As Everlasting Yea, a No: Agency, Necessity andThe Making of the English Working Class
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Source: Contemporary British History
Author: Kevin Morgan
Institution: University of Manchester
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2058045495