37 Facts About EP Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner.

EP Thompson is best known today for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class.

EP Thompson published biographies of William Morris and William Blake and was a prolific journalist and essayist.

EP Thompson published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry.

EP Thompson's work is considered by some to have been among the most important contributions to labour history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.

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EP Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

EP Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s.

EP Thompson attended two independent schools, The Dragon School in Oxford and Kingswood School in Bath.

EP Thompson served in a tank unit in the Italian campaign, including at the fourth battle of Cassino.

EP Thompson formed the Communist Party Historians Group with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr and others.

EP Thompson's first major work of scholarship was his biography of William Morris, written while he was a member of the Communist Party.

EP Thompson subsequently allied himself with the annual Socialist Register publication.

EP Thompson took what others had regarded as scraps from the archive and interrogated them for what they told us about the beliefs and aims of those who were not on the winning side.

EP Thompson opened the gates for a generation of labour historians, such as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working classes.

Major work of research and synthesis, the book was important in historiographical terms: with it, EP Thompson demonstrated the power of a historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers.

EP Thompson wrote the book while living in Siddal, Halifax, West Yorkshire and based some of the work on his experiences with the local Halifax population.

In later essays, EP Thompson has emphasized that crime and disorder were characteristic responses of the working and lower classes to the oppressions imposed upon them.

EP Thompson argues that crime was defined and punished primarily as an activity that threatened the status, property and interests of the elites.

EP Thompson authored Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, published in 1967, which posits that reliance on clock-time is a result of the European Industrial Revolution and that neither industrial capitalism nor the creation of the modern state would have been possible without the imposition of synchronic forms of time and work discipline.

The new clock-time imposed by government and capitalist interests replaced earlier, collective perceptions of time—such as natural rhythms of time like sunrise, sunset, and seasonal changes—that EP Thompson believed flowed from the collective wisdom of human societies.

However, although it is likely that earlier views of time were imposed by religious and other social authorities prior to the industrial revolution, EP Thompson's work identified time discipline as an important concept for study within the social sciences.

EP Thompson left the University of Warwick in protest at the commercialisation of the academy, documented in the book Warwick University Limited.

EP Thompson continued to teach and lecture as a visiting professor, particularly in the United States.

EP Thompson's polemic provoked a book-length response from Perry Anderson entitled Arguments Within English Marxism.

From 1981 onward, EP Thompson was a frequent contributor to the American magazine The Nation.

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From 1980, EP Thompson was the most prominent intellectual of the revived movement for nuclear disarmament, revered by activists throughout the world.

Just as important, EP Thompson was, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, an author of the 1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, calling for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, which was the founding document of European Nuclear Disarmament.

EP Thompson played a key role in both END and CND throughout the 1980s, speaking at many public meetings, corresponding with hundreds of fellow activists and sympathetic intellectuals, and doing more than his fair share of committee work.

EP Thompson had a particularly important part in opening a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which he was denounced as a tool of American imperialism by the Soviet authorities.

EP Thompson wrote dozens of polemical articles and essays during this period, which are collected in the books Zero Option and The Heavy Dancers.

EP Thompson wrote an extended essay attacking the ideologists on both sides of the cold war, Double Exposure and edited a collection of essays opposing Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars.

EP Thompson's older brother Frank, was a member of the British Communist Party during the Second World War.

EP Thompson supported the resistance as a liaison officer but was captured and on 10 June 1944 he was executed.

Frank EP Thompson was a friend and confidant of Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and novelist.

EP Thompson wrote another book about his brother, published in 1996.

Kolakowski's portrait of EP Thompson elicited some protests from readers and other left-wing journals came to EP Thompson's defence.

Marc Steinberg argued that Stedman Jones' interpretation of EP Thompson's perspective was "reductionist", with EP Thompson understanding the relationship between experience and consciousness as a "complex dialectical relationship".