E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics

E. P. Thompson is a towering fi gure in the fi eld of labor history,best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, TheMaking of the English Working Class. But as this collection shows,Thompson was much more than a historian: he was a dedicatededucator of workers, a brilliant polemicist, a skilled political theorist,and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons,and for a rebirth of the socialist project. The essays in this book, many of which are either out-of-print ordiffi cult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963 duringone of the most fertile periods of Thompson’s intellectual andpolitical life, when he wrote his two great works, The Making ofthe English Working Class and William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.They reveal Thompson’s insistence on the vitality of ahumanistic and democratic socialism along with the value of utopianthinking in radical politics. Throughout, Thompson strugglesto open a space independent of offi cial Communist Parties andreformist Social Democratic Parties, opposing them with a vision ofsocialism built from the bottom up. Editor Cal Winslow, who studiedwith Thompson, provides context for the essays in a detailedintroduction and reminds us why this eloquent and inspiring voiceremains so relevant to us today.