Thompson, Godwin, and the French Revolution

Abstract

In his Introduction and Epilogue to the English edition of Social Policy in the Third Reich,1 Tim Mason performed an exemplary act of intellectual honesty when he reported how his original intention, to write a general history of German Fascism from the end of the first to the end of the second world war, fell apart when he realised that he could not simply tack on the war years to the account of the inter-war period given in Social Policy.... What happens in the war, he realised, profoundly affects how one must read the earlier events. All historians I suspect face this kind of difficulty at one time or another in their lives. No historian knows everything, every reading of events is a partial one, and there are always going to be areas which one knows one should address but for which time, inclination or energy may be lacking. In the case of E. P. Thompson it should not be surprising, given the wide range of his work, that we might be able to note the odd lacunae or blind spot. The question the 'Mason question' must be how far such absences are benign and how far they affect his general argument. In this paper I want to identify two areas in his analysis of English popular politics at the time of the French Revolution which he himself identified as questions he wished to return to address on another occasion, but which he was unable to. And I want to ask how far an adequate account of these two areas might throw into question some of the broader claims made in The Making of the English Working Class. The two areas might seem to be rather disparate they concern William Godwin and the intellectual radicalism of the 1790s on the one hand, and the place of popular or vulgar conservatism on the other but, I hope to show, a similar problem underlies Thompson's treatment of them. Godwin occupies a curious place in Thompson's work. He is referred to on several occasions in The Making. . ., and he makes a surprise appearance in The Poverty of Theory, which is where Thompson issues his