Abstract

Contemporary interest in social history owes much to the work of a generation of British Marxist historians, including Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton, who popularized the idea of history from below. A key concept in their work was that of the "people." The populism was no accident, but can be explained in terms of debates within interwar Marxism, and the adoption by the British Communist Party after 1935 of the Popular Front tactic. It was also no single strand but a family of rhetorical devices. Populism was employed differently by Thompson and Hobsbawm, let alone by the other members of the group.