BERNARD SEMMEL
137
accepted almost as uncritically as ecclesiastical chroniclers received
accounts of miracles. In this way the socialist historians, generally of
middle-class origin, can recreate, and their similarly-placed readers
can "experience ," the texture of the life of the proletariat's past, and
feel a comradely empathy which somehow evades them in the world
of today's working classes. The radical historians provided a pro–
letarian and revolutionary hagiography, and whiffs of insurrectionary
fervor are cherished and often magnified.
If
the Hammonds in their
pre-1939 social-democratic gentility insisted on working-class loyalty,
and argued that the government's
agents provocateurs
foisted conspira–
cies on early nineteenth-century workers so as to assist the forces of
reaction, a militant Thompson, employing much the same archival
sources, assures his readers that the working-class conspiracies in
fact existed , provoked by repression and infused by a revolutionary
class consciousness. Readers might in this way share vicariously the
burden of exploitation and repression, the cathartic release of heroic
resistance , and the self-satisfied contentment of martyrdom in a
good cause.
It makes for good reading- as the lives of the saints and martyrs
have made for believers in past centuries- but is it good history? In
recent years, a few more stringent Marxists, like Perry Anderson
and Terry Eagleton, have criticized workshop methods in the
New
Left Review
as well as the
History Workshop
itself. One Marxist his–
torian, Richard Johnson, attacked the workshop's (as well as Thomp–
son's) "socialist-humanist history" which reduced everything to
superstructure, entirely evading "the analysis of the forms, tenden–
cies and laws of the capitalist mode of production." Johnson sug–
gested a return to the economist Maurice Dobb's classical Marxist
approach, thickened by the work of the French Marxist-structuralist
Louis Althusser. An early adherent, David Selbourne, also came to
doubt whether workshop methods produced good Marxist history,
and described the typical workshop product as a
"'cinema-verite'
presentation of the past," with "its own carefully-selected
dramatis per–
sonae,
and its own carefully-handled
mise-en-scene"
-
more populist
art than materialist or dialectical science. Selbourne suggested that it
was only in their choice of the subject of proletarian life and work
that the workshop historians could be called Marxist. The Cam–
bridge social historian Gareth Stedman Jones, a member of the
His–
tory Workshop 's
"editorial collective," somewhat belatedly condemned
the culturalist-qualitative tack taken by Hobsbawm and Thompson.
Thompson particularly ought to have stuck to economics in the or-
