The result is a major critique of Althusserian Marxism, or ‘theoretical practice’, entering closely into questions of epistemology and of the theory and practice of the historian. Around this detailed polemic, Thompson develops a constructive view of an alternative, socialist tradition, empirical and self-critical in method, and fully open to the creative practice evidenced by history – a tradition sharply opposed to much that now passes as ‘Marxism’. In converging shafts to close analysis and Swiftian irony, the author defoliates Althusser’s arcane, rationalist rhetoric and reinstates ‘historicism’, ‘empiricism’, ‘moralism’ and ‘socialist humanism’ in a different Marxist inheritance. The title of this essay echoesThe Poverty of Philosophy, Marx’s annihilating attack on Proudhon, which, like Engels’ Anti-Dühring, is a work read long after its subject has been consigned to oblivion.