Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
Gregor McLellan (1982): a history from below in that it seeks to reintroduce workingclass
experience into the historical process; and a history from below in that it insists
that the working class were the conscious agents of their own making. 8 Thompson is
working with Marx’s (1977) famous claim about the way in which men and women
make history: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (10). What
Thompson does is to emphasize the first part of Marx’s claim (human agency) against
what he considers to have been an overemphasis by Marxist historians on the second
part (structural determinants). Paradoxically, or perhaps not so, he has himself been
criticized for overstressing the role of human agency – human experiences, human
values – at the expense of structural factors (see Anderson, 1980).
The Making of the English Working Class is in so many ways a monumental contribution
to social history (in size alone: the Penguin edition runs to over nine hundred pages).
What makes it significant for the student of popular culture is the nature of its historical
account. Thompson’s history is not one of abstract economic and political processes;
nor is it an account of the doings of the great and the worthy. The book is about ‘ordinary’
men and women, their experiences, their values, their ideas, their actions, their
desires: in short, popular culture as a site of resistance to those in whose interests the
Industrial Revolution was made. Hall (1980b) calls it ‘the most seminal work of social
history of the post-war period’, pointing to the way it challenges ‘the narrow, elitist
conception of “culture” enshrined in the Leavisite tradition, as well as the rather evolutionary
approach which sometimes marked Williams’s The Long Revolution’ (19–20).
In an interview a decade or so after the publication of the book, Thompson (1976)
commented on his historical method as follows: ‘If you want a generalization I would
have to say that the historian has got to be listening all the time’ (15). He is by no
means the only historian who listens; the conservative historian G.M. Young also
listens, if in a rather more selective fashion: ‘history is the conversation of people
who counted’ (quoted in McLellan, 1982: 107). What makes Thompson’s listening
radically different is the people to whom he listens. As he explains in a famous passage
from the Preface to The Making of the English Working Class:
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. Their crafts and traditions
may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been
backward looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their
insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through
these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid
in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they
remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties (1980: 12).
Before concluding this brief account of Thompson’s contribution to the study of
popular culture, it should be noted that he himself does not accept the term ‘culturalism’