000			02652nam a22002177a 4500
005			20260603120845.0
008			260603b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
028			_a: Donated by Prof. Romila Thapar
082			_a335 THO
100			_aThompson, E P.
245			_aThe Poverty of Theory & Other Essays. _c/ E P. Thompson.
260			_aDelhi _b : Aakar Books _c, 2010.
300			_av, 404p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b00
520			_aDorothy Thompson writes in her introduction: ‘This essay is a rarity among Edward’s published work. Although he was throughout his life interested in the philosophy of history and in various theoretical formulations, he concerned himself with these mainly in private reading and private discussion. Why then did he write this essay? He had read the work of Louis Althusser and found very liitle in them to affect his work. When Althusser appeared on the scene he made little impact on practicing historians. For some reason however, he suddenly became a major force among graduate students and some young historians and literary scholars. Most historians would have been prepared to wait for the new influence to demonstrate its validity in the production of innovative work in history; not only did this not happen, but Althusser’s followers – even some of the historians among them – began to declare that history was a non-discipline and that its study was of no value. It was the influence that Althusser’s writings were having on scholarship that made Edward take on the uncongenial task of putting the case for history against his closed system.’ The result is a major critique of Althusserian Marxism, or ‘theoretical practice’, entering closely into questions of epistemology and of the theory and practice of the historian. Around this detailed polemic, Thompson develops a constructive view of an alternative, socialist tradition, empirical and self-critical in method, and fully open to the creative practice evidenced by history – a tradition sharply opposed to much that now passes as ‘Marxism’. In converging shafts to close analysis and Swiftian irony, the author defoliates Althusser’s arcane, rationalist rhetoric and reinstates ‘historicism’, ‘empiricism’, ‘moralism’ and ‘socialist humanism’ in a different Marxist inheritance. The title of this essay echoesThe Poverty of Philosophy, Marx’s annihilating attack on Proudhon, which, like Engels’ Anti-Dühring, is a work read long after its subject has been consigned to oblivion.
650			_aPoverty
650			_aPhilosophy
650			_aHistory
700			_aE P Thompson
942			_cBOOK
999			_c68378 _d68378