When E.P. Thompson and John Saville were instructed by the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain to close down their journal The Reasoner, which had been critical of what the editors saw as the Party’s dogmatism, they refused. Suspended form the party, from which they soon resigned in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary, they relaunched with the New Reasoner. The magazine urged a reconsideration of the longer traditions of radical politics and began to lay out the basis of the sort of humanist socialism for which Thompson remains so well known. Running to ten issues, the New Reasoner would later merge with the Universities and Left Review and become New Left Review. Read more about the New Reasoner in this introduction written by Peter Worsley with Dorothy Thompson and Stuart Hall.
