CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO E. P. THOMPSON.
In this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture,...
| Published in: | History & Theory Vol. 63; no. 2; pp. 219 - 240 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Wiley-Blackwell
Jun2024
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=177482472&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 177482472 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00182656 HAT jtl: History & Theory issn: 00182656 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Jun2024 vid: 63 iid: 2 pid: 480 pub: Wiley-Blackwell artinfo: ui: 177482472 10.1111/hith.12343 ppf: 219 ppct: 21 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 165KB tig: atl: CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO E. P. THOMPSON. aug: au: Cunningham, Daniel affil: Old Dominion University su: Thompson, E. P. (Edward Palmer), 1924-1993 Making of the English Working Class, The (Book) Class formation Class consciousness Historical materialism Socialism Radicalism sug: subj: Thompson, E. P. (Edward Palmer), 1924-1993 Making of the English Working Class, The (Book) Class formation Class consciousness Historical materialism Socialism Radicalism keyword: British radicalism class class consciousness E. P. Thompson eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century history historical materialism socialism ab: In this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays "The Peculiarities of the English" and "Eighteenth‐Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" In the first section, I argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that Thompson developed a genuinely historical materialist theory of class formation as a "structured process" that moves from class struggle to class consciousness, a theory that complicates the frequent description of Thompson as a "voluntarist." In the second section, I take a more critical position toward Thompson's understanding of class, discussing a tension between this notion of class as structured process and his numerous invocations of class as a form of "lived experience" whose diversity and unpredictability exceed theorization. This tension aside, Thompson claims that, in the case of the nineteenth‐century English working class, to which he dedicated so much research, lived experience coincided with the more general structured process he posits. In the third section, therefore, I more fully elaborate on this specific process of class formation as Thompson portrays it, identifying and discussing three intertwined threads: (1) a movement from a past‐oriented defense of traditional institutions to a future‐oriented demand for reforms, (2) the development of oppositional, class‐specific pedagogical institutions and practices, and (3) the creation of a distinct class culture (which Thompson closely aligns with the achievement of class consciousness) that is aware both of itself and of its antagonism with other classes. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of History & Theory is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: History & Theory holder: Wiley-Blackwell dt: @attributes: year: 2024 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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