Some people are influential but not brilliant. Others are brilliant but remain unrecognized their whole lives. Neither fate befell Edward Palmer Thompson. In the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the British Marxist historian was one of the “100 most cited authors of the 20th century in all fields” for 1976–83. Even during his lifetime, many spoke of a “Thompsonian view” of social history.

It’s easy to see why. Thompson developed intellectually in the British Communist Historians’ Group, widely credited as having revolutionized the history profession internationally. According to Perry Anderson, it even paved the way for Anglophone hegemony in Western Marxism. In his seminal 1963 work, The Making of the English Working Class, which his close friend Eric Hobsbawm described as a “historical volcano” erupting, Thompson had developed his understanding of class as “history from below.” Detecting an “unreconstructed Hegelianism” in Marx’s Grundrisse that turned capital into a subject of history, Thompson argued that Capital was not a work of history — and that in later years even Friedrich Engels had understood that it lacked a sufficiently historical character.

Thompson observed “a real silence” in Marx regarding the real history of capitalism, as embedded in politics, law, ideology, and cultural forms like value systems. Thompson turned against prevalent usage of Marx’s “base-superstructure” metaphor and against Georg Lukács’s analytical distinction of “class in itself” and “class for itself,” both of which he considered troublesome. Instead, Thompson defined class as the process of the development of class consciousness.