E. P. Thompson and Cultural Sociology: Questions of Poetics,Capitalism and the Commons

Abstract

There is currently a need for cultural sociology to readdress the work of humanistic and cultural Marxism. While recently much of this work has been dismissed, the appearance of more radical social movements and the ongoing crisis of neoliberalism suggest that it still has much to tell us. In this respect, this article seeks to readdress the writing of the historian E. P. Thompson, arguing that his work on the class-based and other social movements, poetics, critique of positivism and economic reason, utopia and the idea of the commons all have much to offer more contemporary scholarship. While the article recognises that the cultural Marxism of figures like Thompson cannot simply be resurrected, it does continue to offer a number of critical insights. By readdressing the internal complexity of Thompson’s writing, the argumentative strategy of this article suggests that cultural sociology needs to move beyond more simplistic understandings of cultural Marxism and more carefully explore what it has to offer. This is especially pressing in a world that after the financial crash of 2008 has become increasingly dominated by the values and practices of capitalism. In this respect, Thompson’s contribution to cultural sociology is to offer a more complex language of resistance and transformation than exists within other less class-based traditions of sociology.