the working class, good for all industrialized countries. A ‘certain kind of revolutionary movement’ is characteristic of the early years of a working class: but a ‘climacteric moment’ once passed, it disappears, and a more ‘limited, reformist’ phase sets in. This schema bears some resemblance to a widespread view within conventional sociology that the working class is rebellious in its youth because it has not yet accepted the irreversible advent of industrialism, unwillingly adjusts to the reality of the capitalist order in middle-age, and becomes reconciled to it through new levels of consumption towards retirement—before passing away altogether in a post-industrial society. The large difference, of course, is that Thompson—while willing to concede the possibility of a ‘break-up of the old class institutions and value-system’, and ‘far-reaching changes in the sociological composition of the groups making up the historical class’85—holds firmly to the hope of a transition to socialism, if necessary after such a transmutation. There is nothing discreditable about these hypotheses. But what leaps to the eye is that this type of perspective is quite incongruent with that of The Making of the English Working Class. For if such a universal sequence is ordained, what remains of the claim for particular invention in the case of England? Collective agency must inevitably seem to shrink in scope, once ‘much the same’ kind of outcome ultimately results from its exercise in ‘all advanced capitalist countries’. We are led to wonder: could the English working class not have made itself? The reductio ad absurdum involved in such a question casts a sharp final shadow over the claim for co-determination. The role of agency in history, just because it is so unremittingly pursued in The Making of the English Working Class, remains the more unmistakably elusive at the end of it.
Thompson’s major substantive work of history is concerned with the making of classes themselves. We can trace the recurrence of the same intellectual movement, and its limits, when he turns to the question of the making of history by classes, in The Poverty of Theory. There he cites Engels’s famous paradigm of the historical process: ‘History makes itself in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite parallelogram of forces which give rise to one resultant—the historical event. This again may be viewed as the product of a power which, taken as a whole, works unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something no one willed.’86 Thompson concedes part of the force of Althusser’s criticism of this construction. In particular, ‘Engels has not offered a solution to the problem, but re-stated it in new terms. He has commenced with the proposition that economic presuppositions are ‘finally decisive’, and this is where he concludes. On the way he has gathered in an infinitude of “individual wills” whose agency, in the result, is cancelled out’.87 But Thompson nevertheless sharply diverges from Althusser in his overall assessment of the passage, considering that ‘Engels has proposed a very critical problem (agency and process) and that, despite deficiencies, the general tendency of his meditation is helpful’.88 He argues, in effect, that with an amendment Engel’s formula can be retained. All is well if we substitute class wills for individual wills. Thus ‘the historical “resultant” cannot usefully be conceived as the involuntary product of the sum of an infinity of mutually-contradictory individual volitions’, for ‘these “individual wills”, however “particular” their “conditions of life”, have been conditioned in class ways; and if the historical resultant is then seen as the outcome of a collision of contradictory class interests and forces, then we may see how human agency gives rise to an involuntary result—“the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary”—and how we may say, at one and the same time, that “we make our own history” and “history makes itself’.’89
Does this emendation resolve the aporia of Engels’s solution? Thompson, of course, is right to emphasize that ‘individual wills are not de-structured atoms in collision but act with, upon and against each other as grouped wills’. But what he has forgotten is that he himself redefines class in such a way as in effect to make it dependent on a sum of individual wills. For ‘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: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are “given”’.90 In other words, the same regression towards infinity occurs within Thompson’s construction as in Engels’s: the only difference is that whereas for Engels the immediate building-blocks of history are individual men and women, for Thompson they are classes that are themselves built in turn by individual men and women. The convergence of end-results can be seen in Thompson’s dictum elsewhere: ‘agency lies, not in class but in men’.91 The central theoretical difficulty in either case remains intact. It concerns not the appropriate type—personal or collective—but the pertinent place of will in history. For the intractable question posed by any construction like that of Thompson is this: if fundamental historical processes, the structure and evolution of whole societies, are the involuntary resultant of a duality or plurality of voluntary class forces clashing with each other, what explains their ordered nature? Why should the intersection of rival collective wills not produce the random chaos of an arbitrary, destructured log-jam? Two of the greatest works of modern social thought have addressed themselves to precisely this problem—Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Parsons’s statement of the problem remains unsurpassed in clarity and cogency. How could the utilitarian model of conflicting rational interests ever found a coherent social order?92 What prevented it from dissolving into a relentless war of all against all? Himself deeply committed to a ‘voluntarist theory of action’, Parsons sought to provide a superior answer to the conundrum of how a multitude of individual ‘unit-acts’ could ultimately constitute a ‘social system’. His solution, as is well known, was to postulate common norms and values as the integrative framework of any society, informing individual acts and annealing divisive interests to ensure a stable and cohesive social whole. The idealist stamp of this escape from the Hobbesian problem of order, unable to explain either the generation or conflict of values themselves, has been criticized many times and need not detain us here. What is of greater interest is the close parallelism of problem and divergence of solution in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Sartre’s basic question was how historical processes could be rationally intelligible if they were composed of a multiplicity of individual ‘projects’ colliding, clashing and thwarting each other to produce the deadened and alienated inverse of human agency—the practico-inert in all its myriad figures. His aim was to explore how the ‘different practices which can be found and located at a given moment of the historical temporalization finally appear as partially totalizing and as connected and merged in their very oppositions and diversities by an intelligible totalization from which there is no appeal’.93 Thereby he hoped to establish the nature of history as a ‘totalization without a totalizer’, and of its ‘motive forces and its non-circular direction’.94 Unlike Parsons, Sartre as a Marxist naturally refused to invoke ‘hyper-organicist’ values as a totalizing principle of social or historical ensembles. He also proceeded beyond individual ‘praxes’ to the level of class practices and projects as such, while attempting to preserve the epistemological continuity between the two in a way that is not dissimilar to that of Thompson. In fact, it might be said that Thompson’s conclusion (substitute class for individual wills, which themselves compose classes) rehearses Sartre’s point of departure. For what it lacks is Sartre’s tormented awareness of the logic and empirical difficulties of constructing an ordered set of social structures from a multiplicity of antagonistic unit-acts. The remarkable unpublished second volume of the Critique is precisely devoted to the question: how can ‘a plurality of epicentres of action have a single intelligibility’, such that class struggles can be described as contradictions—in other words ‘particularizations of a unitary totalization beyond them’?95 The bulk of the work is taken up with an intricate series of analyses of social and political conflicts rending Soviet
