Document Type
Article
Abstract
E. P. Thompson used the Confucian trope of “rectification of human names” to summarize the major themes of his work. Such rectification has both political and scholarly ramifications that extend to poststructuralist debates over historical discourse (Ranajit Guha’s meditation on the method of Subaltern Studies, Hayden White’s theory of rhetorical universalism); organic relationship between working-class gesture, linguistic philosophy, and political economy (as exemplified in Piero Sraffa's renowned contribution to the "epistemological break" between the early and late Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy); and the universality of class struggle in defining the crucial intellectual breakthroughs of the 1970s, from the works of Michel Foucault and Yoshimoto Takaaki to those of autonomist Marxism and history from below. As is clear in Thompson’s revealing but also limited polemic against Louis Althusser, every act of rectification is necessarily incomplete and requires endless revision, both individually and collectively.
Repository Citation
Yang, Manuel. ""Rectification of Human Names": E.P. Thompson and Contemporary Debates on Historical and Epistemological Discourse." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1–55. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss4/16