Politics & Power Quote by E. P. Thompson

Thompson is needling the technocrat’s favorite alibi: the idea that science merely responds to history, when in fact history is often retrofitted to excuse what science has already built. The line lands because it’s framed as a pointed aside to “a scientist,” recruiting insider authority to indict a whole system of rationalization. It’s not anti-science; it’s anti-innocence. The sting is in “completely independently” and “only afterward” - a chronology that flips the usual morality tale. Weapons, doctrines, surveillance tools: first you perfect the instrument, then you invent the emergency.

The key verb is “contrived.” Thompson isn’t claiming political crises are fake so much as curated - arranged, amplified, narrated until they fit the new capability. Once you have the bomb, you find the geopolitical logic that makes the bomb feel inevitable. Once you have a laboratory triumph, you manufacture a story of necessity. That’s a historian’s move: tracing how power converts contingency into destiny.

Context matters: Thompson wrote as a Marxist social historian shaped by the Cold War, nuclear brinkmanship, and the military-industrial pipeline that made “research” indistinguishable from strategic planning. His broader project was to restore human agency to narratives that institutions prefer to present as impersonal forces. This sentence performs that politics in miniature, stripping away the comforting belief that technology is neutral and policy is reactive. The subtext is an accusation: experts don’t just misread the world; they help stage it, then plead the script as justification.