Abstract
…we should not forget that ‘culture’ is a clumpish term, which by gathering up so many activities and attributes into one common bundle may actually confuse or disguise discriminations that should be made between them. We need to take this bundle apart, and examine the components with more care: rites, symbolic modes, the cultural attributes of hegemony, the inter-generational transmission of custom and custom’s evolution within historically specific forms of working and social relations. (Thompson, 1993a: 13)
I begin my essay with this short extract from the book Customs in Common by the social historian Edward Palmer (EP) Thompson (1924–93). The text reveals a sophisticated grasp of a number of features of culture and social being – in particular its multi-layered, hysteresial, praxiological, and above all, interactional nature – which, one might argue, are often given too little emphasis in contemporary sociology. Thompson, despite being described some 25 years ago by Anthony Giddens (1987) as ‘the sociologists’ historian’, is now rarely cited in the sociology literature. What has happened? Why did the work of this extraordinary character – who, in addition to his prominence as a social historian, was a public intellectual, an outspoken political activist, a biographer of William Morris, a William Blake scholar, a poet and novelist, and a pamphleteer and political journalist – become unfashionable in sociological circles so quickly?
Thompson was a controversial figure, some would say a controversialist, certainly a polemicist, having something of the antinomianism and contrarian nature of his heroes Morris and Blake about him. The new book by Scott Hamilton, which I review here, is effective in capturing that sense of controversy. Hamilton’s book, a cross between an intellectual biography and an exercise in the sociology of knowledge, uses a close examination of Thompson’s life as a means to probe the role of ideas in a series of arenas of 20th-century British political life. It is notable for uncovering some fascinating new insights into what went on in the backstage of the 1960s British New Left, and in that respect in particular it is an important addition to the literature. The new material includes a number of wonderfully amusing acid remarks by Ralph Miliband – the Marxist intellectual and late father of the current leader of the British Labour Party – about Thompson’s inability to deliver manuscripts in time for deadlines. I was also interested to learn exactly how much Old Etonian Perry Anderson paid in 1962 in order to settle New Left Review’s debts, as part of his editorial take-over of the journal.
To his credit, Hamilton recognises that Thompson regarded all his disparate intellectual and political activities as being ‘organically connected’. He makes a brave attempt to unpack all those complicated linkages, but I feel that the resulting analysis doesn’t quite work. The book is perhaps overly concerned with the acrimonious debates about Marxist theory associated with the essays contained in Thompson’s (1978) book The Poverty of Theory. Hamilton’s central argument, that the contradictions in Thompson’s thought led inexorably to ‘quietism’ and ultimate failure, glosses over Thompson’s impatience with political theory, his unerring focus on the specific, concrete features of mundane lived experience, and his practical confrontation with what he regarded as moral ‘lacunae’ in Marx’s writings (cited in Kenny, 2000: 109; see also detailed discussion of this matter in Lukes, 1985).
Giddens attributed Thompson’s popularity amongst sociologists to their discovery in his work of ‘something which they recognize to be absent in much sociological writing … something we could loosely call a sense of agency’ (1987: 203). That characteristic of Thompson’s work, his pre-occupation with questions of agency, and in particular moral choice, is doubtless an important factor for those of us who continue to find inspiration in his work. But perhaps the review of The Poverty of Theory which appeared some years ago in the Guardian newspaper captured its distinctive quality most eloquently:
Edward Thompson’s voice is powerful and seductive. It is quite unlike anything to be heard in the universities. It is passionate, intense and fiercely truth-seeking. His imagination draws as much on Blake, Wordsworth and William Morris as on Marx and Engels. His is the voice of the English libertarian and socialist tradition. Moreover it is extremely funny.
I still take the view that Thompson’s work repays careful study, and indeed feel that sociology as a whole would benefit from a renewed engagement with his ideas. Although Hamilton’s book is based on a sociology PhD thesis, it makes no real effort to relate Thompson’s writings to the wider sociological literature. This is surprising, given Thompson’s interventions concerning matters of fundamental importance to the discipline, like the nature of social class and the relationship between structure and agency. Giddens’ (1987) critical review of Thompson’s work, cited above, prompts no mention in Hamilton’s book, and indeed neither does the role of Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class as an important influence for a number of prominent sociological studies, for example Huw Beynon’s (1984) Working for Ford.
Interestingly, rather than ignoring sociology, Thompson was not averse to sniping at the discipline. He was especially hostile to statistics and generalisation:
… the mumbo-jumbo of those latter-day astrologers who stem from Conjuror Bentham … who for 200 years have been trying to persuade us that nothing is real that cannot be counted. (1972: 48)
Indeed, he sought to encourage other scholars to resist what he described as ‘that old sociological itch’ (Thompson, 1976: 392), namely its ‘over anxious’ tendency to ‘derive from particular evidence generalizations and typologies which are then translated to inappropriate contexts’ (1976: 387). Here Thompson seems to come close to the Wittgensteinian notion of a ‘craving for generality’ (1969: 17), which, of course, chimes interestingly with some of the ethnomethodological criticisms of mainstream sociology. Hamilton draws particular attention to Thompson’s observation (1972: 50) that the reader must trust the judgement of the historian in deciding that this and not that feature ‘shall be singled out for remark’. He does so in developing his own argument that Thompson’s ‘historiographic positions ultimately defer to moral and political arguments’ (pp. 41–2). This seems to be suggesting that Thompson had a rather cavalier attitude to data; a claim that I find unconvincing, and one that is certainly not supported by my reading of Thompson’s historical works.
At the heart of Hamilton’s book is an attempt to be systematic (and one might even say scientific) in capturing the contradictions within Thompson’s thought. He does so by ‘loosely adapting’ (p. 39) Lakatos’ theory of scientific research programmes, claiming that it is possible to identify ‘five hardcore ideas’ that Thompson adopted as a young man and held until the 1980s, at which point what Hamilton describes as Thompson’s ‘research programme’ eventually collapsed under the weight of its internal contradictions. He argues that these five core elements were: a continuity between the tradition of English romantic libertarian ideas and Marxism; a commitment to ‘popular front’ grand alliance politics; a belief in the motivating power of a vision of a better world, and ideas like justice and liberty, over bottom-line ‘objective interests’; the essential unity of political, scholarly and artistic work; and, finally, the central role of English culture (and possibly English ‘exceptionalism’). In line with the Lakatos theory, he argues that along the way Thompson adopted more loosely held ‘softcore ideas’ in order to seek to maintain the relevance of his fundamental beliefs as he engaged with successive periods of political struggle.
As many readers will be aware, Lakatos’ model was developed in the 1960s, in the context of the Kuhn–Popper debates, in an attempt to understand the social processes entailed in how scientific knowledge came into being, and to be regarded as such, set against a backdrop of sometimes contradictory empirical evidence (e.g. Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970). I am simply not persuaded that this is a useful way of trying to capture a single individual’s intellectual trajectory over a lifetime of work. Thompson was not engaged in a ‘research programme’ in this sense. He did, of course, carry out scholarly research in a number of specific areas, which has proved significant for many scholars across the humanities and social sciences. But Hamilton is trying to get at something quite distinct from that idea. One might even describe Hamilton’s approach as flirting with the very sort of over-intellectualised, and rather too systematised, sort of analysis against which Thompson railed, and on whom the irony would certainly not have been lost.
In his pursuit of a neat analysis of Thompson’s failures, Hamilton is in places a little sloppy with his evidence. One particularly stark example is taken from the period during the late 1960s when Thompson was working at Warwick University, and he became heavily involved in supporting student discontent about what the protestors regarded as the murky relationship between the university and big business. Hamilton quotes from a book about the affair which was edited by Thompson, and which shows, so he argues, Thompson’s ‘disdain’ for the students (p. 126). The paragraph in question begins (Thompson, 1970: 155):
I am not, among my students or acquaintances, notorious for my uncritical admiration of ‘youth’.
Hamilton then selects out the middle section of the paragraph which includes some observations on the tendency of young people:
… to become very hairy, to lie in bed till lunch time, to miss seminars, to be more concerned with the style than with the consequences of actions …
Hamilton then omits the paragraph’s punch line which states:
In short, I am disposed to admire youth only if, by their actions, they command admiration. As, in the case of the students of Warwick, they most emphatically have.
In other words, Hamilton omits those parts of the paragraph which serve to completely invert the meaning he chooses to include in his book.
What about those contradictions in Thompson’s thought? Well, there are certainly areas that have attracted critical attention. His conception of social interaction and social organisation could, for example, be described as voluntarist. This aspect forms the central target of both Anderson’s (1980) and Giddens’ (1987) substantial critiques of his work. However, others might disagree with this suggestion. I have already mentioned ethnomethodology, and it is interesting that scholars working in that genre seem to have shown little interest in Thompson’s work (or he in theirs), despite the wonderfully dynamic sense of context-free yet context-sensitive emergence (cf. Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970; Molotch and Boden, 1985) in his description of social class in The Making of the English Working Class (1968: 8–9):
I do not see class as a ‘structure’; nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships … The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and a real context … We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.
The most memorable articulation of Thompson’s hostility to structural models of society lies in his demolition of Althusser’s machine-like conception of social organisation (Thompson, 1970: 192), where in typically witty and caustic style, he substitutes Althusser for the figure of Gradgrind from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times:
As if an astronomical observatory should be made without any windows, and the astronomer within should arrange the starry universe solely by pen, ink and paper, so M. Althusser, in his Observatory (and there are many like it) has no need to cast an eye upon the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty little bit of sponge.
Turning now to Thompson’s romanticism; yes, he would surely plead guilty. Indeed, Hamilton does not do full justice to the extent and depth of passion and scholarship of romantic traditions that informed Thompson’s thinking and practical politics (for more satisfactory accounts, see e.g. Kenny, 2000; Veltman, 1994). Hamilton’s book does not really get to grips with Thompson’s work on Morris (1955) and Blake (1993b), or fully appreciate the significance in Thompson’s sensibilities of traditions of dissent, and non-conformist radicalism and libertarian thinking, going back to 17th-century England (see e.g. Hill, 1975). These considerations have an abiding relevance for contemporary sociology, which, it has been argued, owes a debt to romanticism for a ‘good deal of the discipline’s genuine moral commitment to the creation of a better world’ (Strong and Dingwall, 1989: 50). However, there needs to be a ‘frank recognition of its vices: the substitution of evangelical zeal for scholarship, the lust for experience over reflection, the elevation of the personal above the communal’ (Strong and Dingwall, 1989: 50; see also discussion in Horlick-Jones, 2009). It seems to me it is a question of balance: without romanticism, sociology has no heart; with too much romanticism, it has no head.
Hamilton’s book has relatively little to say about Thompson’s hugely energetic involvement in the British and European campaigns against nuclear weapons during the decade between the late 1970s and the end of the Cold War, which Hamilton strangely regards as a time of ‘intellectual breaking point’ for Thompson (p. 249): ‘Mere survival has replaced socialism as a revolutionary aspiration’ (p. 257) as he puts it. Of course, Hamilton misses the point that survival is a pre-condition for any kind of radical social change. Thompson tried to communicate that argument, and to galvanise the intellectual left to the need for urgent political action, in an essay in New Left Review (1980: 3) which introduced his notion of ‘exterminism’:
Comrades, we need a cogent theoretical and class analysis of the present war crisis. Yes. But to structure an analysis in a consecutive rational manner may be, at the same time, to impose a consequential rationality upon the object of analysis. What if the object is irrational? What if events are being willed by no single causative historical logic (‘the increasingly aggressive military posture of world imperialism’, etc.) – a logic which may then be analysed in terms of origins, intentions or goals, contradictions or conjunctures – but are simply the product of a messy inertia? This inertia may have drifted down to us as a collocation of fragmented forces (political and military formations, ideological imperatives, weapons technologies): or, rather, as two antagonistic collocations of such fragments, interlocked by their oppositions?
In essence, Thompson was arguing that the asymmetric nature of the Cold War conflict had led to a reciprocal relationship between East and West (which he termed exterminism), which served to exacerbate pathologies in both, whilst feeding an accelerating momentum towards nuclear war. Whilst this is perhaps not the best example of Thompson’s scholarship – being much more pre-occupied with the urgency of the political situation in question, and the need to produce a convincing form of rhetoric – it does, however, draw upon a rich collection of ideas concerning social organisation: the notion of perverse unintended consequences, one familiar from game theory; social action emerging from a ‘collocation of forces’ and multiple rationalities; and that field of forces being made even more messy by historical mismatches, imperfect knowledge and painful misunderstandings.
In this short essay, I have only been able to sketch in outline what I suggest are some crucially important features of Edward Thompson’s work that have continued relevance for sociology and how it is practised. I have been critical of some of Hamilton’s analysis, but I am delighted that he wrote the book, especially so if it serves to rekindle interest in Thompson’s ideas. I certainly do not offer Thompson as a guru, or the prophet of some new potential sociological fashion. On the contrary, by pointing readers in the direction of Thompson’s writings, I hope to simply inspire a little resistance to the Gradgrind-like tendencies of some contemporary currents within sociological theory, and to encourage a renewed enthusiasm for investigating the fine detail of the everyday practical morality of social life.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am pleased to thank Mick Bloor and Lorenzo Marvulli for some helpful observations on earlier versions of this essay. I also wish to thank the Sociology editorial team for the efficient and courteous way in which they dealt with an essay that didn’t quite fit the existing editorial guidelines.