As Everlasting Yea, a No

Agency, Necessity and The Making of the English Working Class

Bibliographic Data

ID12585424
AuthorsKevin Morgan (0000-0002-2933-2231, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume28
Issue4
Pages457-476
Publication date2014-10-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueContemporary British History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1361-9462 • E-ISSN: 1743-7997
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13619462.2014.962912
OpenAlexW2058045495
LanguageEN
References cited13

Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963) is rightly identified with the strong affirmation of human agency against more determinist forms of Marxism. This paper argues that this approach was deeply rooted in Thompson's experience of popular-front communism, but in a pronouncedly oppositional articulation whose distinctiveness lay in its uncoupling from any discourse of historical necessity. The theme is traced through key political and historical writings of Thompson, and through his friend and sometime party comrade, the historian Christopher Hill. In Hill's work on seventeenth-century England, it is argued, an oppositional counter-narrative of the English revolution was only fully embraced some years after the publication of The Making, and as a direct result of its influence

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Articulation (sociology · Class (philosophy · Communism · Determinism · Epistemology · Literature · Making-of · Narrative · Optimal distinctiveness theory · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Theme (computing · Working class · Australian History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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