ABSTRACT
Edward Thompson was to remain loyal to the heritage of the 1956 movement and its conceptual nemesis, in the form of a socialist humanism. Thompson recognized that it was his task, as a socialist and as a historian, to link together these diverse expressions of opposition. Contrary to the conventional image of the romantic movement as comprising largely of apolitical, eccentric dreamers, Thompson, whenever he used the sentiments of the poets, emphasized the politicized, moral realism in their work. William Morris' utopianism centred around an interpretation of what could be possible within a given historical situation. The various theoretical traditions which came to define socialist humanism in Europe in the 1950s helped enrich the flourishing intellectual debates within Marxism as well as giving expression to the political militancy which accompanied the growth of the New Left. The British variant of socialist humanism involved a different approach from those developed on the continent by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Kolakowski.
