Daily Inspiration Quote by E. P. Thompson

Thompson’s line performs its critique while pretending to be a procedural nicety. “Could I interrupt” is classic British academic stagecraft: politeness as a scalpel. He’s not merely asking for the floor; he’s seizing control of the frame, flagging that the previous speaker’s causal story is too tidy, too flattering to power, or too resigned to “progress” as something that simply arrives.

The bite sits in “alternative explanation” and “particularly well placed.” Thompson flatters his interlocutor only to corner them. If you’re “well placed,” you’re also implicated: you have access to the institutional machinery that produces the story being sold. His question is really an ethical demand dressed up as collegial debate: don’t just repeat the official account; use your vantage to test it.

Then comes the metaphor: “alchemists in the laboratories” inventing “sweet new kits.” Alchemy suggests mystification, a pseudo-magic that turns obscure tinkering into destiny. “Sweet” signals seduction: technological novelty as candy, engineered to be desired before it’s understood. “Kits” makes it sound modular and consumer-ready, as if social change is a product drop rather than a contested process.

Thompson, the historian of class and agency, is pushing back against technological determinism and elite self-mythology. He’s prodding at the comforting idea that innovation is neutral, inevitable, and authored by lone geniuses in sealed labs. The subtext: behind the “sweet new kits” are choices about labor, discipline, surveillance, profit, and whose lives get reorganized to make the new world run.