EP Thompson and CLR James

Following up this post, here's some of EP Thompson's presence in the blogosphere:

BigPictureSmallOffice.com: Give Me Liberty: "“The state has been taking liberties,' said E.P. Thompson, a British socialist historian, 'and these liberties were once ours.”"

fortuna: Snapshot, 1793: Thompson on what freedom meant to eighteenth century Englishmen.

Free as in Liberation: Dumb eh?: "I recall E P Thompson mentioning that handwritten copies of Rousseau's and Voltaire's radical essays were circulating amongst working-class Chartist activists in 19th-Century England - these activists would mostly have nothing more than a Sunday-School education. My grandmother (from a background of Methodist unionists with Sunday-school literacy) used to copy out entire library books for me by hand as a child, so I have personal experience of that tradition (contrary to the view that this is just a 'romanticisaion' of the working class)."

The Social Affairs Unit Weblog: Why Marx was wrong about economists: "E.P. Thompson once described the Wealth of Nations and the Rights of Man as two 'handbooks' of working class radicals in the first decades of the 19th century. "

And here's some of CLR James':

The Virtual Stoa: "The fools who read the Observer think that Nick Hornby's somewhat engaging and mildly interesting Fever Pitch is a better sports book than C L R James's imperishable classic Beyond a Boundary (and scroll down to #3). This is idiocy on a large scale."

Militant Moderate: Libertarians, Radicals, and the British Perception of the State: "In a fantastic essay written for The Cricketer, and later reproduced in his classic book Beyond a Boundary, CLR James (an unapologetic Marxist) bemoaned the defensive style of cricket becoming more and more prevalent, blaming it on the “welfare state of mind” "

International Affairs Club: A political cricket, a reggae of economics: "The late CLR James, the Trinidadian philosopher and scholar wrote extensively about cricket and West Indian nationalism. In Beyond the Boundary, a thesis on cricket and West Indian cultural identity, James reminds us that he had little doubt “that the clash of race, caste and class did not retard but stimulated West Indian cricket” insisting on the “simultaneity of culture and politics”. James presented what in his view was a metaphorical basis upon which on could view the role of cricket in West Indian society."

File under: heroes of freedom