The Making Of The English Working Class By E. P. Thompson

In British history, competing methodologies and modes of analysis have produced differing results concerning the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. Some, such as the British Marxist social historian E.P. Thompson, in his lengthy tome The Making of the English Working Class, have concluded that although the industrial revolution may have marginally increased the average incomes of workers between 1760 and 1830, the corresponding changes in society led to a substantial increase in misery for many poor British workers, while at the same time creating a distinct working-class with its own consciousness.

Despite the great service Thompson undertook to rectify the buried histories of many working class men and women—“the poor stockinger, the Luddite

Thompson’s part III was devoted to expositing the way in which the

Thompson also asserts that only qualitative evidence—as he terms it, “literary evidence”—is appropriate to measure happiness, or one’s satisfaction with one’s own way-of-life. Hence Thompson proceeds to marshal hoards of literary evidence and bombard the reader with it in his part II, in order to create the impression that there was “a great qualitative disturbance in people’s way of life, traditional relationships, and sanctions,” which meant not happiness, but misery. Unfortunately, such methodology is specious. The economic method of Hayek, while an imperfect tool for measuring prosperity, happiness, utility, etc., is a substantial improvement over the Thomson’s method—the method whereby one uses massive quantities of qualitative data in an attempt to quantify something so unquantifiable as happiness or misery. To further add to Thompson’s methodological shortcomings, in order to argue that misery was increasing during the Industrial Revolution, he would have had to present a side-by-side comparison of the industrial period with the previous period; Thompson does nothing of the sort, arguably because it would have made