Wade Matthews (University of Strathclyde), "Contradictions and Possibilities: Thompson and the Ideology of the Freeborn Englishman"

This paper will investigate Thompson's understanding of the ideology of the "freeborn Englishman" as he presented it in The Making of the English Working Class. It will not only revisit his analysis of the "freeborn Englishman" in his classic of English social history, but also explore later critiques of his understanding of "reform" in the 1790s. Voiced first by Geoffrey Best in a review of The Making in 1965, it has been suggested that his history of popular reformism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ignored reactionary elements within "the people," the susceptibility of the working-class to the appeal of "loyalism". Thompson's narrative of the genesis of a distinctly proletarian class consciousness, his "unflinchingly English account of English radicalism," was fatally undermined, it is claimed, by his elision of the "flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of the plebeian mind." This paper will concentrate on Thompson's understanding of "the nation" as a realm of contested discourse, or class struggle, and will assess the validity of these later critiques. It will also examine the part played by the ideology of the "freeborn Englishman" in the making of the English working class, and will ask to what degree this ideology could be reconciled to a specifically working-class consciousness. It will conclude with a brief assessment of the way Thompson used the rhetoric of the "freeborn Englishman" in his political journalism of the late 1970s, and will ask what place this rhetoric might have in socialist discourse today.