
This book is an intellectual biography of EP Thompson, as well as an exercise in the sociology of knowledge: as such, it considers not just Thompson's ideas and arguments, but also the question of why he adopted those ideas, and made those arguments.

The crisis of theory tells the story of the political and intellectual adventures of E. P. Thompson, one of Britain's foremost twentieth-century thinkers. Drawing on extraordinary new unpublished documents, Scott Hamilton shows that all of Thompson's work, from his acclaimed...