The Essential E.P. Thompson, edited by Dorothy Thompson. New Press: New York, 2001. x + 498 pp. $45.00 cloth; $21.95 paper.

Abstract

Putting together a reader from the polymorphously diverse writings of a formidably creative, dissident writer who reflects in his or her sensibility and voice the defining compass of the times that he or she has lived through and, moreover, helped remake is an unenviable task of tribute fraught with inevitable omissions and haunting incompletion. In his obituary on C. Wright Mills, his trans-Atlantic friend and comrade of the international New Left, Edward Thompson recognized that it was Mill's “style, rather than a comprehensive theory of social process . . . the style of a responsible and catholic eclectic” that he successfully attained in his late years and remains his enduring legacy. Thompson was able to make greater strides in achieving, if not a “comprehensive theory of social process,” a poetically incandescent, empirically textured way of reading this social process from the perspective of the English plebeians, artisans, and commoners, most famously with The Making of the English Working Class. Noting that in America The Making of the English Working Class “had both a Movement reading and an Academic reading,” Peter Linebaugh, a former student of Thompson's, has stressed its function as “an iconic text in some ways in the Movement . . . a text of particular class composition and a particular political moment” that also became among the students “a shield for the troops in this strategy, protecting us from the shafts and cuts of the Old Boy Network” of US higher education in the 1960s. Thirty-five years later, under the specter of another “particular class composition,” we may ask ourselves if The Essential E.P. Thompson can bid us to undertake new readings of the last “great bustard” and to pitch them against the neoliberal imperial Behemoth that encircles us today wherever we turn our eyes.