ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the context for the argument over structure and the nature of the subject which took place between Thompson and Paul Hirst and which succeeded in introducing post-structuralism into historical studies. It considers Hirst’s critique consists of three assertions. The first is to deny the humanist conception, and is made with a force that requires citation of a whole paragraph. Having denied the universality of the subject, Hirst, in a second line of argument, denies its unity. Hirst’s third argument develops from the other two, and concerns essentially the transparency—or rather non-transparency— of discourse. Post-structuralist arguments such as that so well advanced by Hirst remain a thorn in the side of history writing in Britain. More than any other academic discourse, the writing of history is the one most contaminated by unexamined Englishness and its ideology of the real.
