E. P. Thompson

He was born in Oxford on 3 February 1924, the son of Methodist missionaries. His elder brother Frank was captured and shot during the Second World War while aiding the Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans. He entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1941 but left in 1942 to join the army, serving in a tank unit in the Italian campaign, including the fourth battle of Cassino, and returned after the war to graduate in history in 1946. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain at Cambridge, and in 1946 formed the Communist Party Historians Group with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr and others, which launched the journal Past and Present in 1952.

His first major work, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955), written while he was a party member, belonged to the Historians Group's effort to stress the domestic roots of British Marxism at a time when the party was attacked for always following the Moscow line. It was also an attempt to take Morris back from critics who for more than fifty years had stressed his art and played down his politics.

After Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 Thompson, with John Saville and others, started a dissident publication inside the party, The Reasoner; when they refused an order to stop it, both were suspended. Six months later he and most of his comrades left the party over the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The New Reasoner, which he founded with Saville in 1957, sought a democratic socialist alternative both to the ossified official Marxism of the Communist and Trotskyist parties and to the managerialist cold-war social democracy of the Labour Party, and became the most important organ of what came to be called the New Left.

In "Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines", in its first issue, Thompson defined Stalinism as the ideology of a revolutionary elite that had degenerated into a bureaucracy in a particular historical context. He criticised Stalin for using base and superstructure as a mechanical model working semi-automatically and independently of conscious human agency, and insisted on human creative agency in history: no "basis", he wrote, ever invented a steam engine. Socialist humanism, as he described it, was a revolt against dogmatism and inhumanity, a return from abstractions such as the Party or the Two Camps to real men and women. In 1960 The New Reasoner merged with Universities and Left Review to form New Left Review, but Thompson and others fell out with the group around Perry Anderson that took over the journal in 1962; Thompson's circle has since been called the first New Left and Anderson's the second.

In 1963, while working at the University of Leeds and living in Halifax, West Yorkshire, he published The Making of the English Working Class, a book of more than 800 pages on artisan and working-class society "in its formative years 1780 to 1832". Searching workshop customs, failed conspiracies, threatening letters, popular songs and union club cards that had been treated as archival scraps, it told the forgotten history of the world's first working-class political left. In the preface Thompson set out to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver and the "Utopian" artisan "from the enormous condescension of posterity": their ideals may have been fantasies and their conspiracies foolhardy, but their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.

The book's theoretical core was its definition of class, which for Thompson was not a structure but a relationship. Class happens when people, through common experiences, feel and articulate an identity of interests between themselves and against others whose interests differ. Class experience is largely determined by productive relations, but class consciousness, the way those experiences are handled in cultural terms of traditions, value systems, ideas and institutions, is not determined by any law. He criticised treating the working class as an inhuman statistical bloc, sought to dissociate Marxism from Stalinism, and in 1966 named his approach "history from below".

"Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" (1967) argued that clock time became a tool of social control with the industrial revolution, and "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" (1971) presented food rioters as active subjects rather than passive objects. In "The Peculiarities of the English" (1965) he answered Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, charging them with hammering English history into class categories and dismissing the English experience. Feminist historians such as Joan Wallach Scott later criticised the book as androcentric, blind to the centrality of gender in the making of class identities.

In 1971 he left the University of Warwick in protest at its commercialisation, as documented in Warwick University Limited, and thereafter taught as a visiting professor, particularly in the United States, while working mainly as a freelance writer for New Society, Socialist Register and historical journals. The Poverty of Theory (1978) attacked the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers in Britain around New Left Review; its title echoed Marx's polemic against Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy, and Perry Anderson replied with Arguments within English Marxism (1980). In the late 1970s Thompson won a large audience as a critic of the Labour government's disregard of civil liberties.

From 1980 he was the most prominent intellectual of the revived movement for nuclear disarmament. His pamphlet Protest and Survive, a parody of the government leaflet Protect and Survive, played a major part in the revival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. With Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor, Dan Smith and others he wrote the 1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, which called for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal and became the founding document of END. He worked to open a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in eastern Europe, especially in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which Soviet authorities denounced him as a tool of American imperialism. His last book, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, showed how far Blake drew on dissident religious ideas from the radical opponents of the monarchy in the English civil war. After four years of declining health he died at his home in Upper Wick, Worcestershire, on 28 August 1993.