ABSTRACT
Edward Thompson's Poverty of Theory has proved to be a remarkable political and intellectual event. It has dominated intellectual debate on the left for more than a year. Part of its impact is undoubtedly due to Thompson's stature as an historian of the first rank. Many of his qualities are to be seen to advantage in the essays reprinted in The Poverty of Theory especially The Peculiarities Of The English', a brilliant sketch of English historical development first published, as a polemic against Perry Anderson, in The Socialist Register. Althusserianism in the sense of gospel and doctrine is a vulnerable tendency and Thompson scores a number of palpable hits. As Marx himself says, chemists have reagents and botanists microscopes: the historian of society has only one instrument' the procedure of abstraction. Thompson reject without reservation the identification of the Marxist tradition of historiography of which he have been taken as one representative of culturalism.
