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E.P. Thompson's article "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" critiques the "spasmodic view" of popular history, which portrays the common people as merely reacting to economic stimuli without self-consciousness or agency. Thompson argues that this view is simplistic and neglects the complexities of motive, behavior, and function, reducing historical explanation to mere economic reductionism. He contends that historians have lent support to this view by reflecting only cursorily on the materials they disclose, and that a more nuanced understanding of the moral economy of the English crowd is needed to appreciate the cultural and social context of their actions. Thompson's work challenges the notion that the crowd's behavior can be explained solely by reference to economic distress, and instead seeks to understand the crowd's actions as a complex, culturally-mediated function.