Jim heartfield wrote:
> In message <37ED14F2.392F9CBD at mail.ilstu.edu>, Carrol Cox
> <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes
> >George Thompson (the British Stalinist/Maoist greek scholar)
>
> A great scholar, too. Lost to history, I had thought, until I read this
> from Carrol. The Human Essence is my favourite, followed by Aeschylus
> and Athens. He was at Birmingham University in the sixties, and much
> harried by the authorities there, coming a generation before Stuart
> Hall's Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham (which I think he had
> no truck with). Thompson supported a small Maoist breakaway from the
> Communist Party of Great Britain, (the CPB-ML, of led by Reg Birch, I
> think) judging (rightly, but belatedly) that the party's 'British Road
> to Socialism' manifesto was a move to the right.
>
> His cultural analyses, being both materialistic and unashamedly
> classical is out of favour today, but there is a great deal in The Human
> Essence which will still be true long after Stuart Hall has been
> forgotten.
He and Joan Robinson were co-editors of a newsletter on China. I never saw a copy of it myself. I learned a great deal from all of his books, even those which subsequent scholarship (specifically, De Croix and Wood) has corrected. I agree with Jim on *The Human Essence*. Some years ago a writer in MR referred to him as "the late George Thompson" and Thompson wrote in noting that he was still alive. I presume he is no longer?? I first learned of him through an article by him MR published in the late '60s or early '70s.
Carrol