English historian whose The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is one of the century's great works of history and, by general acclamation, the founding text of "history from below" — the study of ordinary people as conscious agents of their own fate rather than as demographic rubble. Edward Palmer Thompson was raised in a Methodist-missionary household radicalized by India's independence struggle (his father William wrote against the Raj; his elder brother Frank, a communist and Special Operations officer, was captured and executed in Bulgaria in 1944), and he carried that inheritance through a life in which scholarship, communism, then dissent, then anti-nuclear politics were continuous rather than separate careers. He fought in Italy as a tank commander, joined the Communist Party Historians' Group alongside Hobsbawm, Hilton, and Hill — and walked out of the Party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, taking with him the materials that became The Reasoner and then The New Reasoner, two of the journals whose 1960 merger created New Left Review.
The Making of the English Working Class is eight hundred pages that insist, against both Stalinist economism and Fabian condescension, that the working class made itself between roughly 1790 and 1832 — "present at its own making" — through hedge preachers and corresponding societies, Jacobin clubs and Luddite oaths, hymn-singing and bread riots. The celebrated opening aims to rescue the lives of such people "from the enormous condescension of posterity," and the book does; it also installs experience as a historical category without which political-economic categories float untethered. Whigs and Hunters (1975), on the 1723 Black Act, ends with a surprising and controversial argument — a historian of the Left paying serious tribute to the rule of law as a genuine, if contradictory, achievement of the propertied elite against itself. The Poverty of Theory (1978) is a sustained, furious polemic against Louis Althusser's structural Marxism, which Thompson saw as pulling English socialist history back into exactly the scholastic rationalism that "history from below" had been invented to escape.
The last decade of his life was given to the European peace movement: Thompson co-founded European Nuclear Disarmament (END) in 1980 and spent years shuttling between Western peace protests and dissidents in the Eastern bloc, arguing for a "third way" out of Cold War bipolarity. He was by then the most widely read historian in Britain and a public intellectual in the older sense — radio lectures, open letters in the broadsheets, long and sharp prose in the London Review of Books. Customs in Common (1991) gathered the later essays; Witness Against the Beast (1993), on William Blake, appeared days before his death and is his most intimate book. Hall read Making as a student in 1963 and said it taught him what a left history could be; that is a reasonable summary of Thompson's effect on a generation.