E. P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class
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E. P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class
[Penguin 1991] buy new or used at abebooks.co.uk | buy new at amazon.co.uk 
If you use either of these links to purchase this item breviary stuff will receive 5% commission The classic and imaginative account of the working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and recereates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a culture and a political consciousness of great vitality. "This book has a clumsy title, but it is one that meets its purpose. Making because it is a study of an active process, which owes as much to agency as conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making. Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. There is, of course, a difference. 'Working classes' is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes. By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is a historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships."Contents
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