E. P. Thompson and History. A Case of Methodological Republicanism?

For some time research on republicanism has gone beyond the scope of "ideal theories" to enter into historical discussion (Skinner, 1998, Domènech, 2004, Gourevitch, 2015). The political concepts that make up the republican tradition are seen in their concrete historical context and under the various normative intentions in which they are employed. Historical research has become almost inevitable. Edward Palmer Thompson is commonly accepted as one of the seminal authors in social history. Despite this fact, however, its possible contribution in other areas has rarely been addressed. In this paper an interpretation of the “methodological republicanism” of the British historian is offered: (1) Holistic Methodological Individualism and Intentional Explanations are operating through his key concept of ‘experience’. In many parts of his work the general arguments take the form of testimonies of individual experiences. Thompson has repeatedly argued against methodological collectivism (e.g. the idea of treating human communities or social classes as entities with personal attributes). (2) Historic and institutional understanding of the human action, dealing with the normative problems from a pluralist motivational perspective (e.g. his concept of ‘social class’, his research on the origins of capitalism as a system of structural domination, his critique of ‘economicism’, the ‘industrialism’ or his thesis about the Luddite movement). (3) The normative scheme of agency relationships (trust-trustee), which was brought to the modern republican theory by the work of John Locke, is applied by Thompson to grasp the historical process of the making of the working class (e.g. the discussion about the relations between the first working class organizations and the role in them of W. Cobet, T. Carlyle or the messianic J. Southcott). It is not coincidence that Thompson assumes these methodological principles in the study of the influences of the English popular and republican tradition in the first labour movement, that mixture of 'Jacobin consciousness' and 'proletarian consciousness' (Hobsbawm, 1962). Studies that would lead him to deal with such republican problems as, e.g. the tradition of "free English by birth" as a type of doctrine of "constitutive rights" that allow the absence of arbitrary interference; or his research on common property forms (the commons) that understand autonomous material existence as a requirement of freedom. In sum: what can a historian like E.P. Thompson offer to the researchers of the republican tradition? Were the conceptual schemes, with which Thompson normatively valued historical processes, "republican"? Could be his contribution be understood as an attempt to "republicanize” historical materialism? Should we then consider Thompson as a sui iuris member of this tradition?