T hompson, E. P.

Abstract

E. P. Thompson (1924–93) is among the most influential historians of the second half of the twentieth century. His masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class (1968 [1963]), helped define the new social and labor history, which aspired to produce “total history” grounded in a bottom‐up or “history from below” perspective. Thompson's revision of Marxist class theory, his emphasis on the cultural domain of social life, and his stress on the role of human agency in history inspired more than a generation of historians and influenced sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural theorists. In addition to being a historian, Thompson was a poet and a political activist. He was among the founders of the British New Left in the 1950s and a long‐time proponent of nuclear disarmament. A leading figure in the European disarmament movement, he debated Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan, at the Oxford Union in 1984. Thompson's academic career was spent in working‐class adult education, at the University of Leeds, and at the Social History Centre at the University of Warwick, which he helped found in 1968. He resigned from Warwick in 1971, following his critique that the university pandered to the corporate sector, and spent the rest of his life as a political activist and independent scholar.