E.P. Thompsons videnskabelige fortælling om arbejderklassen og klassebegrebet

This article deals with the British social historian E.P. Thompson’s (1924-93) concept of class and his narrative presentation of the English working-class. The aim is to focus on the need for history told as a story without losing either the methodological or theoretical frame. Furthermore, it is desirable not to neglect historians’ finest efforts to develop empirical data and analyze a variety of sources into fruitful results about the past, as seen in E.P. Thompson’s work. In the past decades, history as a discipline has witnessed several trends. By looking at E.P. Thompson today, we might find an old fashioned interest in a long gone popular issue, namely the making of the working-class. On the other hand, class is still to be used as a concept in understanding not only the far and distant past, but also the recent past. Class ought to call on historians to find the importance of conducting research in history of the common people, but narrated as a story.