As I have reread The Making of English Working Class and numerous other texts by Thompson, I find myself thinking in terms of blindness and insight, not in absolute deconstructive binaries employed by Paul de Man, but rather to signify inescapable process in which insights we manage to gain are purchased at price of being blind to other aspects of reality they do not permit us to see. Thompson's The Making of English Working Class is incalculably rich in narrative, with vivid, novelistic characterization and description, but, as many have noted, it is poor in historically relevant statistics. Thompson's handling of Romanticism from his 1955 book on William Morris to his later work on Thelwall and Blake consistently mined a vein of radical Romanticism that he called Romantic revolt, thereby neglecting more nationalistic and counter-revolutionary areas of Romanticism. Thompson's eloquent and passionate opposition to Stalinism and what he called variously Marxist Platonism, idealism, and theoreticism produced some of best political writing since George Orwell, but perhaps because of events of his own life--the tragic death of his brother, a Communist, at hands of Bulgarian fascists in 1944; personally satisfying experience he enjoyed working with fellow Communists on construction of a Yugoslavian railroad in 1947; and his leaving British Communist Party in 1956 after suppression of Hungarian Revolution--he was ungenerous and unsympathetic to anarchist and opponents of Stalinism who repudiated Stalin and sometimes even entire Bolshevik Revolution much earlier than 1956. Premature anti-Stalinists found little favor in Thompson's writing, which harshly criticized Orwell himself in interesting but not wholly persuasive essay, Outside Whale (1960). Before I go any further, however, I must say, first, blindness/insight dialectic applies to everyone, including myself, and, second, my recent review of Thompson's work has convinced me that he is a great writer who still has much to teach us about Romanticism, history, and politics. Thompson's The Making of English Working Class (1963), one of founding texts of British cultural (Stevenson 2), made an important mark in Romantic studies in two ways: by supplying a unique historical context for and by linking Romanticism with process of working class's own making. Near very of The Making of English Working Class, Thompson concludes that working-class political culture countered laissez-faire policies with intelligence and moral passion in ways parallel with but separate from the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism. The Romantics and Radical craftsmen who opposed annunciation of Acquisitive comprise an early 19th-century (832). In a later writing he linked working-class movement with Romantic critique as a revolutionary resistance to economic man (Poverty of Theory 294). According to Thompson, then, at moment of Industrial Revolution working class did two things: it registered a Romantic, ultimately utopian protest against utilitarian cash-nexus governed by naked instrumental reason, and it created strong organizations and a tough-minded political culture capable of struggling against capitalism on numerous fronts and for long haul. In replying to New Left Review editors who found working class insufficiently revolutionary, Thompson countered that the workers, having failed to overthrow capitalist society, proceeded to warren it from to end with unions, cooperatives, political associations, and other institutions that survived and produced meaningful reforms (Poverty of Theory 281). The radical Romanticism that Thompson links with working-class culture shares utopian protest against Economic Man that The Making of English Working Class describes in such moving detail. …
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