Nearly 50 years ago, E.P. Thompson published his magisterial The Making of the English Working Class. This book, and Thompson's subsequent essays on various aspects of working class life and culture, radically reshaped the way historians thought about class, politics, and the writing of history itself. As Geoff Eley and Steven Hahn noted in a recent Vanderbilt History Seminar (VHS) reassessing Thompson's legacy, The Making, in its rereading of practices and values traditionally ignored by political and intellectual historians, opened up new ways of looking at the political. As Eley observes in his book The Crooked Line, Thompson's writings helped to inspire "a radically deinstitutionalized understanding of politics, in which the possible sources of a popular oppositional impulse were now sought away from the recognized arenas of parties, polite associations, and parliaments." In some ways, then, it is to Thompson that many historians today owe their most basic understandings of the concept of "political culture" as something constructed through and manifested in everyday experience. Our challenge today is to build on the framework that Thompson and his followers established, while also addressing the various lacunae - issues of gender, empire, war, etc. - left in Thompson's account.
While not all future VHS conversations will speak to political culture and its historiography in this way, there are many interesting presentations coming up in the spring. You can find out more about the series here: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/seminar.html.
