Week #5

(I got confused after the last class and was under the impression that we didn't need to write a blog post because of the assignment due, but I just realized today that said reprieve was only for this past week and not for the week of the 17th when I checked the website and saw that everyone else had posted blogs. Oops. So here is my super late blog post and my apology.)

I really loved Thompson's paper on the "moral economy" of English crowds. I already liked Thompson for other reasons (I like his theoretical writings on historical materialism and Marxism), but what I liked about this particular piece is that he started by politically problematizing a bit of terminology and building an historical thesis from that starting point. Usually, we think it should be the other way around: historical research is supposed to be all about scholarship and objectivity, and to freely admit that your agenda is political in nature is somewhat taboo. But I think this is exactly the kind of scholarship we need. Research should not be done for the sake of adding a few more entries into our cultural 'knowledge' database, but rather should serve some social purpose. Obviously not every historian begins their research project with such a purpose in mind, which is fine, but historical writing is that much more enjoyable (for me) to read when such a purpose is central and is clearly stated.

Of course, Thompson does not attack the work of other historians simply on the basis that it's upsetting to his politics. He uses as a starting point statements which appear politically problematic, and then explores the research and assumptions behind those statements to see if his intuitions are correct. I think he convincingly argues that they are. But it isn't really about uncovering the "truth" about history and seeing which political theory said truth best coheres with: all historical writing imposes a political narrative, consciously or not, on the history being told, and in a way Thompson's project is just to show that a very different kind of story can be told. Obviously, standards of historical scholarship should be just as important a criteria as politics in judging the story beind told, but I think we should be honest with ourselves and admit that politics are also important and that they will always influence our judgment whether we want them to or not and, hence, that we should clarify the relationship between scholarship and politics so that we can apply political criteria critically and not blindly. Thompson's article is a great example of what it looks like to do this. The rest of this process is that the article is valuable both to the professional historian and to the layperson, that it contains both an interesting story and a recognizable political moral. I wish there were more histories like this!