The Mystifications of Structuralism

E. P. Thompson is best known as the social historian whose magisterial The Making of the English Working Class has had an enduring impact on the writing of labor history on both sides of the Atlantic. His biography of William Morris, recently reissued, has found comparably few readers. Thompson is also a formidable Marxist theoretician and polemicist in the grand tradition. This volume shows us this other Thompson.

Thompson became a member of the British Communist party shortly after the war. In 1956 he and a number of his cothinkers produced a mimeographed journal of discussion within the Party, the Reasoner. When they expressed their solidarity with the Hungarian revolution, they were expelled from the Party. S...