he was an essential figure on CND platformsrnand at international conferencesrndevoted to the intellectual redefinitionrnof the left in an age of fading hope. Hisrncoevals, it is true, could find him selfimportantrnand sulky, and not only at thernbreakfast table, and he was never honoredrnas Russell was, though a year beforernhis death he became a Fellow of thernBritish Academy. But by then he was arnpuzzled sage, at once passionate andrnambiguous, dedicated and yet plaguedrnby doubts, and a popular idol needsrnabove all things to look and soundrncertain.rnThe uncertainties, so far as one canrnchart them from public documents,rnbegan with his departure from thernCommunist Party in 1956. Years later hernwas to begin the foreword to The Povertyrnof Theory with the ominous words: “Irncommenced to reason in my 33 rd year,rnand despite my best efforts I have neverrnbeen able to shake the habit off.” Thernremark is ambiguous in multiple ways,rneven if you allow that “despite mv bestrnefforts” is ironic. But even that is unclear.rnThompson did try at times not tornreason, fearful of where reason mightrntake him. The general tenor of the remark,rntoo, is unclear. It sounds like selfrecommendation.rnSo does the rest ofrnthe book, and in Thompson’s writingsrnthe first person is never far awa}’. Butrnwhy, one is left wondering, would a manrnof privileged upbringing and educationrn—Kingswood and Cambridge—rnwait till he was nearly 33 before thinkingrnfor himself?rnThe an.swer is not to be spoken lightly,rnbut it must be attempted. Thompson,rnfor all his dissidence, loved to belongrnto things. He joined the CommunistrnParty, following his brother Frank; thernjournals he helped to found and editrnwere group journals; the Round Tablernand END were international groups.rnThough never a man of the majority, hernwas never a loner either; and commencingrnto reason, which started when his lifernwas nearly half done, meant not walkingrna lonely road of intellection but promotingrnoneself from disciple to leader.rnThough he loved to think of himself asrnawkward, in the tradition of Blake, Cobbett,rnMorris, and F.R. Leavis, it was alwa’rnS the sort of awkwardness that soughtrnadmiration; the public figure who is indifferentrnto approbation has never beenrnborn. “One must put oneself into arnschool of awkwardness,” he once wrote,rnand “make one’s sensibility all knobbly—rnall knees and elbows of susceptibility andrnrefusal.” That is one way of commandingrnattention, eertamly, and attentionrnwas what he could not be without. Thernnonconformist tradition in which he wasrnbrought up did not die when it rejectedrnGod. And, like man’ another nonconformist,rnhe could not live in another’srnshadow.rnSince a leader cannot bear competition,rnthe leadership of the New Left, inrnits day, was not harmonious, and it couldrnlav about its friends as well as its adversaries.rnThompson could be devastating.rnHis review of Raymond Williams’s ThernLong Revohdion in NeH’ Left Reviewrn(May-June 1961) is a case in point: thernbook, he wrote, reads as if it were writtenrnb’ “an elderly gentlewoman and nearrelativernof Mr. Eliot, so distinguishedrnas to have become an institution”—anrninstitution, Thompson goes on happily,rncalled The Tradition: “There she sits,rnwith that white starched affair on herrnhead, knitting definitions” and decorousrnbeyond belief. “In her presence howrnone must watch one’s language]” As arndemolition-job that shows some skill,rnand though Thompson’s prose was toorndisjointed to make him an eminentrnstylist, his invective, at times, had pungencyrnand bite.rnHis style, like Marx’s own, oscillatedrnbetween the stolidly academic and thernvirulently witty; and as with Marx, it isrnthe witty virulence that is interesting.rnIn The Making of the EngUsh WorkingrnClass his ancestral Methodism is soundlyrnand repeatedly vilified, and thoughrnthe rhetoric is extreme it saves the bookrnfrom the charge of stolidity. Methodism,rnin his view, did not just inhibitrnsocial revolution by its promise of felicityrnin an after-life. Darker and more nebulousrncharges are made against it. It wasrna form of psychic masturbation. It encouragedrnhysteria, like the false pregnancyrnof Joanna Southcott, the religiousrnenthusiast, in 1814. It is such bizarrerndetail, such grotesque incidents and thernpassion of vilification they arouse in him,rnthat keep the book readable.rnHis theoretical exercises were lessrnhappy. The epistemology of Louis Althusser,rnwho later became famous byrnstrangling his wife, cannot easily bernmade a lively topic, but the reader hardlyrndeserves to be told that it was “foundedrnupon an account of theoretical proceduresrnwhich is at every point derivatiernnot only from academic intellectual disciplinesrnbut from one (and at the mostrnthree) highly specialized disciplines,”rnmeaning his philosophy, which was “arnparticular Cartesian tradition of logicalrnexegesis marked at its origins by the pressuresrnof Catholic theology modified byrnthe monism of Spinoza.” That is bedsit-rnTrotskyite English, and there were momentsrnwhen it came too easily to him.rnIt suggests not only a disregard of thernreader but a despair about politics; therndespair of one for whom the revolutionrnnever came.rnThompson’s crusade led nowhere.rnBehind his prose, however, lay a rich interiorrnlife—not just of the country gentlemanrnin his boots, or of the cult historian,rnbut of the tousled hero adored byrnthe crowd. In that mood he was defiant,rnand his defiance was heroic. “I will notrnbe silenced by mere opposition,” hernwrote to Kolakowski in his “OpenrnLetter,” no doubt to the latter’s profoundrnastonishment. Imagine expectingrnany such thing. Thompson may havernpreferred silence at breakfast, but hisrntrue inclinations were all for arguing outrnand arguing down: “The great bustard,rnby a law well-known to aeronautics, canrnonly rise into the air against a strongrnhead-wind. It is only by facing into oppositionrnthat I am able to define myrnthought at all.” One imagines a politernand erudite Polish dissident, brought uprnin the grey tedium of postwar Polandrnwhere debates about Marxism-Leninismrnwere about as exciting as the liturgies ofrnan established church, feeling puzzledrnby all this vivid self-agitation. Of coursernno one was trying to silence Thompson.rnIt was merely important to him to imaginernthat many were.rnBut then behind the bravado there layrnself-doubt. After all, there was plenty tornbe doubtful about. Thompson hadrnserved Stalin faithfully down to his deathrnin 1953 and for several years more. Herncommenced to reason, as he put it, onlyrnafter Khrushchev had shown the greenrnlight to anti-Stalinism in his speech tornthe 20th Party Congress in 1956, whichrnsuggests that he still needed a leader tornshow the way. He had believed in thernnostrums of the left in its heyday, one byrnone, and one by one he saw them falterrnand fail, and he wondered how he hadrnever belie’ed them: that you defeat capitalismrnby making the state the supremerncapitalist; that to abolish grammarrnschools is to move toward greater equalityrnof education; that a nuclear arms racerncan only beggar the West and lead tornnuclear war. “The whole grotesque car-rnJULY 1994/47rnrnrn