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.

In the closing of the classic 1963 “Preface” to The Making, Thompson wrote, “Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.” Thirty years later, in his introductory chapter to Customs in Common (unfortunately not included in The EEPT), Thompson invoked Asia and Africa again, albeit on a less optimistic note:

I say “less optimistic” because, further on, Thompson considers the likelihood of defying these pressures to remake human nature according to “a new kind of customary consciousness” that might break asunder the Promethean shackles of capitalist and state communist “economic man” as “not . . . likely to happen,” perhaps equivalent to the act of “whistl[ing] into a typhoon.” In 1992, we heard just such a whistling against what Subcommandante Marcos called “the first wind” from above—Thompson's “typhoon”—reverberate from Chiapas into “the second wind” from below as the Zapatistas declared war against the 500-year-old “economic man” whose latest guise went under the dissimulating moniker of neoliberalism. This whistling wind swept through the streets of Seattle in late 2000 as the anti-neoliberal-globalizers took the war back to the hegemonic home country where neoliberalism was born. Customs in Common, if read collectively within this contemporary context, may yield us a Movement reading that made The Making come so vividly alive for the social struggles of the previous generation.

Such a new Movement reading, initially coming upon The Essential E.P. Thompson, might take at its point of departure Customs in Common's “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”; this chapter rescues popular riots from the condescension of our ruling ideologues who fetishistically cast these complex forms of popular direct action as “simple responses to economic stimuli.” And, from Thompson's critical reconsideration of “moral economy” as a communal antithesis to the enclosing cupidity of the market economy, we may draw sustenance to plot renewed direct actions against the IMF and World Bank in strategic solidarity with food rioters still engulfing the world, from Indonesia to Venezuela. “The Grid of Inheritance” can offer us a method of redefining the existing inheritance system of corporate capitalist private property as “property in the usufruct, or a place within a complex gradation of coincident use-rights,” inducing us to contemplate means of radically reversing the decomposition of not only eighteenth-century English customary tenure rights but those of the global commons today, from Palestine and Africa to East Timor and Latin America, that are confronted by the “New Enclosures” of structural-adjustment and military imperialist policies. We can adopt “The Crime of Anonymity” that carefully analyzes the “anonymous threatening letter” as “a characteristic form of social protest in any society which has crossed a certain threshold of literacy” to decipher the limits and possibilities of contemporary cyber-class-war wherein anonymous hackers can leave defiant messages, spread computer viruses, and generate havoc within corporate and state memory banks. And, at a time when large sections of the Left and social justice groups employ the language of international law and human rights to critique the aggressive malfeasance that the US-and-NATO-centered Empire perpetrates, we can ponder on Thompson's critical appreciation of “The Rule of Law” as “a cultural achievement of universal significance” that may stay the hands of the ruling class even as they distort and misuse it to their own ends. “The Rule of Law” prods us to works out our own solutions—on the terrain of the twenty-first century—to the historical paradox of eighteenth-century English rulers who surrendered to their law instead of shattering “their own self-image” by repudiating “150 years of constitutional legality” and thus “threw retrospective light back on the history of their class and retrieved for it something of its honour.”

Perhaps it is possible for us to retrieve the honor of our own class by retracing the origins of feudal and bourgeois legal discourse to the popular consciousness and customary practices of the ancient commons in so-called prehistory, under whose mythical and ecological memory (characterized as the “Tao”) the personified collectivity known as Lao-Tze wrote: “The more rules you have, the more unhappy people are;/And the more weapons there are, the worse things happen./The more we want luxuries, the more we abandon simplicity—/And the more laws you pass, the more we will break them” and, on the limits of “rule of law” from above, “A legal man acts judiciously/But he is still serving his own ends.//And the rigid man uses laws/And if people don't like it, force.//If the true Tao is lost/then morality takes its place (141). Many of the commons that form the basis of contemporary “Asian and African villages” still retain the “Tao” or the unwritten, non-statist “rule of law” from below, and they face, as Thompson said, the same pressures of capitalist market revolution that assaulted the eighteenth-century English villages.

If, for example, we take Japan, one of the most enclosed and modernized of these villages and whose peculiarities rival those of the English, we find that even here The EEPT can serve as a fertile resource for rethinking its history. Weighing in on the “academic battlefield” of scholarship on the Industrial Revolution in “Exploitation” (a defining “structuralist statement” in The Making, according to Thompson), Thompson contrasted the “classical catastrophic orthodoxy” that, with the common syllogistic thesis of “steam power and the cotton-mill = new working class,” stressed the economically revolutionary and disruptive nature of this historical moment with the then “new anti-catastrophic orthodoxy” that, with empirically cautious, statistical circumspection, shifted the terrain of debate to the continuity of economic growth throughout the period. Thompson's attacks on the first for its tendency to assume an “automatic, or over-direct correspondence between the dynamic of economic growth and the dynamic of social or cultural life” and the latter for its “moral complacency, a narrowness of reference, and an insufficient familiarity with the actual movements of the working people of the time” are also applicable for the postwar developments in Japanese historiography.

Until the 1960s, the prevailing orthodox Marxist and modernization schools of scholarship have disagreed over the late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth-century Japanese “Industrial Revolution” along similar lines as the catastrophic and anti-catastrophic orthodoxies in English history, prompting the emergence of grassroots rebellion that took the form of “people's history” (minshū-shi). As Irokawa Daikichi, a leading practitioner of this “people's history,” wrote: “We advanced our studies as both a critique of the times and a movement, according to this problem consciousness [posing as “a doubt and challenge against the mainstream of our country's postwar historiography, namely Marxist (historical materialism) and modernist historiographies”]. Although often grounded organically in popular activism and excavation of regional histories through ethnological, oral methods—e.g., democratically participatory scholarship and organizing in the fishing village of Minamata which devastatingly suffered the effect of corporate mercury poisoning as well as among various Ainu and Buraku communities—its wholesale rejection of Marxism has tended to brunt the class dimensions of the histories and social relations that it constructively rescued.

The excerpts from Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class in The Essential E. P. Thompson, to say nothing of the entire book, can then still serve as a model to redress the limitations and strengthen the merits of this “people's history.” Reading “Class Consciousness”—the book's coda that explores the indigenous intellectual and cultural traditions of English popular Radicalism in the first half of the nineteenth century—under the “Satanic light” of Japanese popular radical traditions, we find ourselves reassessing the dynamics of the late-nineteenth-century jiyū-minken undō (“Freedom and Popular Rights Movement”), as Irokawa's own seminal Meiji seishin-shi (History of Meiji Mentality) did. Observing the split within this Movement between its reformist wing, centering on the urban bourgeoisie, that incorporated British parliamentarian ideas and its village-based radical democratic wing influenced by the French revolutionary tradition, we can comparatively situate the proponents of English Radicalism, such as William Cobbett, Richard Carlile, John Gast, and John Wade, as useful points of reference for their counterparts among the jiyū-minken radicals, such as the civil libertarian Nakamura Keiu, democratic radical journalist Nakae Chōmin, the footloose writer Kitamura Tōkoku, and radical constitutionalist Ueki Emori; follow the popular armed insurrections in the 1880s that developed out of the militant elements among the latter in Chichibu, Kabazan, Gunma, and Handa, which attacked the local police and moneylenders with the aim of overthrowing despotism and establish a free government; connect these struggles to the earlier ones of 1860s Yanaoshi and Eeijanaika millenarian peasant movements as well as to the 1870s anti-privatization peasant rebellions against the New Meiji state; and reconsider on its own terms the popular genealogy of radical Emperor-centered ideas and practices that modern Japanese scholarship, including that of minshū-shi, have tended to dismiss as reactionary or insufficiently democratic, tracing the historical roots of the Emperor system's prevailing power over the popular imagination and revolutionary ideas to its hegemonic capacity to incorporate the folk Shinto mythologies and rituals of the Japanese commons.

It is possible to turn this hegemony on its head if we look, for example, at the major Japanese participants in the pan-Asian revolutionary nationalist movements from the turn of the century to the 1920s, such as Kita Ikki and Miyazaki Tōten. Kita's father was an activist in the Freedom and People's Rights Movement; Miyazaki's brothers, while imbibing Rousseauean ideas, participated in the restorationist military struggles of Satsuma samurai against the central Bakufu government. Kita became the theoretical forefather of the Japanese radical right—whose tactics of assassinations and anticapitalist conceptions of the land parallel in some fundamental ways those of the nineteenth-century Russian Narodniki—and maintained close relationship with the antiwar socialist and anarchist Kōtōku Shūsui who, in turn, forged international links with the American Wobblies. Both Miyazaki and Kita actively aided the Chinese nationalist movement under Sun Yat-sen's leadership and exhibited in their writings and activism an indigenously Romantic ethos of radical loyalist hatred for social injustice and commonist sympathy for the peasantry.

In order to reclaim this tradition that suffered obliteration and institutional co-optation under the modern militarist and capitalist state in Japan, Thompson's exemplary reading of the Romantic roots of William Morris's socialism is of considerable value. Thompson characterized Morris's “attempt to invent (or re-invent) a language which would put at a distance Victorian society” according to “his stubborn attachment to Keatsian and pre-Raphaelite notions of ‘Beauty'” as “rash” and judged its premises “wrong” but at the same time recognized Morris's “youthful Romantic rebellion [as] not a rebellion of individual sensibility against ‘society,' but a rebellion of value, or aspiration, against actuality.” We witness in the struggles of Kita, Miyazaki, Kōtōku, and others following the generation of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement just such a retrenched, internationalist “rebellion of value, or aspiration, against” the actuality of emergent Japanese industrial capitalism and bureaucratization of state power even as we critically acknowledge their limitations. This dialectically committed style that suggested Marxism to “close down one counter in its universal pharmacy, and cease dispensing potions of analysis to cure the maladies of desires” and “allow a little space, not only for literary Utopians, but also for the unprescribed initiatives of everyday men and women who, in some part of themselves, are also alienated and utopian by turns” would be an essential one to emulate in rereading this historically critical moment at the birth of the modern Japanese working class and pan-Asian revolutionary struggles from below.

For, no less than so for Mills, it is above all Thompson's style—infectiously polemical, metaphorically supple, relentlessly detailed with more than a few recalcitrant iskra of archival fever, and paradoxically luminous with antinomian, moral energy—that irresistibly draws us in and vigorously stirs us to continue fighting for what he meant by another name. I have sketchily conjectured here that one such “another name” may be the anti-neoliberal-globalization movement that sprang up from the fiery fountainheads of the Zapatista and Seattle, along with the struggle to rewrite a sort of Japanese—and, by implication, world—history from below that wrestles with the customary practices and popular laws of the commons as the revolutionary fulcrum of the new global proletariat that may cut through the historically structured Gordian knot of contemporary capitalism.

We may thus bring together, with incendiary intent, both the Movement and Academic readings of Thompson for a renewed conjuncture of the international New Left that is already struggling under other names, categories, and possibilities that some of its predecessors may not recognize and even find misguided according to a set of obsolescent ideas that still bind them in the night of the political living dead. The polemically sardonic fire encased in crystalline rational analysis and unclouded stocktaking—found among the pieces collected in the last section “Reading and Writing History”—furnishes us with a model of a style for surviving this night of combat; it is a style that sagaciously defended the historical materialist logic from Althusserian “static, anti-historical structure” while admonishing that “radical history should not ask for any privilege of any kind” and that such a history “demands the most exacting standards of the historical discipline” and “must be good as history can be.” The Essential E.P. Thompson gives us a necessarily imperfect, intensely illuminating selection of texts for us to arm ourselves in the coming wars against “unreason, or . . . the reasons of power and the reasons of money,” in and outside academia, and, no less importantly, to recommence arguing with the undisputedly inspired tank commander of historical materialist reasoning and Muggletonian Marxist imagination who had inimitably penned these writings, as he would have wanted us to.