ABSTRACT
This debate, which provided a kind of centrepiece for History Workshop 13, has two immediate provocations. First, a critique of British Marxist historiography prepared by a group at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This was published in mimeographed form in Spring 1979 and a section of it was then reproduced, in printed form, under the title of ‘Thompson, Genovese and Socialist Humanist History’ under the name of one of the authors, Richard Johnson, in History Workshop Journal No. 6 (Autumn 1978). The editors invited replies to Johnson’s article which were published in the subsequent issue of the History Workshop Journal. Second, there was the publication of Thompson’s Poverty of Theory in November 1978, a wholesale attack both on French Marxist structuralism and on its various English followers. A third, and longer term basis for the debate was the political and intellectual division in the English New Left which opened up in the mid-1960s, and which can be followed in Thompson’s ‘Peculiarities of the English’ (reprinted as a chapter in The Poverty of Theory) and the radical revision of English history by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, published in various articles in New Left Review, to which it was a riposte. A still earlier division to which reference is made in the texts which follow, was that which helped to splinter the New Left of the early 1960s.
