epistemology’.35 The paradigm that is presumed here is, in fact, much more central to Thompson’s work as a whole than the previous type. The emphasis of Thompson’s ‘experience’ is in general closer to that of Erlebnis then Erfahrung—moral-existential more than practical-experimental. But the same problem recurs in this register as well. What ensures that a particular experience of distress or disaster will inspire a particular (cognitively or morally appropriate) conclusion? Did the famine of the 1840s lead the Irish peasantry to think in new ways about the market? Few countries in the West have remained so immune to the socialist critique of it, even in the most timorous social-democratic form, as the Republic founded on that class. Did the imprisonment of a generation of East European Communists before the War make them champions of a humane justice and legality after it? The longest single ordeal in a White gaol was endured by a prisoner whose name, an international legend of heroism in the 30s, became a byword for sadism in the 50s: Matyas Rakosi. Experience as such is a concept tous azimuts, which can point in any direction. The self-same events can be lived through by agents who draw diametrically opposite conclusions from them. Another of the transformative upheavals cited by Thompson is war, which provides some of the most spectacular illustrations of this polyvalence. Just as few collective experiences were probably as intense as religion to the majority of producers at particular times in their lives (very unevenly) in pre-industrial epochs, so in modern times few popular experiences have been as strong and as widespread to many millions as national sentiment—materially rooted in locality, language, customs. What did this experience tell the exploited masses of Europe in 1914? That it was right and natural, even if unfortunate, that they should fight each other on an unprecedented scale. Did the four years of bitter massacre which followed undo this illusion, teaching them to reflect in new ways on the nation? In some cases—most of the Russian working class and peasantry, much of the Italian and a minority of the German working class—it did: the Third International grew precisely out of this matrix. In other cases, it did not: the traditional patriotism of the English and French masses was tempered by a certain post-war pacifism, but not fundamentally modified. In yet other cases, nationalism on the contrary underwent a hellish exacerbation: among the German and Italian petty-bourgeoisie, the Austrian peasantry, the Hungarian lumpenproletariat, defeat tightened the springs of revenge into fascism. The mass experience of death and destruction itself brought with it no necessary illumination. A forest of interpretations grew over the deserted battlefields.
In other words, the tacit first version of experience to be found in The Poverty of Theory—a set of mental and emotional responses as it were ‘given with’ a set of lived events to which they correspond36—cannot be sustained. However, as we have seen, Thompson also sketches a second definition, which seems to allow for divergences and variations of response much better. Here, experience itself remains an objective sector of ‘social being’, which is then processed or handled by the subject to yield a particular ‘social consciousness’. The possibility of different ways of ‘handling’ the same experience is epistemologically secured. This schema represents, in fact, the more recurrent and important of the two accounts advanced by Thompson, although there is a significant degree of oscillation between them. To see it worked through on a grand scale, we must turn to The Making of the English Working Class. In doing so, we will immediately rejoin the problem of historical agency at the deepest levels of Thompson’s intellectual engagement with it. This great work opens with the famous declaration: ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making’.37 For this making was an active process, ‘which owes as much to agency as to conditioning’.38 The early English proletariat was not the mere product of the advent of the factory system. On the contrary, ‘the working class made itself as much as it was made’.39 The fundamental form this agency took was the conversion of a collective experience into a social consciousness which thereby defined and created the class itself. ‘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. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way in which the experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class consciousness does not … class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.’40 The process of this formative definition is studied in three consecutive movements. The first part of the book reconstructs the political and cultural traditions of English radicalism in the 18th century: religious dissent, popular tumult, and constitutional conviction—the latter eventually culminating in Paine’s rupture with constitutionalism, followed by the brief episode of English Jacobinism in the 1790s. The second part deals with the catastrophic social experience of the Industrial Revolution, as it was lived by successive groups of primary producers—field labourers, artisans, weavers—and discusses the standard of living, proselytization, work discipline and community institutions of the working people in these grim years. The third part traces the growth of working class consciousness in successive political and industrial struggles against the new order during and after the Napoleonic epoch—the parliamentary campaigns in London, the outbreak of Luddism in the North and Midlands, the national radicalism led by Cobbett and Hunt, the massacre at Peterloo, the spread of Owenism. By the time of the crisis of 1832, Thompson concludes, ‘the working class presence was the most significant factor in British political life’.41 By now, indeed, ‘there is a sense in which the working class is no longer in the making, but has been made’.42
It will soon enough be twenty years since The Making of the English Working Class was published. Yet there has been surprisingly little historiographic discussion of the book on the Left; its extraordinary power seems to have inhibited the ordinary flow of critical reflection and assimilation which normally attends work of such magnitude. There are two main avenues along which a contemporary revaluation of The Making of the English Working Class could proceed. The first is a detailed empirical review of the evidence that has since come to light on the early years of the English proletariat, to see how far the panorama presented by Thompson needs local or general retouching. There is, of course, neither space nor competence for that here. The second is a closer look at the logical structure of the argument in this classic of English Marxist history. A few remarks will be attempted on this. From the brief summary given above, it will be seen that three fundamental theses sustain the architecture of The Making of the English Working Class. The first we shall call the claim of co-determination: that is, the thesis that the English working class ‘made itself as much as it was made’, in a causal parity of ‘agency and conditioning’.43 The second is the criterion of consciousness as the touchstone of class: namely, the contention that ‘class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences, 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’.44 The formulation here is closely echoed in The Poverty of Theory: ‘Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, think and value in class ways’.45 Classes exist in and through the process of collective self-identification that is class consciousness: ‘Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition’.46 The third thesis might be termed the implication of closure: in other words, the assertion that the identity of the English working-class was in some sense completed by the early 1830s, such that we can speak of it as ‘no longer in the making’ but ‘made’. The title of the work lends a decisive force of suggestion to this notion. Let us consider each of these themes.
The peculiar interest of the first is that we are presented with a practical test of the theoretical declarations of The Poverty of Theory. The ‘proportions’ of agency and necessity are specified, in a particular historical process—the formation of the English working class. Thompson judges them equal. The clarity and seriousness with which he poses the problem is beyond praise: it has no precedent in Marxist
