The Enormous Condescension of Posterity
The phrase, which appears in the preface to The Making of the English Working Class, names the methodological failure Thompson's career was organized to refuse. Conventional history had treated the losers of technological transformation — the handloom weavers starved by the power loom, the framework knitters hanged for breaking frames, the utopian socialists whose schemes came to nothing — as evolutionary dead ends on the march of progress. Thompson inverted the frame: these people were not obstacles to be explained away but participants in a democratic tradition whose analyses of their situations were often more acute than those of their social superiors. The phrase now names the specific failure of the contemporary AI discourse to treat the displaced, the concerned, and the resistant as political actors whose grievances merit institutional response rather than therapeutic reassurance.
In the AI Story
The condescension operates through several mechanisms the Thompson framework makes visible. The first is the label that forecloses analysis — Luddite in the nineteenth century, variations on fearful of change in the twenty-first. The second is the reduction of political grievance to psychological state: the displaced worker is afraid, nostalgic, unable to adapt — never correct in her analysis of a structural injustice.
The third mechanism is the imputation of ignorance. The framework knitters were dismissed as not understanding the benefits of industrialization. The contemporary displaced worker is dismissed as not understanding the benefits of AI. In both cases, the dismissal serves a political function: it relieves the beneficiaries of the transition from the obligation to address grievances that would, if taken seriously, require institutional response.
Thompson's method of refusing the condescension involved patient archival work — recovering the actual words, the actual organizations, the actual analyses of the dismissed. The framework knitters' petitions to Parliament, the Chartists' speeches, the trade unionists' resolutions — read without condescension, these documents reveal political sophistication that the dismissive label cannot accommodate.
The contemporary equivalent requires similar patience. The Andersen v. Stability AI lawsuit, the SAG-AFTRA strike, the Authors Guild letter — each document, read without condescension, reveals specific political analysis that the dismissive framing obscures.
Origin
The phrase appears in Thompson's 1963 preface, where he wrote that he sought to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand-loom weaver, the utopian artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.
Key Ideas
Methodological refusal. The phrase names a methodological choice: to treat the dismissed as serious political actors whose analyses deserve rigorous engagement.
Label as foreclosure. Dismissive labels (Luddite, fearful, nostalgic) foreclose analysis by reducing political grievance to psychological state.
Political function of condescension. The condescension serves those who benefit from the transition by making grievances deniable without institutional response.
Archival recovery. The antidote is patient recovery of the actual words, analyses, and organizations of the dismissed.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, preface (1963)
- C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (Secker & Warburg, 1938)
- Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" (1940)