Democratic Revolution. Their significance—especially that of the French Revolution—is incomparably greater for the political formation of the English working class than, say, popular attitudes towards crime. Yet the latter receives careful treatment, while the former is relegated off-stage. Despite their central importance over two decades, the reader learns little or nothing of the complicated attitudes and debates within English radicalism over events in France. An apparent procedural bias excludes them: since social revolutions abroad cannot be entered as self-activity of the working class in England, they fall outside the historical accounting given of these years.
Their sequel is also largely omitted from the later parts of the book. For while Thompson invokes in principle the coincidence of industrial revolution and political counter-revolution during the Napoleonic Wars, with its simultaneous ‘intensification of two intolerable forms of relationship: those of economic exploitation and of political repression’,54 in practice the impact of two decades of war on English popular culture is virtually ignored. Like the pattern of capital accumulation itself, the reality of military conflict figures only gesturally in the narrative. One inevitable result is a minimization of the nationalist mobilization of the whole English population by the ruling class, in its tremendous struggle for supremacy with France. Yet no full picture of English popular culture after 1815 can be gained without due notice of the depth of the ideological capture of the ‘nation’ for conservative ends in Britain. The result is a serious over-simplification of the legacy of the wars. Thus in a memorable conclusion to the second part of the book, Thompson writes of ‘the loss of any felt cohesion in the community, save that which the working people, in antagonism to their labour and to their masters, built for themselves’.55 Eloquence here is not necessarily accuracy, however. The sense of national community, systematically orchestrated and instilled by the State, may well have been a greater reality in the Napoleonic epoch than at any time in the previous century. By overlooking it, Thompson can argue that whereas in 1792 the ruling class had governed by means of consent and deference, ‘in 1816 the English people were held down by force’.56 Hated though the Liverpool government was by wide sectors of the masses, this judgement must be deemed an exaggeration. An army of 25,000—the total troop-force available for domestic repression—was scarcely sufficient to pin down a society of 12,000,000.57 The power of the English ancien régime rested on a combination of culture and coercion, after no less than before the Wars. The prime weapon in its ideological arsenal, after twenty years of victorious fighting against the French Revolution and its successor regimes, was a counter-revolutionary nationalism. The structural importance of the latter, general and durable, was certainly greater than that of the more local and limited phenomenon of Methodism, however hysterical its manifestations—to which Thompson devotes one of the most unforgettable chapters of his book. England was, in fact, probably the first country in Europe in which nation overtook religion as the dominant form of ideological discourse—a change already, of course, under way in the 18th century. It would be difficult to guess this from The Making of the English Working Class, where few or none of the ideological bonds subordinating the immediate producers—not to their employers (Methodism or Utilitarianism are certainly present)—but to their rulers materialize.
How far do these omissions affect Thompson’s achievement? After all, no book can say everything. In face of the profusion of riches in The Making of the English Working Class, is it reasonable to ask for anything more? By ordinary standards, no. But the theme of the work is no ordinary historical one either, as we have seen. The pertinence of the gaps suggested above—the spearhead sectors of the Industrial Revolution, the commercial-rentier configuration of London, the impact of the American and French Revolutions, the galvanization of wartime chauvinism—is that they render a judgement of the issue posed at the beginning of the book unnegotiable. In the absence of any direct treatment of these massive moulds of the early history of the English working class, we have no way of adjudicating the part of collective self-determination in its making. The parity between agency and conditioning asserted at the outset remains a postulate that is never really tested through the relevant range of evidence for both sides of the process. For all their power, the descriptions of mass immiseration and alienation etched in the second part of the book are in no sense equivalent to a survey of the objective determinants of the formation of the English working class. It is not the structural transformations—economic, political and demographic—which Thompson invokes at the head of this part of the book which are the objects of his inquiry, but rather their precipitates in the subjective experience of those who lived through these ‘terrible years’. The result is to resolve the complex manifold of objective-subjective determinations whose totalization actually generated the English working class into a simple dialectic between suffering and resistance whose whole movement is internal to the subjectivity of the class. This is the force of the celebrated ending of the book. ‘Such men met Utilitarianism in their daily lives, and they sought to throw it back, not blindly, but with intelligence and moral passion … These years appear at times to display, not a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement, in which both the Romantics and the Radical Craftsmen opposed the annunciation of Acquisitive Man’.58 Inscribed in the moving clauses of its conclusion, the claim of parity between agency and necessity recurs, but within the form of the work it is not justiciable.
We may now look at the second major theme of The Making of the English Working Class, that ‘class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs’.59 We have called this the criterion of consciousness, because the effect of Thompson’s definition is to make the existence of a class depend on the presence of collective expression (feeling/articulation) of common interests in opposition to those of an antagonistic class (or classes). In The Poverty of Theory, as we have seen, Thompson restates this position even more sharply and unequivocally: ‘Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think, and to value in class ways’.60 Class consciousness here becomes the very hallmark of class formation. How plausible is this definition, empirically? The answer is surely that it is impossible to reconcile with the plain record of historical evidence. Classes have frequently existed whose members did not ‘identify their antagonistic interests’ in any process of common clarification or struggle. Indeed it is probable that for most of historical time this was the rule rather than the exception. The very term class, in the modern sense, is after all a coinage of the 19th century. Did Athenian slaves in ancient Greece, or caste-ridden villagers in mediaeval India, or Meiji workers in modern Japan ‘come to struggle, think in class ways’? There is every evidence to the contrary. Yet did they thereby cease to compose classes? Thompson’s error is to make an abusive generalization from the English experience he has studied himself: the remarkable class-consciousness of the first industrial working class in world history is projected universally onto classes as such. The result is a definition of class that is far too voluntarist and subjectivist—closer to an ethical-rhetorical parti pris than to a conclusion from empirical investigation. In his fundamental work Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen has rightly criticized the logic of Thompson’s description of class, vindicating the traditional Marxist thesis that ‘a person’s class is established by nothing but his objective place in the network of ownership relations … His consciousness, culture and politics do not enter the definition of his class position. Indeed these exclusions are required to protect the substantive character of the Marxian thesis that class position strongly conditions consciousness, culture and politics.’61 Cohen’s own account of the structural position of the proletarian in a capitalist economy, and of the gamut of possible relations of production that generate classes, is of exemplary clarity and subtlety. The concept of class as an objective relation to means of production, independent of will or attitude, is unlikely to need further reinstatement.
The untenability of Thompson’s definition of class in The Making of the English Working Class, if taken literally, can be seen from the later development of his own writing. As the field of his historical research has moved back into 18th century England, a period in which
