The Essay: The Enormous Condescension of Posterity

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: The Enormous Condescension of Posterity: The Making of EP Thompson

The Making of EP Thompson

The Enormous Condescension of Posterity

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, The Enormous Condescension of Posterity, The Making of EP Thompson

Historian Geoff Andrews explores EP Thompson's experience of adult education.

Geoff Andrews explores the ways in which EP Thompson's experiences as an adult education tutor were the making of The Making of the English Working Class.

Sixty years after it was first published, five essayists reflect on the legacy, ideas and personal inspiration of The Making of the English Working Class – and plot its place in the present day.

EP Thompson's landmark social history, The Making of the English Working Class, is a book that changed lives. In an academic world where history was primarily concerned with power and political reform, EP Thompson sought to rescue working people from, as he put it, "the enormous condescension of posterity".

It's a book that lies at the root of contemporary social history, of cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, where, in the years after its publication, the idea of agency – the 'making' of the title – came to be a defining touchstone in thinking about culture and society. And it was popular too, even if its easily recognisable blue Pelican covers – and almost 1,000 pages – were possibly more dipped into than read cover to cover.

EP Thompson spent many years as an adult education tutor among industrial communities in the West Riding of Yorkshire. When The Making of the English Working Class was published in 1963 he dedicated it to his students. In this essay, the historian and biographer Geoff Andrews recalls his own experiences of adult education in the 1980s and explores the ways in which these democratic classroom encounters might have provided an opportunity for EP Thompson to learn as well as teach.

Geoff Andrews is a historian and biographer, currently writing a new history of the labour movement.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

EP Thompson and his social history, The Making of the English Working Class, reassessed.

EP Thompson's subversive social history, The Making of the English Working Class, is a book that changed lives. But does it still speak as clearly in the 21st century?

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Essay

The Enormous Condescension of Posterity

The Making of EP Thompson

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3