E.P. Thompson and the Discipline of Historical Context
Craig Calhoun
Journal article · 1994 · Social Research
Abstract
A he great English historian E. P. Thompson died this past year. Arguably most important founder of the social history, he was a transformative influence on and an inspiration for two generations of historians. His work held up to changing fashions, making sense as much to readers who grew up with new cultural history of late 1980s and 1990s as to those more concerned with labor and social organization twenty years before. Thompson helped to offer marxism with a human face to a New Left anxious to break out of orthodoxies (and scientism and factional quarrels) of its predecessors. Founder of New Reasoner (NR) and (after NR merged with Universities and Left Review) original editor of New Left Review, he was a powerful critical voice for four decades; he helped to maintain immensely intellectually productive and sometimes politically important borderland between academic scholarship and public activismand always, I think, regretted way this borderland had been attenuated by increasing capacity of universities to absorb and domesticate intellectual discourse.
Citation
Calhoun, C. (1994). E.P. Thompson and the discipline of historical context. Social Research, 61(2), 1-21.