"Class Not as a Thing but as a Relationship"

"Thompson's empathy with those forced to struggle on an inhospitable social terrain has lessons for us, too. Today, the issue is the enormous condescension not of posterity but of the present: the contempt for working-class people, the hostility to benefit 'scroungers', the derision of those forced to use food banks, the indifference to injustice. It is visible also in the scorn for the supposed bigotry and conservatism of the working class or in the disdain of those who voted the wrong way or have become disillusioned with the left. Thompson's insistence that 'their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences' is as necessary to acknowledge now as it was then."

Kenan Malik at The Guardian marks E.P. Thompson's 100th birthday.

"Recovered Utopian Notions"

"The imprint of his childhood among anticolonial poets and his father's generation of war poets, evident in his Romantic sense of his own agency, also manifested in his insistence on poetry's importance to liberatory politics. EP and his father drew on their vestigial belief in the potential for heroic action to question the imperial, great-man historical imagination that had given them that belief. In doing so, they helped imagine a new kind of history and history-making, infused with a poetic vision."

At Aeon, Priya Satia looks at the early influences on E.P. Thompson.

What If?

"Others suffer from a different problem. They are hopelessly speculative, because they depend on wildly elaborate causal chains that are best treated as the 
exercise of an active imagination. Some counterfactualists suggest that if some apparently trivial change had occurred, large consequences would follow ('the butterfly effect,' made famous by a short story by Ray Bradbury). As a matter of logic, it may not be possible to rule out such elaborate causal chains, but they require a large number of contingencies to come to fruition (and a large number of other contingencies not to do so). Much of Evans’s exasperation is reserved for narratives that fall into this category. As 
examples, consider Tuchman's suggestion that if Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai had met with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s, the wars in Korea and Vietnam might not have happened, or Parker's claim that if the Spanish Armada had successfully landed in England in 1588, Philip II would have established Spanish rule in North America. OK, maybe—but who could possibly know?"


Cass R. Sunstein in The New Republic reviews Richard J. Evans's Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History.

"Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will"

"The review was founded in 1960 out of a merger of two existing journals, Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner, the former representing an upsurge of political and cultural radicalism in the late 1950s, especially strong in universities, that repudiated the reformism of the Labour party, while the latter provided a rallying ground for those communists and ex-communists who, post-1956, disowned orthodox Stalinism. New Left clubs were formed around the country, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament provided a mobilising and unifying focus. For a brief period, the review was part of a wider movement. But after the 1962 changeover, it focused more exclusively on preparing the theoretical ground for 'revolution' (it can be hard now to remember what an everyday term 'revolution' was in the 1960s and 1970s)."

Stefan Collini in The Guardian marks the fiftieth anniversary of New Left Review.

And in NLR, Stuart Hall traces the journal's origins.