Critical Inquiry
Winter 1995
Volume 21, Number 2
Excerpt from "Agenda for a Radical History" by E.P. Thompson:
"I think the renewed emphasis upon power and power relations, especially in
history, is right. Some studies of 'culture' forget the controlling context of
power. And yet something that has called itself Marxism has had so little
helpful to say about so many of the great problems of the twentieth century:
the tenacities of nationalism, the whole problem of Nazism; the problem of
Stalinism; of the Chinese cultural revolution; of the cold war today, which in
my view is not acting out a conflict between modes of production or economies
but is acting out a conflict from an outworn ideological script which
threatens indeed to be terminal to all modes of production alike. I think
we've had an insufficient vocabulary for examining the structure of power
relations through symbolism, from the awe of empire or monarchy to the awe
today of nuclear weapons. Our concern increasingly must be with finding
the'rationality' of social unreason. That is not throwing up one's hands and
saying 'anything can happen in history', but, rather, finding the 'reasons' of
social unreason. To give an example among the few articles I've had time to
read recently, the one which fascinated me most of all, completely outside my
field, was an article in Past and Present (May 1985) by Inga Clendinnen
on 'The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society'. And where, again, from the
materialist vocabulary do agency, initiatives, ideas, and even love come from?
This is why I'm so concerned with Blake and Blake's quarrel with the Deists
and the Godwinian utilitarians. His political sympathies were with so many of
their positions: and yet in the end he said there must be an affirmation,
'Thou Shalt Love'. Where foes the affirmative, 'Thou Shalt Love', come from?
This argument with necessitarianism continues Milton's old argument with
predestinarianism and prefigures today's argument with determinisms and
structuralisms which themselves are ideologically inflected products of a
defeated and disillusioned age. If we can destructure the cold war, then a new
age of ideas may be coming, as in the 1790s or the 1640s...."
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