E. P. Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993) was a historian probably best known for his work The Making of the English Working Class which included his reassessment of the Luddite movement. He published many other histories besides, and one novel (The Sykaos Papers). He also wrote an influential biography of William Morris (subtitled 'Romantic to Revolutionary').

In 1946 he formed the Communist Historians Group along with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton and others. This group launched the influential journal Past and Present in 1952. Thompson left the Communist Party in disgust at the USSR's invasion of Hungary in 1956. He remained a Marxist, however, and with a group of fellow-thinkers of the New Left, published a journal, New Reasoner, that sought to develop a subtle, humanist Marxism to counter the 'official' Marxism of the communist and Trotskyist parties.

In 1978 he published The Poverty of Theory, which attacked the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser.

During the late 1970s he acquired a large public audience as a critic of the then Labour government's cavalier disregard of civil liberties, and from 1980 he was the most prominent intellectual of the renewed movement for nuclear disarmament. Thompson was, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, an author of the 1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, calling for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, which was the founding document of European Nuclear Disarmament - confusingly both a Europe-wide campaign that comprised a series of large public conferences and a small British pressure group. In Britain, his pamphlet Protest and Survive, a parody on the government leaflet Protect and Survive played a major role in the rebirth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Thompson played a key role in both END and CND thorughout the 1980s.