| Abstract: | E.P. Thompson's work on working-class formation is widely recognized as one of the crucial contributions to Marxist historiography in the twentieth century. His emphasis on notions of agency and subjectivity is intimately linked to a radical recasting of the socialist agenda against the objectivism of an earlier, ‘orthodox’, Marxism and of a later, and more theoretically sophisticated, structuralism. Thompson's conception of working-class agency as the primary element in historical materialism parallels Antonio Negri's theorization of proletarian subjectivity as an expansive process of collective self-constitution. In particular, Negri's analysis of ‘power’ as an autonomous dynamic of social creation offers an essential development of Thompson's ideas and a fresh theoretical template for the political re-actualization of radical humanism. |
