Full bibliography

Summarizes the 20th anniversary conference of the Society for the Study of Labour History in London on May 31, 1980. Focuses on the plenary session paper of Scottish historian R.J. Morris, who, in critiquing the course of English labour history since 1960, said that the Thompsian preoccupation with class consciousness obscured great areas of class consensus on sex, religion, age group, and ethnicity. The paper drew a number of replies, including from E.P. Thompson, who commented that the key problem with his approach was that it put too little emphasis upon the place of power and the state. Thus, he asked his listeners to recall that the labour movement was, by its very nature, an oppositional force, a shelter or carrier for intellectual currents from anarchism to environmentalism that were from time to time important in political life. Concludes that the feminist critiques of Thompson presented by Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander were also a harbinger of the shifting terrain of scholarship in the field.