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poet's "revolt against the world of the Railway Age, and the values of
Gradgrind" in favor of the "finer and richer" values of traditional
society. For Morris, as Thompson presented him, the Middle Ages
witnessed "a real
community
of human beings" - a precapitalist and
preindustrial community where relationships between men "how–
ever severe and binding" were not of "an impersonal labour-market,"
but were organic.
Thompson has accused liberal and conservative historians of
an ideological commitment to economic growth, to the view that in–
dustrial progress and the widespread dissemination of material
goods is a benefit, not the morally bad thing he thinks it to be.
If
the
economic forces making for working-class revolution have failed, he
believes that "will" and high moral purpose can succeed, and that the
proletariat may yet be redeemed from the fleshpots of capitalism. He
celebrates the artisans and laborers of the eighteenth and early nine–
teenth centuries who vainly tried to turn back the industrial revolu–
tion; the Luddite machine-breakers are his particular heroes, and he
pictures them as valiant defenders of the Aquinian "moral economy"
against the determined efforts of a commercial society to make labor
a mere commodity.
If
the emerging working classes did not mount a
revolution during this period, he argues, it was because of their
diminished class consciousness and the "psychic exploitation" of their
alienated condition by Methodist preachers who with their acolytes
of the establishment terrified the working class into passive submis–
sIOn .
Thompson joined populist social history, with a Marxist em–
phasis on class, to something resembling the more systematic studies
of the French
Annales
school, with its heavy reliance on an–
thropological and psychological models. This has certainly helped to
broaden the outlook of historians in the English-speaking world. In
the past generation, however, this approach has achieved a prom–
inence that has made any other - such as the history of ideas or of
politics - almost illegitimate and certainly peripheral. While it has
been useful to turn to previously little-explored and wayward
sources for the light these may undoubtedly shed, such traditional
sources as "establishment" journals or parliamentary debates are
now discarded as "elitist" efforts to disguise what more obscure
sources - the history of popular beliefs, mating rituals, or working–
men's memoirs - amply and more truthfully reveal. (In this, of
course, the new model historians forget Marx's effective use of elitist
parliamentary blue books in
Capital. )
For the left-liberal historian of the present generation - and the
