E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics

E. P. Thompson is a towering figure in the field of labor history, best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. But as this collection shows, Thompson was much more than a historian: he was a dedicated educator of workers, a brilliant polemicist, a skilled political theorist, and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons, and for a rebirth of the socialist project.

The essays in this book, many of which are either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963 during one of the most fertile periods of Thompson’s intellectual and political life, when he wrote his two great works, The Making of the English Working Class and William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. They reveal Thompson’s insistence on the vitality of a humanistic and democratic socialism along with the value of utopian thinking in radical politics. Throughout, Thompson struggles to open a space independent of official Communist Parties and reformist Social Democratic Parties, opposing them with a vision of socialism built from the bottom up. Editor Cal Winslow, who studied with Thompson, provides context for the essays in a detailed introduction and reminds us why this eloquent and inspiring voice remains so relevant to us today.

Also available from Monthly Review Press: The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays by E. P. Thompson

E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) is among the most acclaimed historians of the twentieth century. He is known for his works The Making of the English Working Class, William Morris, and The Poverty of Theory, among others.

A longtime labor, antiwar, and peace activist and educator, Cal Winslow is currently a Fellow in Environmental History in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley and Director of the Mendocino Institute, a not-for-profit research and educational center. He was trained at Antioch College and Warwick University where he studied under the direction of E.P. Thompson. His most recent book is Labor’s Civil War in California.