formula puts an impeccable emphasis on change, rather than on stability as Thompson imagines it to do. This is not to say that it furnishes a satisfactory solution to the problem. On the contrary, it is undoubtedly too restrictive. Did Marx’s death, for example, cause a mutation in existing structural relations? Scarcely. Yet it remains an eminently historical fact. The actual terrain tilled by the historian lies somewhere between a confinement to structural changes and an infinity of human behaviour. It is not a matter of reproach that neither Thompson nor Althusser should have resolved one of the oldest and most obdurate puzzles in the philosophy of history. But of the two, it must be said that it is the French philosopher rather than the English historian who on this occasion has given us the preferable reply—superior because sufficiently firm and definite to be falsifiable.
To sum up: Thompson’s definition of the object of history is casual and circular; his prescription for historical concepts, in a traditional emphasis on the approximate character of the discipline, is finally uncompelling; but the opening sections of The Poverty of Theory eclipse these shortcomings in their superb vindication of historical evidence, and of its authority over historical materialism. The lack of empirical controls which Thompson rightly perceives in Althusser’s work in fact forms part of a wider pattern within Western Marxism, as I have argued elsewhere, from whose speculative slide only Gramsci escaped. The period of that long proclivity is passing today, as a sounder and more inquisitive socialist culture has started to emerge in the 70s. The eloquence of Thompson’s admonitions should henceforth stand between it and the temptation of any return to the past.
1.PT, p. 205.
2.PT, p. 205.
3.Considerations on Western Marxism, pp. 64-65.
4.‘A Political and Philosophical Interview’, first published in New Left Review 86, p. 11, now in Western Marxism—A Critical Reader, London 1977, p. 325.
5.PT, p. 224.
6.PT, p. 218.
7.PT, p. 218.
8.PT, p. 387.
9.PT, p. 387.
10.PT, p. 387.
11.PT, 236.
12.PT, p. 237.
13.PT, p. 237.
14.PT, pp. 237, 249, 248.
15.PT, p. 248.
16.PT, p. 242.
17.PT, p. 242.
18.‘Die Unberechenbarkeit der kleinsten Körper’, from Me Ti—Buch der Wendungen, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol 12, Frankfurt 1967, p. 568.
19.Grundrisse, London 1974, p. 101.
20.PT, p. 231.
21.PT, p. 387.
22.PT, p. 232.
23.The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London 1960, p. 40: ‘Theories are, therefore, never empirically verifiable. If we wish to avoid the positivist’s mistake of eliminating, by our criterion of demarcation, the theoretical systems of natural science, then we must choose a criterion which allows us to admit to the domain of empirical science even statements which cannot be verified. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation.’ For Popper, of course, the problem of demarcation was that of the frontier between ‘the empirical sciences on the one hand, and mathematics and logic as well as “metaphysical” systems on the other’ (p. 34).
24.Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Cambridge 1978, especially pp. 31-47.
25.PT, p. 262.
26.PT, p. 223.
27.PT, p. 232.
28.What is History?, London 1961, pp. 5-6.
29.PT, pp. 281-282.
30.Reading Capital, London 1970, p. 102.
31.PT, p. 281.
The second major theme of The Poverty of Theory is no longer procedural—what is the nature of historiography?—but substantive: what is the part of conscious human choice, value, action in history? Readers of William Morris or The Making of the English Working Class will be aware that this is the key organizing theme of Thompson’s entire work. The passion he has brought to it over twenty-five years transpires from every page of what now takes its place as his most extended theoretical statement of the problem. His argument essentially runs as follows. Althusser’s cardinal sin is his repeated assertion that ‘history is a process without a subject’,1 in which individual men and women are ‘supports of relations of production’.2 Although presented as the last word in contemporary Marxism, ‘this is a very ancient mode of thought: process is fate’.3 Today, far from being a proposition of historical materialism, it is in tune with the most reified and decadent bourgeois ideology, which must be resisted by every committed socialist. For, on the contrary, both the genuine heritage of Marx’s theory and the actual findings of historical research teach
