in the major reinterpretation of the project of William Morris, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955), and then in the chef d'oeuvre of The Making of the English Working Class (1963). But it was also the period of Thompson's early career as a peace activist, first with the British Peace Committee, then with CND on its formation in 1957; of his agitation against the wars in Korea, Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus and Algeria; and of his break, following the Soviet repression in Hungary, from the British Communist Party. He began to reason, he was to claim, only in his 33rd year, the date of the founding of the New Reasoner, the organ which gave English voice to the `socialist humanism' which Thompson describes in The Poverty of Theory as arising `simultaneously in a hundred places, and on ten thousand lips' in Eastern Europe. Later to amalgamate with that other journal of `socialist humanism', the Universities and Left Review, to form the New Left Review, the New Reasoner signalled the emergence of the New Left in Britain. It also marked Thompson's unswervingly non-aligned position in the Cold War, and his personal resistance movement to the `inverted Podsnappery' of the Nairn-Anderson analysis of British history, to Continental rationalism and to Marxist anti-humanism, evidenced and documented in the bitter disputes which ensued with the subsequent editors of the New Left Review. All this was to culminate in 1978 in the onslaught on `Stalinism in theory' of The Poverty of Theory - which ends, in effect, with a call to Marxist intellectuals to unburden themselves of this `alp on the brain' and renew the agenda of the (old) New Left sketched in the original Epistle to the Philistines of 1957.

In the meantime, the main target of Thompson's polemic had shifted, and the sixties were spent inveighing not so much against Stalinian Communism, but the philistinism of `Natopolitanism' and the apathy of the Labour Left and Communist dissenters in leaving capitalism to `rot on the bough' when Britain was over-ripe for socialism. This was given more concrete expression in Thompson's steadfast solidarity with the student protest against the tailoring of Warwick University (which he had joined in 1965) to the needs of industry. Resigning his post in disgust in 1971, he was never again to take permanent employment in the academy, which is not to say that he did not engage in an exhausting programme of visiting lecturing, mainly in the United States, which in the last decade of his life added to the toll of his frenetic peace movement activity.

During the seventies Thompson continued and deepened, though with an increasing note of pessimism, his campaign against the abuse of State power, both in his historical writing and in a series of Swiftian diatribes on the condition of the day. The historical accusation is most powerfully represented in Whigs and Hunters (1975), the contemporary in the brilliant essays collected in Writing by Candlelight (1980). At the same time, Thompson was brooding ever more despairingly at the Cold War cul-de-sac, but only to erupt, when the moment came, in the inspired exhortation to action of Protest and Survive. As the peace movement swelled in the early eighties in response to the agreement on INF deployment, Thompson ceded the writing of history to the attempt to make it. It was at this point that the logic of his demand for `socialist humanism' as a third way between the oppositional but mirrored ideologies of the Soviet and Natopolitan systems was translated most tellingly and effectively into the call to put the agendas for peace and human rights together in a movement that would remove the weapons `from the Atlantic to the Urals' and take Europe `beyond the blocs'.

Indefatigable in his pursuit of the objectives of the END campaign, Thompson spent the better part of the decade as a roving ambassador on the international peace circuit. The articles, letters and memos poured from his desk in the sackful. At any moment, he might be found exhorting the masses in Trafalgar Square to `feel their strength' or manning the bookstall at the END bazaar; playing percussion in a fund-raising concert or haggling at the Czech embassy over the suppression of the Jazz Group; dialoguing with Charta 77 or marching at the head of an anti-NATO rally in Madrid; exposing the grotesqueries of the SDI programme or railing against the skullduggery of the Soviet Peace Committee. That the CIA and the KGB would both accuse each other of funding these activities only served to reaffirm the wisdom of pressing for a process of `citizens' detente' and for the adoption of a non-aligned position within the Western peace movement. This was to prove of critical importance, both in the impact it had on the politics and strategies of the latter, and in the space it opened up for trans-bloc dialogue between it and the independent peace initiatives and dissident groups in Eastern Europe. This was no easy dialogue to sustain, demanding as it did a keen sensitivity to differences of political priority and to the divergent conditions under which the various peace groups in both halves of Europe were at that time working. The story of its ideological complexities is yet to be told. But when it is, it will be clear that without Thompson's sense of historical eventuation and his punctilious concern for the individuals involved in the process, certain lines of East-West communication which contributed to the dramatic changes of the late eighties would not have been opened up.

To make these claims for Thompson's agency in the making of recent history is not to suppose he was the only influence on the internationalisation of the British peace movement, or that he singlehandedly either devised or promoted the END programme. Even less is it to suggest that he was responsible for the ending of the Cold War, which is the `absurdity' which some respondents have read into Mary Kaldor's obituary tribute in the Independent. What Kaldor actually claims is that, in the fullness of time, Thompson, along with Gorbachev and Havel, will be viewed as `one of the key individuals who influenced the course of events in the 1980s', and this point is hardly refuted either by an appeal to the steadfastness of Reagan and the hard right, or to Western `victory' in the Cold War, or even to the supposedly brute fact that the freeze ended because of the internal economic contradictions of the Soviet Union and the consequent transformation in its leadership. To argue that the Cold War collapsed because the Soviet Union collapsed is more in the order of an analytic statement than a piece of historical analysis. `Collapses' of that order do not take place in a vacuum, but in a context shaped by shifts of atmosphere and the emergence of altered logics; a context which in turn exerts a specific influence on the direction taken by the unfolding of the events it has helped to precipitate. If it is true that glasnost and perestroika came in response to domestic crisis, it is also true that its defence and foreign policy initiatives were informed by peace movement thinking, and that the climate of reception of these both within and without the Soviet bloc had been altered by exposure to the pressures of the non-aligned anti-nuclear campaign in the West. As the major architect and spokesperson of that campaign, Thompson can certainly be said to have played a key role in shaping the historical disposition of the late eighties. Even at the time, as Kaldor notes, he was wryly predicting the historical theft of the peace movement contribution. `This is the most serious political work I have ever done or will ever do in my life,' he wrote. `It won't last long. If we succeed a little, the politicians will move in and take it off us.'

What also, one fears, may be taken off him post-mortem, now that it can no longer lacerate, is that `fierce indignation' and socialist morality which made him such a thorn in the flesh of the establishment while alive. Already, in some of his obituary notices, one detects the machinery of the assimilative culture going into action in the salutes to the grand old `British' troublemaker who kept open the lines of liberal dissent. In Paul Barker's tribute in The Sunday Times (which, it should be said, is that of an editor who gave space to Thompson in New Society at a time when few others were prepared to do so), there is little to suggest that Thompson had ever been an advocate of the thought of Morris, let alone of Marx. He was a communist for a while, Barker concedes, but this ran up against his `wonderful unwillingness to hold his tongue'. Thompson is presented as carrying the torch of Paine, Cobbett and Hazlitt; Leavis, Hoggart and Orwell are cited among the more contemporary figures closest in spirit to him. One would not deny that association with this pantheon captures a good deal of the quality of Thompson's dissent. But it captures it only in the form of the discriminations through which he criticised Marxist theory and much of its political legacy. What it fails to register is the distinctively socialist position from which Thompson took issue with Orwell's dismissals of the `squashily pacifist' and `bearded fruit-juice drinkers' of the Left, with the aspirations to a `common culture', and with the blindnesses of a left liberal tradition of dissent to its own forms of quietism and elitism. In this process of abstraction and conflation, not only does the actual failure of realisation in `British' society of everything which Thompson stood for go unnoticed: but so too do those contemporary forms of dissent, notably feminism, which must be allowed to trouble the argument of the troublemakers, Thompson included. Against this congratulatory emphasis (quite absent, one might say, from the fine note in The Telegraph), on Thompson's membership of the Awkward Squad, or on the `humaneness' of his `abandonment of Marxist class analysis' by the time of The Making of the English Working Class (The Times), one may well feel inclined to side with Andrew Marr (The Independent) in his call for a little more ire. A more suitable memorial, suggests Marr, would be to declare an annual `two minutes pandemonium'. Yet even this, perhaps, smacks a little of containment. Thompson's own response, one may imagine, might have been `why only two minutes?'.

Of course, Thompson did, as he put it, `share the same idiom as that of the culture which is my reluctant host', and he would have been glad that W. L. Webb (The Guardian) and others had noted it. On this basis, some might want to argue (wrongly, to my mind) that he invited the assimilation by the `host', and that it is therefore a touch disingenuous of Marr to protest against its hypocrisy. There is rather more reason in the complaints of his critics against the assimilative effects of a resistance to Continental `imports' which tended to present Sartre and Althusser, Lacan and Marcuse as all coming from the same warehouse, through the exclusive agency of the New Left Review. All the same, the paradox (together with some of the irony) of the `great bustard' bluster has not always been sufficiently noticed. For of all the Left theorists of his generation, Thompson had by far the widest international audience, and the anti-chauvinism of his peace movement perspectives and activities can hardly be disputed. We might note, moreover, that there were numerous Continental contributions (including from Gramsci, Sartre and Bourdet) to the New Reasoner, and that the END Journal provided an almost unique forum for East European dissident writings throughout the eighties. Thompson may not have been able to fly very far in theory, but he still managed to jump quite successfully across national barriers and continental blocs in thinking.

What allowed Thompson's voice to carry so far was the inherent consistency of its message. At a low point in the seventies, he himself was inclined to suppose that it was the sheer boredom of such consistency that would lead in the end to its silencing. `Consistency is an old bore,' he remarked in his letter to Kolakowski, `the voice of the bore is doomed in the end to tail off into silence.' But he went on to prove this wrong in the sheer persistence with which, as Sheila Rowbotham puts it (New Statesman and Society), he `pitted himself against seemingly invincible forces, knowing that so many others had taken the risks of commitment'. His great political legacy to us is this refusal to submit to pessimism; and the examplar he provides of how important it will always be to keep the past in mind if we are to find the resources to struggle for the future. There can be no poorer reason for refusing the continuous engagement with Thompson's argument than that `postmodern' glibness which `knows' that it is passe without having read a line of his writing. Fortunately, however, one may confidently predict that there will always be too many who will prove too awkward to take that `knowledge' of their times on trust, and whose direct experience of Thompson's writing will continue to renew its spirit. Thompson has given us a resource too rich and too little boring for it not to be permanently cherished in the use that will be made of it.

Needless to say, this cannot compensate for the loss of the man to those who knew and loved him, for his great flailing gestures of mirth and contempt; for his grumpiness and tenderness, his self-irony and empathy. We shall miss very dearly this formidable thinker, with the cat around his shoulders, whose opinions he every so often saw fit to consult .

Kate Soper

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