Many scholars regard E. P. Thompson, along with the Welsh Marxist and founder of the British Cultural Studies group Raymond Williams, as pioneers in the field of cultural studies. A Marxist historian and lifelong political activist, Thompson was both an important theorist and a skeptical questioner of the value of theory. He believed that social consciousness is formed by a variety of social institutions and practices, not just by economic factors, and he objected to any theory of class that attempted to generalize beyond a specific social and historical context. Not content to see class formation simply as a necessary product of changes in the mode of production, he emphasized the agency of the actual individuals involved in class relationships. Unimpressed with the interpretation of history as the inevitable march of progress, he wrote his historical works from the viewpoint of the laboring classes, unabashedly offering an ideological...