For Aristotle identifying the essence of something was a step to its classification, and thus the genre to which it belonged. For Leibniz every individual thing had an essence, and thus it established specific difference. Who was the essential E.P. Thompson, one of a kind or a type? The vogue in America was to speak of the British Marxist historians, or English social history as a genre.

“To this day many academic history schools languish under the Norman yoke, and the seed of William the Bastard occupies the Chairs,” wrote Thompson in 1966. From America it seems that the genre called English social history helped to throw off the Norman yoke, but actually several schools (the seed of Alfred?) did that. First, the Warwick School. Thompson was the director of its Centre for the Study of Social History, which produced remarkable social historians, such as John Rule, Eric J. Evans, and Robert Malcolmson. It reached out to North America for graduate students such as Cal Winslow and Douglas Hay, and for senior labor historians such as Melvin Dubofsky and David Montgomery. Thus the Warwick School was trans-Atlantic. Ralph Samuel led the Ruskin School which practiced true history from below, whose practitioners came from the working class and were often non-matriculated. It spawned the glorious history workshop movement that grew around the world, Germany, South Africa. Stuart Hall led the Birmingham School, the third. It produced cultural studies and helped open academia to people of color and the formerly colonized.

The schools of “Alfred”, Warwick, Ruskin, Birmingham, lost their distinctiveness in the crossing to US academia, which at the border stamped them essentially as English social history. Essence as singularity became essence as genre in the crossing. Also crossing to the land of plenty was The New Left Review, which in its own way combated the Norman Yoke and was the seed of the new schools. The bright lights of Cambridge University (where Thompson went after the Second World War) whisked right through Customs without a problem.

The editor, Dorothy Thompson, is an English social historian of Chartism, respected from Ireland to Japan. She was also E.P. Thompson's wife. This gives to her selection of the essence an authority based on deep knowledge and long professional cooperation. Hers is the second meaning of essence, unique. In the preface to The Making of the English Working Class he describes her as his collaborator, and in The Poverty of Theory as a comrade who argued both with, and against, his views. She excludes his literary criticism, his novel, and his poetry. She also excludes his political work, both the occasional essays in the newspapers (some later collected in The Heavy Dancers (1985) or Persons and Polemics (1994) or Reading by Candlelight (1980) and the great campaigning documents, like Protest and Survive (1985). His sustained polemics, or interventions in the debates of international Marxism, are absent too, “Outside the Whale” (1960), “The Peculiarities of the English” (1965), “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowsky” (1973), and “The Poverty of Theory” (1978). She writes, “he increasingly hesitated to call himself a Marxist.” In this selection we do not see him as a socialist, or a revolutionary. Dorothy Thompson presents Edward Thompson as an historian.

Her selection is not based on chronology but on topics called Politics and Culture, Law and Custom, History and Theory, and Reading and Writing History. It proceeds from The Making of the English Working Class of 1963, back to William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary in 1955 forward a little bit to 1976 and the coda to the second edition of Morris, then back to an essay on Mary Wollstonecraft in 1974. A second section contains four pieces on the Eighteenth century. Despite the disclaimer that Edward was not a theorist two selections appear here from The Poverty of Theory of 1978. The book closes with two short, deft pieces on writing history, one from 1966 and the other from 1986. In the middle of the volume is a Brechtian interlude of Bengali-Oxford gossip from Thompson's book about his father in which having survived a night with a tiger growling at the bungalow, the next morning with Indian friends Thompson sahib sat beneath the ancient bo-tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment.

The essence being developed is a professional one. Yet, his history is poetic, not because it rejects the discipline of craft or the protocols of investigation. He was an original contributor to methodology and a discoverer of primary documentation. His history was epic, or poetic, because it expressed a yearning: he understood human nature as potentia: he expressed the revolutionary affirmative as a deep non-rhetorical litotes (the negative of the contrary). His rhetorical brilliance, his sustained metaphors, his ironic tone, his passionate cries, his awkwardness, his multiple voices were allied closely to archival rummaging and to his intellectual striving. His rhythms are consciously wrought. This is why was beloved, and why some still say he spoke of “the nation.” It is what Milton and Blake did, and at night in the loneliness of his study he communed with them. At one notable point, he spoke of history as the queen of disciplines.

Essentializing makes contextualizing more difficult. Edward was not only a great speaker, he was an attentive listener. The publisher has chosen to cite its own re-prints rather than the initial publisher, so the dates on the selections are later than the dates of first publication. The question of dates is important to that of context. The scholarly community was one context. Thus, “The Moral Economy” appeared not in Customs in Common (1991) but almost twenty years earlier (1972) in Past & Present, the journal of English social history. A second context was provided by his political comrades. The debate of 1956 is not here. He exchanged words with Raymond Williams, crossed swords with Perry Anderson, bruised Philip Corrigan. His students provided a third context. “The Crime of Anonymity” appeared in a volume which was largely a collective effort. You cannot understand “The rule of Law” unless you have understood their pre-occupation with crime.

Neither essence as generic English social history nor essence as the genius of the specific individual best grasps Thompson's achievement. An evolutionary and organic metaphor, his growth from a seed, at least calls attention to its origins. What was it?

In 1985 Edward identified the origins of that essence. Exhausted from the previous six years in the peace movement and speaking as if he too had stayed the tiger and sat under the Tree of Enlightenment, he spoke at a conference at the New School of Social Research with, and about, his generation of radical historians. “A certain breakthrough in British radical history, associated particularly at that point with the Marxist tradition, took place some forty-five years ago,” and he apologized for the military metaphor. He continued, “We're still exploiting the terrain that was opened up with that breakthrough.” What did he mean? He did not mean the breakthrough of the Blitzkrieg in Poland, Holland, Belgium, and France to the beaches of Dunkirk. However, the Nazi threats to social being undoubtedly in this last instance broke through social consciousness.

“Blood, sweat, tears, and toil”—“their finest hour”—the Four Freedoms: we recognize the moment. Breakthroughs in social consciousness were happening all over. Virginia Woolf, two houses in Bloomsbury wrecked by bombs and the Luftwaffe buzzing above her in the Suffolk Downs, extolled the tea-table (her sex was excluded from the high table and the conference table) and the human “mind.” In May 1940 she wrote, “thinking is my fighting.” Day Lewis apparently disappeared into the translation of Virgil's Georgics which was published in June 1940. Against the hypocrisy following the debacle of Munich and the defeat of Spain, he wrote “for a vision that saw beyond an imperial day the hand of man no longer armed against his fellow.” And his praise for subsistence or kitchen gardening on waste land which took as a metaphor that “our creative winged seed can strike a root in anything.”

Indeed, the breakthroughs in human thought in that 1940 spot of time included Mary Inman (wages for housework) and C.L.R. James (black power). In the weeks before his death trying to cross the Pyrennes, Walter Benjamin handed over in the Marseilles underground to Hannah Arendt his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” History is a flower, it must be brushed against the grain, not even the dead are safe from the enemy, the now is shot through with the chips of messianic time.

Such a chip fell on Edward. “For me in 1940 as a school student it came through the work of Christopher Hill: his first brief study of 1640. I sat down at the age of 16 to write for the sixth form history society a paper on the Marxist interpretation of history and the English civil war, leafing through Christopher's work, and Bernstein, and Petagorsky, and Winstanley's pamphlets and such Leveller tracts as I could get, and some Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov.”

In “his brief study” Christopher Hill criticized the Tory interpretation which suggested “that all politics is a dirty game, all principles are eye-wash, all revolutions useless.” He summarized Winstanley's view that “all men are equally and alike born to toke property, liberty, and freedom.” What was the lesson of 1940? If the legal system is not suitable to freedom, then it can be changed by united action. Commenting on Winstanley's freedom, it “was not a cheap politicians slogan: it mean the living struggle of comrades to build a society based on communal ownership.”

At first the Communist Party rejected the book on the grounds that he was wrong to see the civil war as a bourgeois revolution. Hill's book was called The English Revolution. In 1985 Thompson censored himself and spoke, not of revolution, but of the English “civil war.” It was a simple elision to make. The Cold War had done its work, revolution had grown tired. Done Torr, whose graceful independence of mind influenced the post war CPGB History Group, wrote that Hill was a pioneer and that “we all owe it to him in the first place and it was a victory for politics as well as theory.” In 1940 she produced a textbook on nationality and war, quotations from Marx and Engels whose purpose was to provide the reader with writings enabling the reader to “begin to see his own place as a maker of history.” Looking across the world from the flames of London, she noticed, “Millions who stood outside history have become makers of history.”

“We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender . . .” vowed the prime minister. Who was that “we”? Whose hills? Whose fields? Whose streets? Indeed, these questions extend the pact of Spain, as Auden wrote. George Orwell wrote that “the English Revolution started several years ago, and it began to gather momentum when the troops came back from Dunkirk.” Orwell translated Hill's “communal ownership” to include nationalization, educational reform, independence for India, and limitation of individual riches. Yet the Communist Party was not calling for revolution. The USSR had signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler. “1940 was a nadir of hope,” wrote Thompson.

There is a second point to be made about The English Revolution, and “the breakthrough in British radical history:” Hill's was not the only essay in it. Edgel Rickword wrote an essay about Milton. Later in life Thompson affirmed Milton's importance to him (“take free-will and determinism, and I first think of Milton”). Fred Inglis, the editor of Thompson's poems, expressed his conception of poetry “as the best, because the sanest, plainest and most affirmative speech of a free citizen, speaking on behalf of his or her comrades.” “His poetics therefore suffuses all his work.” “The poet's words and the historian's hunt together on behalf of the human.”

His brother, Frank, had joined the army despite his youth and the opposition of his parents. The young brothers had lost a young friend in Spain. Perhaps they made a brotherly pact, like tens of thousands of others. In August 1940 Frank Thompson shortly after the fall of France and the rescue of the British Army from the beaches of Dunkirk wrote a poem comparing the village casualties, Tom, Bill, and Dave, to the heroes of Troy. Taking his title from the Agamemnon, “they died in a war of others' making”—the young poet is not quite at home in the village pub, but gracefully familiar with Aeschylus. Yet, his theme takes you directly to twenty years hence and The Making: self-activity of the working class, the casting off of deference, the fury at riches, the demand for pay.

What is that writing to be? For both brothers history was writing. The life of action was a tale, an epic. A year just before embarking for the front, Frank Thompson wrote a poem called “Brother,” about two poets, two Communists, two brothers, about to become soldiers. Frank wrote in March 1941, giving meaning to brotherhood without using the word,

Frank was shot in 1944, becoming a casualty of both that war and the Cold War. Edward returned to this spot of time and its personal and political commitment, more so than 1945, or 1956, certainly than 1968. Despite the Soviet purges, the debacle at Munich, the struggle for power among the Spanish republicans, the orthodoxy of the Popular Front, the Russo-German Pact of 1939, this is when he made “a purposive historical commitment” of his life. Like Milton, he prepared himself early for a noble role, “surrounded by congregated multitudes, I now imagine that, from the columns of Hercules to the Indian Ocean, I behold the nations of the earth recovering that liberty which they so long had lost.” His authority and his assurance stemmed from this grief, that victory.

I emphasize the origins in 1940 of Thompson's political beliefs and literary commitments as the background to his professional accomplishments. Dorothy Thompson's theme of selection is Thompson's “exploration of English romanticism in art and politics,” even though his books about romanticism per se, Witness Against the Beast and The Romantics, are not represented in this selection. The 1955 work on Morris was the beginning of his “engagement with certain mechanistic and teleological forms of historical presentation which he found not only in mainstream economic and political history but in aspects of the Marxist tradition within which he was writing.” The “real silence in Marx lies in the area that anthropologists call value systems.”

Values might be virtues—wisdom, prudence, kindness, justice, faith, hope, charity. They might be Puritanical, sobriety, punctuality, thrift, cleanliness. They might be antinomian, excess, harmony, spontaneity. They might be English and political, indignation at child labor, at slavery, at bullies; they might include trial by peers, freedom of assembly, petition, thought, speech and publication. Thompson described craft-specific values. He referred to Brechtian values. Oddly, in light of his much noticed anglotude, he referred to a Gallic virtue, égalité.

Thompson argued within the philosophical tradition of English empiricism, and its positivist contrast of facts and values whereas the Marxist tradition describes value in relation to the commodity and its two kind of values, use-value and exchange-value. Even here ambiguity sets in because the ‘uses' are not questioned much. From these beginnings grew constructions such as money, constant and variable capital, organic composition, whose sociology and politics is scarcely explored. Instead, Thompson winked with the Linnaean phrase homo economicus.

“Political Economy has terms for use-value, for exchange value, for monetary value, and for surplus value, but not for normative value.” These are references to the first chapter of Das Kapital, but later Marx, unlike the political economists who preceded his critique, took us to the labor process, to concrete labor, to abstract labor, and to production in plantation, factory, field, garden, mine, mill, and home. Here values were made, and norms were forged.

Das Kapital “remains a study of the logic of capital, not of capitalism, and the social and political dimensions of the history, the wrath, and the understanding of class struggle arise from a region independent of the closed system of economic logic.” Contrast this with “we had, after all, the living line of Marx's analysis of British history, in Capital, in Marx and Engels' correspondence—continually present to us.” Over time the living line became the closed system.

The fact-value antimony might be replaced by a metaphor of animality. Capitalism is a female dog, squirming, hideous, nasty with undertones of pollution. In “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowsky” (1973) he referred to “that old bitch gone in the teeth, consumer capitalism.” “I know that old bitch well in her very original nature; she has engendered world-wide wars, aggressive and racial imperialisms, and she is co-partner in the unhappy history of socialist degeneration.”

In “Class Consciousness,” the final chapter of The Making of the English Working Class the radical tradition is distinctly separate from the romantic critique of utilitarianism. The Making described the making of the class which was to overthrow the bourgeoisie and replace capitalism with socialism. This is also the burden of “the river of fire” in the Morris biography, his transformation from a bourgeois aesthete to a communist agitator, educator, and organizer. That's why it attracted readers who were not otherwise inclined to English history. Can we therefore have the book as an empirical study of modernization but not a story of the class of people who can fulfill the revolutionary destiny of the destruction of capitalism?

William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary was “an argument about the Romantic tradition.” Morris was stimulated by Kropotkin as well as Marx. Ideas have contexts: “the ideas had work to do in the present before they were passed on down the line.” What he means by “work to do” is the causing human action. It is a Brechtian meaning. Thompson would say “socialist is not only one way of organizing production; it is also a way of producing human nature.” Precisely, what he wants his writing to do. “Perhaps we shall take a hand, write our own ending.”

There was a theoretical closure at the end of the nineteenth century such that the romantic critique became moralism or utopianism. The socialist movement retreated from “the acceptance of Utopianism as a valid imaginative form, because of a fright given to us by Engels in 1880.” To Morris romanticism included historical consciousness. “I have heard people miscalled for being romantic, but what romance means is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present.” “Beauty, medievalism, Germanic, Icelandic sagas” were Morris' means of detachment from utilitarian notions of progress, capitalist private property, and technological determinism. “No swearword is more devastating than romantic,” Thompson complained.

Maximization of economic growth is the utilitarian earthly paradise, in contrast to the vocabularies of desire, faculties of speculation, moral self-consciousness. He argues Morris derived communism out of the logic of the Romantic tradition. It is surprising that he didn't correct this following the findings of The Making of the English Working Class. Is it entirely true that Morris did not explore a derivation of communism from the Radical tradition, in contrast to the Romantic? Moreover, the romantics, too, came from somewhere!

His historical subjects went deeper into time, from Marx and the socialists of the nineteenth century, to the radicals and artisans of the eighteenth, to the plebeians of the bread riots and the commoners at enclosure. He recovered each of these dialogues from “the Norman yoke and the seed of William,” or the pall of Stalinism and the complacency of the bourgeoisie. If his life-time concern was the dialogue between social being and social consciousness, then we could make a little non-poetic diagram expressing the revolutionary ideal of equality. Between the books he was active politically. In the first interval he was active in CND and the New Left; in the second, he formed END and helped end the Cold War.

Morris drew on Ruskin and Carlyle, and “upon the very deep commitment he had learned for certain precapitalist values and modes.” Their remit may be larger: if not universal history, then our experience must include the huge reservoir of the commons or the environments protected by the indigenous peoples. Here too is a source of dignity. With the defeat of the Maori in New Zealand, with the Cherokee's Trail of Tears, with the starvation in Ireland, with “the Song of Hiawatha,” with the defeat of the Bedouins in Algeria, with the missionaries prohibition of the surfboard in Hawaii, it is clear that the values and modes did not disappear. Benjamin again: “not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself, is the depository of historical knowledge.” He advised “a tiger's leap into the past.”

“What's radical in [radical history] demands some relations between the academy and active experience . . . and some distrust of easy assimilation by the lost society, an awareness of the institutional and ideological determinations of the society in which we work, which are founded upon unreason, or on the reasons of power and the reasons of money.” The essential Thompson includes this radicalism.

Thompson's work seen as a whole, as an oeuvre, enables us to see both the experience and the history together. Edward believed in human action which is why he blamed Orwell for predicting in 1940 “the passive attitude will come back . . . Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism, robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.” His history writings are thus like Bertolt Brecht's notion of epic theatre whose principle was commitment to social change, whose method was Historisierung, whose soul lay in the story rather than the psyche, whose constant interruptions created a genre without the closures of logical causality, and which was antiillusory. History was essential to his poetry and politics and vice versa.