Description
Book SynopsisThis book is an intellectual biography of EP Thompson, as well as an exercise in the sociology of knowledge: as such, it considers not just Thompson’s ideas and arguments, but also the question of why he adopted those ideas, and made those arguments.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part One: From the thirties to the Cold War
1. The making of EP Thompson: family, anti-fascism, and the thirties
Part Two: New Left, old problems
2. Yesterday the struggle: ‘Outside the Whale’ and the fight for the thirties
3. A peculiar classic
4. Getting out of the tent
Part Three: Crisis and creativity
5. The road to St Paul’s
6. The eagle and the bustard: EP Thompson and Louis Althusser
7. ‘Mountainous inconsistency’: EP Thompson, Marx, and ‘The poverty of theory’
8. ‘Don’t tread on me’: the other side of Thompson’s critique
9. Between Zhdanov and Bloomsbury: the poetry and poetics of EP Thompson
Part Four: Making peace
10. After St Paul’s: EP Thompson’s late work
Conclusion: The last Muggletonian Marxist: The paradoxical triumph of EP Thompson
Bibliography
Index
