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En este artículo se ofrece un análisis de los archivos liberados por el MI5 británico en septiembre de 2016 que documentan el espionaje realizado sobre el historiador socialista E. P. Thompson, con el objetivo de aclarar la relación de este con el estalinismo antes de 1956. Se reconstruye para ello el contexto histórico del comunismo y del macartismo británicos en los primeros años de la Guerra Fría, y se evalúa el peso de la tradición libertarian como factor causal en el proceso de ruptura con el Partido Comunista de Gran Bretaña por parte de Thompson. This article offers an analysis of the files released by the MI5 in September 2016 that contain the documentation about espionage carried out on the socialist historian E. P. Thompson. our aim is shedding light on his commitment to Stalinism before 1956. The historical context of British communism and McCarthyism in the early years of the Cold War is reconstructed. Finally, we assess the weight of the libertarian tradition as a causal factor in Thompson’s break with the Communist Party of Great Britain.

A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lens What's wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century is primarily concerned with disparities in income and wealth. It was not always so. The Moral Economists reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was less important than moral or spiritual desolation. Tim Rogan focuses on three of the twentieth century's most influential critics of capitalism--R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, and E.P. Thompson. Making arguments about the relationships between economics and ethics in modernity, their works commanded wide readerships, shaped research agendas, and influenced public opinion. Rejecting the social philosophy of laissez-faire but fearing authoritarianism, these writers sought out forms of social solidarity closer than individualism admitted but freer than collectivism allowed. They discovered such solidarities while teaching economics, history, and literature to workers in the north of England and elsewhere. They wrote histories of capitalism to make these solidarities articulate. They used makeshift languages of \"tradition\" and \"custom\" to describe them until Thompson patented the idea of the \"moral economy.\"

This article describes the development of the moral economy of merit among the fishermen and rural poor of Dalai Village, Magtaal soum, Mongolia. In 1971, the historian E. P. Thompson used the term “moral economy” to describe a popular consensus on what was considered right and wrong in economic behavior, arguing that its provocation motivated the eighteenth-century English poor to engage in crowd-based political action. In contemporary, post-socialist eastern Mongolia, the rural poor have constructed a pervasive local discourse on what is considered legitimate (“merit-making” or buyantai) versus what is illegitimate in economic behavior that morally-condones their illegal wildlife procurement, selling, and smuggling activities. The political contexts of these case studies are compared in order to detail a similar political-economic progression: (1) the recent market liberalization of the commons, sparking moral outrage amongst those classes newly disadvantaged through this shift to the market; and (2) the formation of an anti-profiteering moral discourse among these classes, designed to limit the ability of others to economically capitalize off of these circumstances. Comparing the case studies, the moral economy is manifested as exchange practices involving commons-marked goods that distribute their benefits among the participants, envisioned as thereby promoting group wellbeing rather than the uneven accumulation by individuals.

The article offers a comparative account of Raymond Williams’s The Fight for Manod and E. P. Thompson’s The Sykaos Papers and examines their depiction of social and political realities during the late twentieth century, the meeting of socialist and ecological concerns in their fictional world, as well as their allegiance to William Morris’s utopian vision. The article also aims to place Williams’s and Thompson’s fiction in an often-neglected thread of the modern utopian tradition, which tends to combine utopian and dystopian elements.

This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, \"Civilisation has shrunk.\" Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.

The work of E.P. Thompson has had an enormous impact on the writing of history in South Africa since the 1970s. This article traces the rise of this historiographical trend, focusing especially on the History Workshop at Wits University (Johannesburg). It outlines how a South African version of Thompsonian historical practice was theorized, and sketches some of the ways in which Thompson’s ideas were utilized by South African historians. The article shows how the History Workshop attempted to popularize their research, and examines the political projects behind these activities. Finally, the article suggests that although the influence of Thompson-style South African social historians has declined, their work has had a lasting impact on the country’s literary culture, well beyond the academy. Jonathan Hyslop. E.P. Thompson en Afrique du Sud: la pratique et la politique de l’histoire sociale dans une ère de révolte et de transition, 1976–2012. L’œuvre d’E.P. Thompson eut un impact gigantesque sur la rédaction de l’histoire en Afrique du Sud depuis les années 1970. Cet article retrace la montée de cette tendance historiographique, en se concentrant particulièrement sur l’Atelier d’histoire de de l’Université du Witwatersrand à Johannesburg (Wits History Workshop). Il met en relief la manière dont une version sud-africaine de la pratique historique thomsponnienne fut théorétisée, et il décrit certaines utilisations des idées de Thompson par les historiens sud-africains. L’article montre comment l’Atelier de l’histoire tenta de populariser sa recherche, et il examine les projets politiques sous-tendant ces activités. Enfin, l’article suggère que bien que l’influence des historiens de l’histoire sociale sud-africains de tendance thompsonnienne ait décliné, leur œuvre eut sur la culture littéraire de l’Afrique du Sud une influence durable qui alla bien au-delà du monde universitaire. Traduction: Christine Plard Jonathan Hyslop. E. P. Thompson in Südafrika: Praxis und Politik der Sozialgeschichte in einem Zeitalter der Revolte und des Übergangs, 1976–2012. E.P. Thompsons Arbeiten haben seit den 1970er Jahren einen enormen Einfluss auf die südafrikanische Geschichtsschreibung ausgeübt. Der Beitrag rekonstruiert die Genese dieser historiografischen Strömung und konzentriert sich dabei insbesondere auf die Geschichtswerkstatt an der Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg (Wits History Workshop). Er umreißt, wie eine südafrikanische Version von Thompsons historiografischer Praxis theoretisiert wurde und skizziert einige der Formen, in denen Thompsons Ideen von südafrikanischen Historikern umgesetzt wurden. Der Beitrag schildert, wie die Geschichtswerkstatt diese Arbeiten zu popularisieren versuchte und untersucht die damit verbundenen politischen Projekte. Wie der Beitrag schließlich zeigt, hat der Einfluss von an Thompson orientierten südafrikanischen Sozialhistorikern zwar abgenommen, deren Arbeiten aber dennoch einen bleibenden Einfluss auf die literarische Kultur des Landes ausgeübt haben, auch weit über den Wissenschaftsbetrieb hinaus. Übersetzung: Max Henninger Jonathan Hyslop. E.P. Thompson en Sudáfrica: la práctica y la política de la historia social en una era de revuelta y transición, 1976–2012. La obra de E.P. Thompson ha tenido un enorme impacto en la escritura de la historia en Sudáfrica desde la década de 1970. En este artículo recorremos el surgir de esta corriente historiográfica, centrándonos especialmente en el Taller de Historia de la Universidad de Witwatersrand en Johanesburgo (Wits History Workshop). En el texto se considera cómo se teorizó una versión propia sudafricana de la práctica histórica thompsoniana, y esboza alguna de las formas en que fueron utilizadas las ideas de Thompson entre los historiadores sudafricanos. En el artículo se observa cómo el Taller de Historia intentó popularizar sus trabajos de investigación y analiza los proyectos políticos que se encuentran tras estas actividades. Por último, el texto sugiere que aunque la influencia estilo-thompsoniano en los historiadores sociales sudafricanos ha ido en declive, su obra, más allá del ámbito académico, sí ha tenido un impacto duradero en la cultura literaria del país. Traduccíon: Vicent Sanz Rozalén

The intellectual history of moral economy falls into two periods: before and after E. P. Thompson. As discussed elsewhere in this dossier, the search for an ethical critique of political economy has an extended lineage.1 Despite this lengthy genealogy, the term \"moral economy\" had essentially fallen out of use by the turn of the twentieth century. To take one revealing example, the journals in JSTOR's archives record 156 usages of \"moral economy\" between its first appearance in 1835 and 1970. Since 1971, there have been almost nine thousand. What accounts for this shift? The answer begins with the 1971 publication of Thompson's \"The Moral Economy of the English Crowd.\"2 Thompson had referred to \"moral economy\" a handful of times in The Making of the English Working Class, which was published in 1963 and already on its way to becoming a classic among a rising generation of baby-boomer social historians. But it was Thompson's 1971 article that gave the concept renewed currency, and inspired James Scott to borrow it in 1976 for the title of The Moral Economy of the Peasant. With Thompson's and Scott's imprimatur behind it, talk of moral economy diffused across the humanities and social sciences, turning a forgotten locution into a fashionable subject for academic research.All of this seems like an intellectual success story. But the evidence suggests that Thompson felt otherwise. As he put it in 1993, \"If I did father the term 'moral economy' upon current academic discourse, the term has long forgotten its paternity. I will not disown it, but it has come of age, and I am no longer answerable for its actions.\"3 Thompson was, partly, expressing the uneasiness often felt by originators of concepts that have escaped their control. But his discomfort had deeper sources.

This article uses E. P. Thompson's last book – Witness against the Beast (1993) – as an occasion to claim oddity, peculiarity, and nonconformity as subjects of African history. Africa's historians have been engaged in an earnest effort to locate contemporary cultural life within the longue durée, but in fact there was much that was strange and eccentric. Here I focus on the reading habits and interpretive strategies that inspired nonconformity. Nonconformists read the Bible idiosyncratically, snipping bits of text out of the fabric of the book and using these slogans to launch heretical and odd ways of living. Over time, some of them sought to position themselves in narrative structures that could authenticate and legitimate their dissident religious activity. That entailed experimentation with voice, positionality, and addressivity.

E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters has had an enormous impact on African historiography in its articulation of the relationship between property and law and the subsequent criminalization of customary practices. Some of the other themes in this book – indistinct bands of law-breaking peasants, people and animals, notions of the wild, and the near impossibility of commonplace judicial murder in peacetime – have not been taken up. This article argues for a broader engagement with this book and to remind African historians that the many facets and eras of Thompson's scholarship should encourage a more flexible reading of his work.