Politics & Power Quote by E. P. Thompson

Thompson is doing something deliberately unfashionable for Cold War discourse: he refuses the lazy map where virtue and vice line up neatly by nation. The first move is to split “Germany and Britain” from their governments, and to split “scientists” from “politicians.” That’s not sociological hair-splitting; it’s an argument about agency. If you’re looking for allies against militarism, he implies, stop treating states as moral persons and start tracking the professional and institutional cultures that actually manufacture consent.

The Weinberger reference (Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary) is the tell. Thompson is attacking a particular strategic mentality - managerial, technocratic, permanently readying for war - and he’s warning that it travels well. You can find it in any capital. The sting is that you can also find its opposite: scientists and intellectuals across borders who share a skepticism about escalation, nuclear brinkmanship, and the seductions of “security” rhetoric.

Calling Britain “the most bellicose ruling group” is a provocation aimed at British self-mythology: the country that imagines itself as temperate, civilized, reluctantly dragged into conflict. Thompson flips that script, suggesting the real heat is in the governing class - not the public, not even the abstract nation, but the people who set doctrine, posture, budgets, and alliances. As a historian shaped by anti-fascism and later anti-nuclear activism, he’s reading the early-1980s West as an arms system with interchangeable elites, and he’s trying to shame Britain into seeing itself not as America’s prudent partner, but as an eager engine in its own right.