Readers in the humanities and social sciences abound. There are those that introduce key texts in a given field. Others seek to encapsulate the contributions of a major intellectual figure. In this latter category, there are volumes that focus on cultural critics, social theorists, literary scholars, and political writers. But there are few—if any—that highlight the writings of historians. It is thus says a great deal regarding E.P. Thompson's stature that the New Press has published The Essential E.P. Thompson. He is, as the book's editor Dorothy Thompson states, “one of the most influential historians of his generation” (vii). But he is more than this, as readers of this journal undoubtedly know. He is among the major public intellectuals of the last half of the twentieth century, certainly in the English-speaking world.

In his introduction to The Castoriadis Reader, David Ames Curtis reflects on what a Reader should contain. In his view it should provide a general survey of the author's work, convey a clear sense of the basic elements of his/her thought and how it evolved over time, incorporate selections for which the author is best known, and include texts that are normally hard to find but are deserving of wider recognition. Curtis is certainly not the last word on Readers, but he captures the multidimensional nature of the enterprise. Does The Essential E.P. Thompson fulfill these purposes? In many respects it does. It provides a clear picture of Thompson's principal achievement as an historian and a clear sense of his intellectual development: from the early biography of William Morris to later work on the early English working class and then still later writings on historical theory and eighteenth-century popular culture. I myself would have begun the volume with the selections from the Morris biography rather than The Making of the English Working Class. Despite being revised in the 1970s, it remains a work conceived in the 1950s. In addition, I would have included neither the book review of Claire Tomailin's biography of Mary Wollstonecraft nor the chapter from Alien Homage, a family memoir/history of his father's relationship to the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. They were perhaps chosen to establish Thompson's relevance for feminist and colonial/postcolonial scholarship but seem incidental to elucidating the development of his main ideas, although Alien Homage provides a fascinating glimpse into his family background. Replacing them with the extraordinary “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” would have been preferable.

I also have reservations regarding the selections made from larger works. I am not objecting to extracts on principle nor am I disputing the importance of the ones chosen. Yet both William Morris and The Making of the English Working Class are conceived on the scale of nineteenth-century novels. The inclusion of a few chapters wrested from their larger narrative poses serious challenges for readers. The selections from the Morris biography begin at a crucial juncture in the middle of his life. It is much like entering a conversation in midstream. These chapters might have been usefully supplemented by Thompson's 1959 address to the William Morris Society, an excellent introduction to his understanding of Morris, including a memorable analysis of his views on Morris's relationship to Marx, in his Making History: Writings on History and Culture (66–76).

Consider also in this context The Making of the English Working Class. Written, as everyone knows, in part as a polemical engagement with Marxist economism, its narrative is structured accordingly. Following the unforgettable Preface, with its classic definition of history from below, Thompson does not begin with working people's experience of the Industrial Revolution, which would have given a kind of credence to the economistic ideas that he was combating. Rather he sets the table by first discussing eighteenth-century political traditions of dissent: English working people did not face the Industrial Revolution as blank slates but as freeborn Englishmen. The book's organization is briefly mentioned in the Preface. However, the exclusion of these vital chapters produces the unintended effect of blunting the originality of Thompson's project. Short of including some of them, readers might have benefited by an introduction explaining the relationship between the parts and the whole.

In the Introduction Dorothy Thompson suggests that her husband “wrote little about historiography or historical theory, preferring to let the theory emerge from the historical and literary writing itself” (ix). This may be true in terms of the proportion of his overall work, but, as historians go, Thompson was unusually reflective regarding the relationship between historical theory and practice. The extracts from “The Poverty of Theory” include Thompson's most serious attempt to define his historical practice and his analysis of Marx's Capital and its problematic relationship to historical materialism. I am not a fan of this text as I have already stated in great detail elsewhere. Thompson was so preoccupied with demolishing Althusserian theoretical practice that he ended up damaging the alternative case that he was attempting to mount. His reflections here shed light on his practice as an historian but only hint at the essay's wider purpose as polemical intervention into British left-wing intellectual debates.

For years now Thompson's most important writings have been readily available. The Reader thus, not surprisingly, turns up little in the way of newly discovered or hard-to-find essays. The one exception is the 1966 essay, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, “History from Below.” It is to be read in conjunction with a text from twenty years later, “Agenda for Radical History,” a talk given at the New School for Social Research, originally published in Radical History Review. Appearing at the end of the volume, they comprise reflections on the state of radical and labor history at two very different moments in time, both in relationship to the development of radical history and to Thompson's own life. The early essay turns out to be a rather workmanlike survey, but it does convey the enormous optimism that radical historians felt at the time. Deploying an image of the ruling class that Christopher Hill had explored in a famous essay, Thompson argues that radical historical writing in England had defined itself against an official history that had “languished under the Norman yoke, and the seed of William the Bastard occupies the Chair” (481). Only in recent years had radical historians developed an autonomous voice. “What is happening now, in what used to be Labour history, is not a disintegration so much as a liberation” (489). The later text, reflecting a time when Marxist and labor history were beginning to enter into more troubled times, does not have the same kind of optimism. Acknowledging the transformed political climate ushered in by Thatcherism in Britain, Thompson tells his audience “that our radical impulses are really hemmed in in many ways” (492). At an event that also included Perry Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, Thompson distances himself from Marxism. He is bored by it as a system and sees its provisional categories as “difficult but still creative concepts,” although he still embraces the term historical materialism.

“Agenda for Radical History” reminds us that Thompson was much more than a historian. He makes clear that CND activism had placed historical work on the back burner, that his work in the peace movement had taken precedence over several partially written manuscripts. The Introduction to the Reader acknowledges Thompson's multifaceted intellectual and political interests, while specifying that the book will exclusively focus on his work as an historian. The question is this: does this warrant the title The Essential E.P. Thompson? It is certainly catchier than The E.P. Thompson Reader, and catchiness counts. But it would not have been by my choice. My first exposure to Thompson was his 1965 critique of the Anderson-Nairn thesis in “The Peculiarities of the English” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (245–302). I had never read anything like it. I was drawn to Thompson's socialist humanism; cultural Marxism; political activism; hardheaded, concrete, yet romantic thinking; and his sustained effort at fusing theory and practice. He was the first contemporary Marxist that truly made sense to me, but his being an historian, although important to me, was only partially the reason. There is of course a voluminous literature on the problems with essentialism. Leaving that aside, I cannot conceive of an “essential” E.P. Thompson that does not include his pioneering efforts at founding the New Left.

Thompson's intellectual life was overdetermined by the Cold War and much of his political writings bear its imprint. In our post-Cold War world there might well be a dwindling audience for them. Yet as we descend into a political epoch whose discourse rivals the Cold War in its irrationality and dogmatism, Thompson's efforts at finding a third way still seem relevant. I am therefore glad that we now have a single volume of some of Thompson's best historical writing. I just would have been happier with one that contained a broader view of his life and work.