The Making of the English Working Class

In the preface, Thompson said of his aims: "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity." Thompson uses a humanist approach to social history, being critical of those who turn the people of the working class into an inhuman statistical bloc. Thompson wished to disassociate Marxism from Stalinism, and added humanistic principles to the book as a way of steering the left towards democratic socialism, as opposed to totalitarianism. In the book, Thompson discusses popular movements of the past, such as Jacobin societies like the London Corresponding Society, and attempts to recreate the life experience of the working class. Thompson also re-evaluates the Luddite movement and the influence of the early Methodist movement on working-class aspirations. (Thompson's parents were Methodist missionaries.) ==Reception==

Sidney Pollard called the book "without a doubt, a landmark in English historiography". Robert K. Webb called it "both very important and extremely exasperating". Geoffrey Best called it a "valuable and exciting book" but noted Thompson's neglect of the "flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of the plebeian mind" and asked, "How large a portion of 'the working class' did those 'artisans' form from whom so much of his evidence necessarily comes, and of how many hundreds of thousands of lower-class folk do we remain so much more ignorant that we cannot speak as confidently about them?" In April 2020, Jacobin magazine launched a podcast series, Casualties of History, focusing on the book and critical receptions of Thompson’s work, by theorists such as Asad Haider and Sheila Rowbotham. In December 2023, BBC Radio 3 issued five episodes of its series The Essay "reflecting on the legacy, ideas and personal inspiration of The Making of the English Working Class" to mark sixty years since its first publication. ==References==