E.P. Thompson

The Poverty of Theory

or an Orrery of Errors

1978


Digitalized by Mark R. Baker on November 11, 2010. Marked-up by Jonas Holmgren for the Marxists Internet Archive.


Postscript

I have not contributed a position paper to this book, since The Poverty of Theory is that. And it remains that. I have followed and am following the discussion which is going on, in History Workshop Journal and elsewhere, and am learning from it. But I have not changed my positions at any central point. However, the articles of Richard Johnson and Stuart Hall raise points which require a comment.

First, I simply want to place on this table certain refusals. Of which the most substantial is this: I reject without reservation the identification of the Marxist tradition of historiography of which I have been taken as one representative of ‘culturalism’. The term is of Richard Johnson’s invention. He comes before us, in his article, reproving everyone except himself for ‘theoretical absolutism’. This results, he argues, in an inflation of issues, a whole massive . . . investment in one particular set of differences.’ I am told that my polemic ‘hardens up differences . . . reproduces really unhelpful polarities.’ Yet it is, of course, the specious opposition between his invented category, ‘culturalism’, and a supposedly authentic Marxism (which, however, has no representative historical works which can point to ... as yet) which is a theoretical absolutism, and which it does all these things.

This category of culturalism is constructed from some sloppy and impressionistic history. Examine Johnson’s description of ‘the Moment of Culture’. ‘Roughly mid-1950s - early 1960s.’ ‘Key texts: Raymond Williams’s early work: EPT’s Making: Hoggart’s Uses? This gives us a mish-mash, a ‘cultural’ blur. What puzzles me is that Richard Johnson, who has worked across a corridor from Smart Hall for several years, could read the history like that In the mid-1950s Richard Hoggart’s attitude to Marxism was one of explicit hostility, Raymond Williams’s was one of active critique, Stuart Hall’s (I would summarise) was one of sceptical ambivalence, whereas, from 1956 onwards, the Reasoner group, with which was associated, closely or loosely, a number of Marxist historians - among them John Saville, Dorothy Thompson, myself, Ralph Miliband, Michael Barratt Brown, Peter Worsley (an anthropologist, but we will allow him in), Ronald Meek, Roy den Harrison, and, less closely, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton, and (as a friendly but politically distanced critic) Eric Hobsbawm - this group was attempting to defend, re-examine and extend the Marxist tradition at a time of political and theoretical disaster.

I am not saying that we were right, and that Hoggart or Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall were wrong. I am not trying to fight out old fraternal battles or differences over again. It may well be that we old Marxists at that time had got into ruts, and that Hoggart, Williams or Hall, running free on the surrounding terrain, helped to tow us out. What I am objecting to is this mish-mash, coming from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. After all, not only MI5 keeps files: some of us have files as well. And there were some fierce polemics in those days - for example, on the question of the Pilkington Report - which turned precisely on the question of ‘cultural studies’.

What I am struggling with is the irony that we Marxists then were subjected to an unremitting critique from positions of an explicit and articulated culturalism; yet today some of those critics have turned full circle, and are accusing us, from positions which are claimed as authentically Marxist, of those culturalist sins - that ‘Moment of Culture’ - which was, precisely, their own. It is not a question of the theoretical rights or wrongs of the issues: the critique, then or now, may have force. It is simply a question of getting the history straight, which as historians we ought to do.

Let me give one illustration. Richard Johnson tells us that this ‘Moment of Culture’ produced powerful paradigms of the study of the culture: for example, the ‘centrality of lived experience - cultural as a whole way of life.’ When Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution came out, Stuart Hall, as editor of New Left Review, commissioned me to write a review article upon it. After reading the book I asked to be relieved of the task, since I found my theoretical differences with Williams to be so sharp that, to express them fully, would endanger the political relations of the New Left. (I mention this anecdote because it may illustrate the dangers of theoretical opportunism, or the covert suppression of differences - without any Stalinist or Leninist intervention - when one is engaged in an active, urgent and fraternal common political movement.)

Stuart Hall, who was not then, and who is not now (I think) a Stalinist, rejected my refusal and encouraged me to write out my critique fully and without inhibition. My article, which appeared in two numbers of New Left Review (Nos 9 and 10, May-June and July-August 1961) - in fact in three, since a page was inadvertently dropped and appeared subsequently on the line like a single sock (September-October, 1961) - was precisely a critique of Williams’s claims for ‘cultural history’, as the history of ‘a whole way of life’, and a critique in terms of Marxist categories and the Marxist tradition, which offered the counter-proposal of ‘a whole way of struggle’, that is, class struggle. I argued in this piece:

“Any theory of culture must include the concept of the dialectical interaction between culture and something that is not culture. We must suppose the raw material of life-experience to be at one pole, and all the infinitely-complex human disciplines and systems, articulate and inarticulate, formalised in institutions or dispersed in the least formal ways, which ‘handle’, transmit, or distort this raw material to be at the other. It is the active process - which is at the same time the process through which men make their history — that I am insisting upon.”

And I argued, explicitly, that we could not grasp the one pole without the concept of the ‘mode of production’ nor the other pole without the concept of ‘ideology’. I proposed directly that there was a theoretical gap, in the formative New Left, between Williams’s ‘cultural history’ and the Marxist tradition, and discussed ways in which this might be bridged, or exchanges between the traditions might be most fruitful.

Any reader going back to that exchange from today’s more theoretically conscious world will find my defence of the Marxist tradition to be not only lacking in confidence but also innocent. We Marxist dissidents, in the years 1956 to 1962, were beset not only by radical inner doubts and self-criticism, but also by a total climate of scepticism or active resistance to Marxism in any form. This climate permeated the New Left also, at its origin, and many comrades then shared the general view that Marxism, in its association with the Soviet state and with indefensible communist apologetics, was a liability which should be dumped, while new theories were improvised from less contaminated sources. My defence of the Marxist tradition then, against culturalism, has none of the robust confidence which characterises ‘The Moment of Theory’. When I brought Capital forward to challenge one of Williams’s propositions, I felt it obligatory to cover my quotation with an apology:

“Oh, that book! Do we really have to go over all that old nineteenth-century stuff again? We have all felt this response: Marx has become not only an embarrassment but a bore. But The Long Revolution has convinced me, finally, that go over it again we must.”

In the past fifteen years - ‘the Moment of Theory’ - this going-over has been done, even to the point of obsession. There have been some strange reversals of position in the same period. Williams has submitted some of his own culturalist positions to a self-critique far more thoroughgoing than any that I offered in 1961. Williams and, certainly, Stuart Hall have shown increasing respect and confidence in the notion of a Marxism as a total and systematic theory, and, to the same degree, my own confidence in such systematisation has become less. So . . . let me make clear, once again, what I am arguing about. I am not proposing that, in 1961,1 was right and that Hoggart, Williams or Stuart Hall were then wrong. I admire all these writers, for many things; the dialogue of the early New Left was a fruitful one, from which both traditions gained; and today I am very close indeed to Raymond Williams on critical points of theory.

My point is that my critique of what Johnson calls culturalism appeared in 1961: that is, exactly when I was in mid-flow in writing the Making of the English Working Class. And that the Making was written, not only during a period of polemics against Stalinism and positivist economic history, but also during a conscious and open-running critique of ‘culturalism’. And it is very easy to establish this point, without resort to nuanced private histories or files.

What Richard Johnson is not interested in - what scarcely seems to enter the door of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies - is any consideration of the politics of his ‘moments’. His notion of ‘theory’ is abstracted from any analysis of the generative political context, and what he is interested in - and how could he write this phrase without feeling a chill somewhere in his epistemological organs? — is ‘the production of really useful knowledge’. Which knowledge, however, must not be tainted by empiricism, must be at a high level of abstraction, and must point towards a Utopia when total history will at last be written. Some rather important ‘texts’ of that ‘Moment of Culture’ are altogether overlooked: Khrushchev’s secret speech (a text which still requires close and symptomatic reading); the speeches of John Foster Dulles; the crisis of British imperialism at Suez; the debates at the 8th Plenum of the Polish Communist Party, the poems of Wazyk, the stories of Tibor Dery, and on and on.

What brought that jumble-sale of theoretical elements together in the first New Left was not a moment of culture at all, but a common sense of political crisis. It was the politics of that moment which directed all of use, from different traditions, to certain common problems, which include those of class, of popular culture and of communications. Examine that moment - situate yourself for a Marxist historical or cultural analysis - and you must commence, not within theory, but within the political world. Marx would have started that way; for what concerned Marx most closely was not ‘economics’ nor even (dare I say it?) epistemology but power. It was to understand power in society that he entered that lifelong detour into economic theory.

We thought, in the late 1950s, watching the flames arise above Budapest, the traditional working-class movement erode around us, while nuclear war seemed imminent, that we had to enter different detours in pursuit of the same questions. Social being had made a convulsive and overdue entry upon social consciousness, including Marxist consciousness, and the times set us not only certain questions but indications as to how these must be pursued. This, and not culturalism, proposed the questions addressed in the Making. It is altogether right that readers today are dissatisfied with the book, or, if not dissatisfied, are looking for different books. Today is proposing, urgently, different questions.

But what is all this theory, or even ‘socialist history’, about it if is so ecumenical that power and politics scarcely matter at all? Richard Johnson will not have us inflating differences: our discourse must be ‘careful and respectful’ and be conducted in a ‘sisterly and brotherly way’. It is easy to be respectful, sisterly and brotherly, if one’s theory can never do so much as bend a pin in the real political world: if one never has to be called to account for one’s theories, since the gap between theory and actuality is so rarely crossed: or if theory is reduced (in part by external determinations, in part by our own inward-turning mentalities) into little more than a psychodrama within the enclosed ghetto of the theoretical left.

It is, I agree, improper to get heated about Stalinism in an academic seminar. It is certainly wrong for elderly teachers to bully or indoctrinate the young. But is it possible to carry over the proper procedures of academic discussion into the political world just like that? For there is another political world, to which The Poverty of Theory was addressed. And it is a world which, like it or not, is less than sisterly or brotherly, in which we must acknowledge solidarities, and discriminate between theoretical kin.

I was going to leave it at that. But I have recently received this criticism from many quarters - ‘fighting old battles’ and the like - and something more must be said. There is, first, the matter of aggression. The Poverty of Theory is sometimes presented as an unseemly act of aggression, breaking in upon and disorganising a constructive, ‘careful and respectful’ discourse of the theoretical left. But, from the position of my tradition, the matter of aggression can be seen very differently. For a full decade a theoreticist and structuralist campaign had been directed at our positions, for their supposed ‘empiricism’, ‘humanism’, 'moralism', ‘historicism’, theoretical vacuity, etc. This campaign had almost overwhelmed the older Marxist tradition in sociology, rooted itself deeply in the criticisms of film, art and literature, and was massing on the borders of history. What seemed to be at risk, then, was not this or that book of mine or of Genovese’s - and I don’t at all wish to protect our work from criticism - but a whole tradition of Marxist historical practice, which had never been theoretically vacant, and whose very continuity seemed to be under threat. In this sense. The Poverty of Theory was not an act of aggression but a counter-attack against a decade of Althusserian dismissal.

Second, I really don’t think that Richard Johnson himself understands the way in which a certain kind of appeal for an absence of polemic, for ‘careful and respectful’ discussion in ‘brotherly and sisterly’ ways, can be a stratagem for doing two things: first, removing socialist theory from a political to an academic context, and he also insists that ‘the Moment of Theory’ must be removed from context also. To point out, as I have done, that this Moment originates in the work of Althusser, in a very particular context of polemic (as well as organisational measures, expulsions, controls, etc.) within the French Communist Party against libertarian and humanist critics within the French Marxist and socialist movement is to introduce improper (untheoretical) considerations.

But this is pre-emption with a vengeance. It is to say that discussion must be on the ground which he has indicated and on no other. It is to say, also, that considerations of ideology, while no doubt proper when we are examining racism, sexism, empiricism, humanism and the rest, are quite improper - even inconceivable - when considering the communist or Marxist movement, where all arises in a medium of pure theory. Richard Johnson declares, in his position paper, in his careful and respectful way, that 1 see The Poverty of Theory as mainly mischievous in its effects.’ I have been trying to explain why I find his new absolutist category of ‘culturalism’ to be mischievous also. It is a category which he has shown, not only into national but also into international discourse, and, if uncontested, it would lead to serious misrecognitions, and threaten to close off or eject a large and still-creative tradition of open-ended Marxist or marxisant historical practice. But to contest that ejection it is not adequate to enter meekly upon the ground which he has declared to be legitimate, and then argue respectfully that this is or that formulation is incorrect. It is necessary to refuse his ground and his terms.

In doing this, voices sometimes get raised. And I am chided for this by Gareth Stedman Jones, a comrade and historian whom I greatly respect. He says, in History Workshop Journal 8, ‘Since Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production and The Poverty of Theory, the tone of debate has fallen to the worst standards of the Cold War.... We are enjoined to think in manichean terms’. Now this also seems to me to be pre-emption - again, perhaps, unconscious - of a different kind. I must remind you where The Poverty of Theory came from. It came from the socialist and Marxist tradition, in particular from the tradition of the Reasoner. All of the comrades associated with that tradition lived through the worst years of the ideological Cold War, and we were at the receiving end of it. When our own crisis came, in 1956 or thereabouts, not one person in that tradition of Marxist historiography ran to Encounter, lamented that our God had failed, or called for the wholesale rejection of the Marxist tradition. Nor did we quit the socialist movement: there are at least four members of the board of the old New Reasoner (John Saville, Dorothy Thompson, Peter Worsley and myself) at this workship today. I mention these points because I think they argue an entitlement in us - when we confront what appear to be over-familiar idealist deformations, as well as large and guilty silences, in what passes as a Marxism - to argue the points, within the left, sharply and with force. The Poverty of Theory was a political intervention, coming from a socialist publishing house and addressed to the left.

We cannot discuss Marxist theory today, carefully and respectfully, while holding the hand over the fact that in huge territories of the world power is endorsed by a state-orthodoxy called Marxism, which is profoundly authoritarian and hostile to libertarian values. Those who ask us not to mention such matters too loudly, in the name of solidarity on the ‘left’, are simply asking to be left in the possession of the field - to define what the ‘left’ is - and using solidarity as a gag. They are also reassuring us, without permitting an inspection, that there could not possibly be any theoretical component in the disasters of real socialist history.

Now I find this very strange. Because the same theorists are very sensitive, and sometimes enlightening, in showing us the way in which capitalist, racist or sexist ideologies reproduce themselves by theoretical means. But for some reason ‘Marxism’ is proclaimed as utterly exempt from similar ‘protocols’: it is improper even to suggest that Stalinist ideology, or authoritarian, elitist, inhumane and philistine attitudes could reproduce themselves within Marxism by theoretical means. A very special privilege, an immunity from ideology, is claimed. Well, I have argued otherwise in The Poverty of Theory: I have argued that ‘the Moment of Theory’ had ideological origins, that structuralism has enabled vast areas of guilty silence to be kept as to Stalinist practice, and I have even argued, more carefully than some critics suppose, the difference between Stalinism as a historical eventuation and Stalinism as an existing ideological tradition. I have been trying to establish libertarian positions, not just on a basis of moralism or utopian aspiration, but at a level of theory: and such a splitting-apart of authoritarian and libertarian elements within a common theoretical tradition cannot be effected without a polemic which must, on occasion, appear ‘manichean’.

I will agree, however, that the indiscriminate hurling around of accusations of ‘Stalinism’ is no more helpful to thought or practice than any other sort of indiscriminate boo word: racism, empiricism, sexism or humanism. Discrimination is what matters. What matters is to explore those large and guilty areas of silence which Althusserianism walled off with its own boo words and its own specious appeals to a solidarity of the ‘left’ which left its practitioners in command of every wall. If Gareth Stedman Jones means that ‘Stalinism’ is a term so heavy with emotion that it cannot be used for discrimination, then - if he will also agree that the other walls must be pulled down which have for too long protected that historical and theoretical object from analysis - I will attend to his objection with care and respect.

Some more refusals, very much more briefly. They chiefly concern Stuart Hall’s article. What puzzles me about this is that it carries a whole set of assertions as to my positions which are not founded upon any careful attention to my text. Of course I see a problem in empiricism. I certainly do not reject filiations between law and class rule in the twentieth-century - although.

I do not always see these as he does, I have argued the complexity of these, and I have certainly not argued ‘contra the left, tout court’. I certainly do not reject concepts of structure: I am at pains to distinguish such valid conceptual and heuristic organisations from structuralism. I am astonished to find that ideology is an ‘absent category’ from my work.

I am also astonished to find that I present values and norms as ‘transcendental human values outside of real historical conditions’, a point which also appears in Simon Clarke’s generous and historically informed critique ‘Abstract and Ahistorical Moralism’, History Workshop Journal 8, p. 154. This seems to me to indicate a serious closure or refusal which still marks the Marxist tradition. For what I actually say about this - ‘A materialist examination of values must situate itself, not by idealist propositions, but in the face of culture’s material abode: the people’s way of life, and, above all, their productive and familial relationships’ (Poverty of Theory, p. 238) - allows no warrant for this dismissal. This continues to be, as in my revised William Morris, and my ongoing work on eighteenth-century customs, a central piece of my own historical and theoretical engagement: neither abstract, nor a-historical, nor transcendental, but contextual and materialist.

I am surprised to find that, in my attempts to define the historical discipline, with its own logic or discourse of the proof, I have given the impression that all ‘History’ is somehow immune from ideological intrusion and may stand above other disciplines as a ‘judge’. And, finally, I am surprised to find that readers still think that I have proposed some ‘culturalist’ theory of class, in which people float free of economic determinations and discover themselves in terms of some immaterial consciousness. (I have written about this, to different effect, repeatedly: most recently in Social History, Vol. 3, no. 2: but see also the excellent study by R. W. Connell, ‘A Critique of the Althusserian Approach to Class’, Theory and Society, 8, 1979.)

I am not attempting to refuse all criticism. I am refusing the category of ‘culturalism’ (which I see as one more wall of silence), and inaccurate criticism. As for the general debate in HWJ I have found much in it that is constructive, and clearly find many points made by McLelland, Tim Mason, Clarke, Williams and Stedman Jones to be helpful. The clarification of concepts in Capital and respecting the Marxist notation of the capitalist mode of production is very certainly helpful; and I am more than willing to accept (and welcome) correction and clarification in economic theory, where my work has obvious weaknesses.

There are still certain difficulties in this exchange. That is, it is not helpful to criticise me or Genovese for not having written out different versions of Capital, when our objects of study and our particular skills were not those of Marx! We have both been working in a Marxist tradition of historiography, supported by the skills of colleagues in adjacent disciplines, and chastised or enlightened by the criticism. When writing the Making, whose central object of study was a moment of class formation, I compensated for my own weakness in economic theory by borrowing heavily from that tradition (Marx or Dobb) or by exchanges with colleagues (John Saville, Hobsbawm and others). I am sure that weaknesses remain, which merit criticism. But I am distinctly unhappy - especially in relation to Marist historiography - at this tendency towards a cult of the methodological individual, whose themes, objects of study and characteristic weaknesses (or even strengths) must be prematurely defined as identifying an absolutist position. It is not only that this puts upon an individual’s work more than it can bear (unless one is a Marx, which none of us are), thereby distracting attention from equally significant adjacent work within a common tradition. It is also that it erects walls within a tradition, which need not be there. In fact, in the British Marxist tradition of historiography these walls just have not existed: colleagues of much harder - even ‘economistic’ - emphasis have argued with me, and I have argued back, and we have both learned from the exchange, just as the very different traditions of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Past and Present, Social History, New Left Review and the History Workshop engage in fruitful exchanges today. If I have resisted structuralism so vigorously — and refuse with vigour the attempt to label a whole ongoing tradition of work as ‘culturalism’ - it is exactly because we should not allow these absolutist walls to be built and to interrupt our exchanges.

The other difficulty in the exchange is that some of the contributors, while making valuable criticisms, appear to wish to reconstruct Marxism-as-system (Tim Mason of course is a warm exception) - and sometimes (as Gareth Stedman Jones suggests, HWJ 8) a system reconstructed in their own image. This is a difficult distance to argue across, but I hope that we can continue to do so. A characteristic of his notion of Marxism-as-system is an insistent attribution of heuristic priority, not only in an epochal sense, but in every detail of method, to the mode of production: the notion persists that, once this can be really theorised and put together with all the bits (including aesthetics and the common law) in the right places, all problems of explanation are ended; indeed, one might then not have to research history at all, because the theory would anticipate the results. I have explained, and I hope with some care, in The Poverty of Theory, why I reject this notion of ‘theory’ - in explaining everything, in one complex gulp, it leaves the actual history unexplained.

This is not, of course, a question of whether we need theory or not. Do I need to say that the title of my book did not invoke the jettisoning of all theory, any more than Marx, in writing The Poverty of Philosophy, intended to jettison all philosophy? My critique was of Theory, of the notion that it could all, somehow, be put together, as a system, by theoretical means. In every moment of our work we certainly need theory - whether in defining problems of the mode of production, or micro-economics, or the family, or culture or the state - and we need research which is both empirically and theoretically informed, and the theorised interrogation of what this research finds.

Two self-critical points. The first arises generally, but particularly in Gavin Kitching’s position paper. What surprised me in Kitching was his assertion that I collapse exploitation into the experience of exploitation, reject material causes going on ‘behind the back’ of consciousness, suppose consciousness to be in some way ‘autonomous’ of any material determinations, and suppose that class arises in such ways. This is to repeat a similar line of critique in Johnson’s original article.[1] This stands so much against the whole tenor of my work (and that of the older Marxist tradition of historiography) that I must suppose that the reading arises from a lack of clarity in my own definitions.

Some of the fault lies with my critics. They persistently refuse to examine seriously the discriminations which Raymond Williams and I have made as to determination in its sense of ‘setting limits’ and ‘exerting pressures’, and which I have made as to ‘junction-concepts’. But the other part may lie in my own use of ‘experience’. For experience is exactly what makes the junction between culture and not-culture, lying half within social being, half within social consciousness. We might perhaps call these experiences I - lived experience - and II - perceived experience.

Many contemporary epistemologists and sociologists, when they hear the word ‘experience’, immediately reach for experience II. That is, they move directly to what Marx called social consciousness. They then go on to show that experience II is a very imperfect and falsifying medium, corrupted by ideological intrusions, and so on. They even read us little epistemological lessons, to show that different persons experience the same thing differently, that experience is organised according to presuppositions and within ideologically-formed categories, etc. Which is all so. But this is exactly why I was so heavy about the distinctive'discipline, the discourse of the proof, of the historian. Historians within the Marxist tradition - as well as many without - have for so long been using the term ‘experience’ in a different way that I had come to assume this usage so deeply myself that in The Poverty of Theory I did not adequately explain it.

What we see - and study - in our work are repeated events within ‘social being’ - such events being indeed often consequent upon material causes which go on behind the back of consciousness or intention - which inevitably do and must give rise to lived experience, experience I, which do not instantly break through as ‘reflections’ into experience II, but whose pressure upon the whole field of consciousness cannot be indefinitely diverted, postponed, falsified or suppressed by ideology. I gestured in The Poverty of Theory (p 11) to the kind of collective experience, within social being, which I mean:

“Experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve: their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they meditate in new ways about the law.”

And I argued:

“changes take place within social being, which give rise to changed experience: and this experience is determining, in the sense that it exerts pressures upon existent social consciousness, proposes new questions, and affords much of the material which the more elaborated intellectual exercises are about.”

How else can a materialist explain historical change with any rationality at all? How else, at a time like our own, are we to suppose that there can ever be any human remedy to the hegemonic domination of the mind, the false descriptions of reality reproduced daily by the media? Experience I is in eternal friction with imposed consciousness, and, as it breaks through, we, who fight in all the intricate vocabularies and disciplines of experience II, are given moments of openness and opportunity before the mould of ideology is imposed once more.

The second self-criticism is too complex to work out, except with pain and at length. I doubt whether I am competent to attempt it. When he had read Poverty of Theory Hans Medick wrote to me to argue that, when I offered to establish the objectivity both of the historical discipline and of its object - the finished historical process, with its pattern of (ultimately unknowable) causation - I had lurched towards that positivism which, at other points, I attempt to confront. I had put Popper out at the front door, and then sneaked him in again at the back. In short, by placing fact here and value there, I had opened my argument to serious error.

I sent a grumpy answer to Hans Medick, but on reflection I think that he is right, or partially right. The fact is - and David Selborne in his paper makes this point[2] - we are all making ferocious or lofty epistemological faces, but most of us, especially in Britain, are the merest novices in philosophy. A training by way of Althusser (who himself makes gross logical blunders) or by way of a critique of Althusser is not an adequate substitute for a more rigourous preparation. In my present view, the distinction offered in The Poverty of Theory remains valid, in the sense that the historical discipline (its ‘discourse of the proof’) presupposes that an encounter with objective evidence is what is at issue: and particular techniques and a particular disciplinary logic have been devised to that end. But I concede also that the historian, in every moment of his or her work, is a value-formed being, who cannot, when proposing problems or interrogating evidence, in fact operate in this value-free way. Medick considers that Habermas has disclosed the nature of this problem and that we should attend more carefully to his writing. I hope that Medick will write further and assist us through this difficult point.

Finally, what, oh what, are we to do with our good friend Philip Corrigan? Does he know what he has written? Philip Corrigan, the enemy of theoretical ‘terrorism' - how on earth did his typewriter encompass that sentence, the most defeatist and terrorist of all? ‘It seems to me time, to be honest, to recognise that History is a cultural form engaged in practices of regulation just like Law — it is one of the ways in which the subordinated are encouraged to agree to their own confinement.’ That is what he has written. Not that History can sometimes be that: not that this is an ideological deformation or ‘capture’ of History, which may go on, in certain academic circles, or in school curricula, or even as popular myth. This point should certainly be taken. But that History is ... just that. Hindess and Hirst come back! All is forgiven! no blow you ever struck was as unkind as this!

No intellectual discipline or art is a cultural form engaged only in practices or regulation, not even law. As Corrigan, of course, well knows. History is a form within which we fight, and many have fought before us. Nor are we alone when we fight there. For the past is not just dead, inert, confining; it carries signs and evidences also of creative resources which can sustain the present and prefigure possibility.

 

Contents

 


Notes

[1] See Richard Johnson, ‘Thompson, Genovese and socialist-humanist history’, History Workshop Journal, 6, Autumn 1978, and subsequent discussions in issues 7, 8 and 9.

[2] See David Selborne, ‘On the methods of the History Workship’, History Workshop Journal, 8, Spring 1980.

 


Last updated on: 7.30.2016