The Crisis of Theory by Scott Hamilton;

Author:Scott Hamilton; [Hamilton;, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719084355
Publisher: ManchesterUP
Published: 2011-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

‘An exercise in attacking the left’?

Thompson’s criticisms of the New New Left and of trendy Continental Marxists like Sartre and Althusser did not win him many friends. Writing in History Workshop Journal a quarter century later, Jonathan Ree remembered the reaction of his friends and colleagues to the ‘Open Letter’:

They regarded socialist humanism as obsolete, and EP Thompson as an obsessive individualist stuck in the past. To put it politely, the ‘Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski’ bored them.50

Even some old allies were alienated by the ‘Open Letter’. Ralph Miliband’s concerns about the tone of the text had initially been balanced by enthusiasm about some of its arguments. By 1975, though, Ralph Miliband’s misgivings about the text had grown. In a letter to Saville, he decided that Thompson had been far too hard on the New New Left:

Edward … is not at all on my wavelength politically. Of course, he is ‘radical’ and all that, but the Kolakowski piece, at least in the final version, serves to hide how anti-New Left … he has become. I have found him more and more cranky, wayward [and] given to pontifical statements … he and I don’t begin to talk the same political language, or write it.51

How can we explain the judgement Miliband made against the ‘Open Letter’, and against Thompson himself? Tony Judt’s suggestion that Thompson’s text was designed to flatter an adoring New Left audience will clearly get us nowhere. It is better to consider the contradictions in the text itself and the deteriorating outlook for Thompson’s politics in the 1970s.

We saw in chapter 3 that the historical insights and suggestive meditations of ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ were marred, and often even overshadowed, by unecessary caricatures of opponents, and by a rhetoric of English exceptionalism that at times seemed almost Anglophilic. The same problems haunted ‘An Open letter to Leszek Kolakowski’, and would soon haunt ‘The Poverty of Theory’. Thompson’s rhetorical excesses belied the subtlety of his argument for ‘Marxism-as-tradition’ over ‘Marxism-as-doctrine’, and probably helped restrict the influence of his text.52

Although Thompson’s rhetoric was sometimes gratuitously extreme, it expressed a real contradiction in the ‘hardcore’ of his thought. From the mid-1960s, at least, he struggled to reconcile his commitment to a politics based on English history and institutions with a world that seemed increasingly oblivious to the legacy of the Chartists and William Morris. Thompson’s redefinition of Marxism in the ‘Open Letter’ was an attempt to deal with the chasm that had opened up between the reality of the second New Left and Thompson’s own politics. Using Lakatosian terminology, we can call the new definition an addition to the protective ‘softcore’ of Thompson’s thought. But Thompson’s elegant exercise in redefinition could not disguise his deep discomfort with an increasingly alien left and an increasingly alien Britain. His jibes against the second New Left and the counterculture may have been tasteless and tactically foolish, but they did express genuine feelings.

As the 1970s went on, Thompson’s backward-looking conception of an alliance of ‘the

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