"Every sociological definition is at bottom a historical
prognosis". Leon Trotsky
A social order that was essentially feudal was destroyed by
violence, a new and capitalist social order created in its place" Christopher
Hill
'a battleground which has been heavily fought over...beset
with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to
fight every inch of the way'. Lawrence Stone
Introduction
The last three decades have witnessed a non-stop onslaught by
revisionist historians against the conception that England during the seventeenth- century witnessed a bourgeois revolution. The purpose of this essay is to reset
the conception of a bourgeois revolution and reestablish it as part of our
understanding of those unprecedented events that took place nearly four hundred
years ago.
The historian most connected with the English bourgeois
revolution was, of course, Christopher Hill. Hill was a member of the Communist
Party until 1956 and was the author of the groundbreaking essay The English
Revolution 1640.
In his introduction, Hill wrote "the object of this essay is
to suggest an interpretation of the events of the seventeenth century different
from that which most of us were taught at school. To summarise it briefly, this
interpretation is that the English Revolution of 1640-60 was a great social
movement like the French Revolution of 1789. The state power protecting an old
order that was essentially feudal was violently overthrown, power passed into
the hands of a new class, and so the freer development of capitalism was made
possible. The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I
was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and
conservative landlords. Parliament beat the King because it could appeal to the
enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and
countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the
population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the
struggle was really about. The rest of this essay will try to prove and
illustrate these generalisations".
Hill knew that defending and proving his thesis would be
easier said than done. He would be attacked both inside and outside the
Communist party. He would spend most of his academic career seeking to defend
and then re-define what he meant by a bourgeois revolution.
In his 1940 essay he
acknowledges how difficult it was to offer a precise definition of a bourgeois
revolution, he writes"The Marxist conception of a bourgeois revolution, which
I find the most helpful model for understanding the English Revolution, does
not mean a revolution made by the bourgeoisie'. There was no self-conscious
bourgeoisie which planned and willed the revolution. However, the English
Revolution was a bourgeois revolution because of its outcome, though glimpsed
by few of its participants, 'was the establishment of conditions far more
favourable to the development of capitalism than those which prevailed before
1640'.
The 1940 essay was a breathtaking piece of work that deserved
to be labelled groundbreaking. Although Hill was unsatisfied with what he wrote
describing the essay, the work of “a very angry young man, believing he was
going to be killed in a world war.”
Hill is correct when he says that the 1640 "bourgeois
revolution was not consciously willed by the bourgeoisie", but he was as Ann
Talbot explains "sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the
social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle
against the king and well-grounded enough in history to identify new and
revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared—as
the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical
precedent for some theory to explain what they were doing."
Despite Hill's belief that the bourgeoisie did not know what
they were doing Talbot believed that Hill was"sufficiently astute to realise
that when the people execute their king after a solemn trial and much
deliberation, it is not the result of a misunderstanding but has a profound
revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past.
Although the monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie was
soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, no
monarch sat quickly on the throne after that event until quite late in
Victoria's reign".
Not everyone in the Communist Party welcomed Hill’s
groundbreaking work on the English Revolution. The CP's Labour Monthly carried several
articles attacking Hill’s conception of the English bourgeois revolution.
A certain P.F wrote "When the king and the bourgeoisie began
to realise that the system of government which up to then had worked rather
satisfactorily would have to be changed somehow, the king looked for allies.
The king was, as we have said, not simply a helpless instrument in the hands of
the bourgeoisie but had a certain independent power corresponding to the stage
or transition between the classes. In order to keep this power and to extend
it, the king turned for support to the feudal remnants and to the reactionary
sections of the bourgeoisie. With the help of these groups, he tried to reign
against the majority of the bourgeoisie, especially the industrial and merchant
bourgeoisie. Out of this conflict developed the Great Rebellion, the Civil War.
The Great Rebellion, therefore, is, in my opinion, not the war of liberation of
a suppressed bourgeoisie against feudalism - as was the Revolution of 1789. It
represents rather a new and very important step forward in the progress of
bourgeois society, a fight for the abolition of absolute monarchy, against the
remnants of feudalism, against the reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie,
against every element which might retard the vigorous development of bourgeois
capitalist society”.
One staggering point about Hill's original article is the
fact that it was allowed to be published by such an ossified Stalinist party.
P.F's comment was essentially reformist and was merely trumpeting Joseph Stalin’s
Menshevik two-stage political position.
Hill's ability to write against the CP'ss party line on historical
questions are explained by Talbot who
said there was "something Jesuitical about the relationship of these
historians to Marxism. They seem to have been capable of partitioning their
minds and pursuing a scientific Marxist approach to history up to the point
where the Stalinist bureaucracy drew the line, like the Jesuit scientists who
would pursue their investigations as far as the Church authorities permitted,
but no further. It was an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme
specialisation of academic life that enabled them to concentrate on very narrow
areas of history that never brought them into direct collision with the
bureaucracy on political questions.
It has been said that as Hill began to write on different
aspects of the revolution, this meant he had abandoned the concept of the
bourgeois revolution. One essay, in particular, has been cited as marking a
change in Hill's stance on the revolution. Published in Three British
Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 Ed J A Pocock (Princeton U.P 1980) some
historians believe it contained a change and repudiated his previous theory of
the bourgeois revolution.
While it is correct to say that Hill did in his early career
concentrate on economic questions in this 1980s essay: A Bourgeois revolution,
he said that" a revolution embraces all social life and activities.
Hill started to pay attention to the radicals of the English
revolution. Groups such as the Levellers and Diggers were given far more
prominence in his writings. Even his writings on these groups were influenced
by his time in the CP. He owes a tremendous debt to the unfortunately underused
historians of the former USSR. Hill was constrained to use only the ones
cleared by the Russian CP.
One outstanding writer not cleared by the CP was Evgeny
Pashukanis. Whether Hill studied Evgeny Pashukanis is an open point. Pashukanis
makes this point on the Levellers “Generally, the dissolution of the bases of
the feudal order in these two and a half centuries was a great step forward;
the contours of the new social relationships appeared much more clearly, and
the anti-feudal ideology assumed mature forms. Therefore, in the seventeenth
century at the extreme left wing of the revolutionary movement we now find a
party (the Levellers) which developed a broad and consistent programme of a
bourgeois-democratic nature; the elimination of royal authority and the Upper
House, the universal right to vote, the separation of church from state (the
abolition of the tithe), the elimination of estate-corporate privileges,
freedom of trade, direct income tax, the cessation of the plunder of common
lands, and the abolition of all remnants of serfdom in land relations including
even copyhold.
He continues"It is particularly important to note the demands of the
Levellers concerning the radical restructuring both of judicial establishments
and of court procedure. The age of mercantile capital, and the absolutism
corresponding to it at the political level, was distinguished in the judicial
area by the rule of casuistry, procrastination, bribe-taking and arbitrariness.
Mercantile capital, developing on the basis of shackling forms of exploitation,
is not only congenial to serf and police arbitrariness but is directly involved
in it, for it facilitates the exploitation of the small commodity producers.
The major monopolistic trading companies are much more interested in having
good ties with the throne than in a fast, impartial and scrupulous court, the
more so since in their internal affairs they enjoy broad, and even judicial, autonomy.
On the contrary, the Levellers-by virtue of the fact that they acted as
champions of the most general conditions of development of bourgeois-capitalist
relations-had to turn their attention again to judicial reform. John Lilburne
in his work, The Fundamental Laws and Liberties, incidentally formulates two
classical principles of the bourgeois doctrine of criminal law: no one may be
convicted other than on the basis of a law existing at the moment of commission
of the act, and the punishment must correspond to the crime according to the
principle an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Lilburne himself was, of
course, the first man in England to succeed in being served with an indictment.
"The Levellers found their support among the peasants, small
rentiers, craftsmen and workers. It is enough to recall the influence which
they enjoyed in the London suburbs, in particular in Southwark, which was
populated by weavers. However, their main support was the army. Here we
encounter a fact imposing a characteristic imprint on the whole course of the
first English Revolution: it was not accompanied by any significant agrarian
movement. Proceeding from the Levellers, the attempt to transform the political
structure of England of that day into a consistent bourgeois-democratic
condition was never supported by a massive peasant uprising. For this, of
course, there were fully sufficient reasons. In the first place, by that time
serf dependence no longer existed in England. Almost everywhere, the corvée had
been replaced by money rent. The cause of the greatest discontent had therefore,
been eliminated. In the second place, the class divisions of the English
peasantry, about which we spoke above, had gone rather far by the time of the
Great Revolution. A rich upper stratum, separated from the general mass, tried
to improve its farming at the expense of the less wealthy strata. Winstanley,
the leader and ideologist of the “Diggers”, who attempted to realize something
like agrarian communism, thus draws this contradiction between the rich
freeholders and the poor: they (the freeholders) exhaust the common pastures,
put an excessive number of sheep and draft animals on them, and as a result the
small renter and peasant farmer hardly manage to feed their cows on the grazing
ground.” The rich upper strata of the country took an active part in the
destruction of the old common system, in particular, the enclosure of the
common lands. In this instance, it united with the landowners against the rural
poor. Here we see, mutatis mutandis, the same alignment of class forces which
Stolypin tried to realize among us with the help of his agrarian legislation.
It is clear that this destroyed the political power of the peasant movement
against the landowners".
Pashukanis was denounced as an "enemy of the people" then denounced
as a "Trotskyite saboteur" and was executed in September 1937.
Hill defended his study of the radicals saying that " some
will think that I overemphasize the importance of the defeated radicals at the
expense of the mainstream achievements of the English revolution. However,
without the pressure of the Radicals, the civil war might not have transformed
into a revolution: some compromise could have been botched up between the
gentry on the two sides- a Prussian path”. Regicide and republic were no part
of the intentions of the original leaders of the Long Parliament: they were
forced on the men of 1649 by the logic of the revolution which they were trying
to control.”
While it is rare for any historian today to come to the
defence of Hill’s writing on the radicals of the English Revolution or any
subject for that matter covered by Hill, it is to Justin Champion's credit that
he did so in his lecture Heaven Taken by Storm. Champion writes “Hill handled
ideas in his three significant books Intellectual Origins of the English
Revolution, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, and The
World Turned Upside Down. Alongside those broader historical landscapes, Hill
also offered profound studies of significant literary figures such as John
Milton and John Bunyan. These works collectively ought to prompt discussion
about what type of Marxism Hill subscribed too. His historical writing allowed
space to consider the role of ideas, assessments of the individuals who
produced them, and the consequent agency or outcomes of those moments of
intellectual intervention. Hill did not employ the deterministic treatment of
ideas as mere epiphenomena of economic infrastructure or class affiliation so
frequently evident in the hostile caricature of his work. Much of the crude
assault on the value of Hill’s history has been shaped by the distinct lack of
conceptual engagement with the published evidence of his Marxist methodology.
The best way to remedy this occlusion is to examine those under-read
contributions by the man himself.
As Champion points out in his essay if there was one constant
feature of Hill's work, it was that he understood the relationship between base
and superstructure. As Karl Marx was the leading proponent of this theory, it
is worth seeing what he wrote. If there is one major criticism is that Hill did
not quote enough of Marx in his books.
Marx wrote in his 1859 essay "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into
definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of
production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material
forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that
determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material
productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of
production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the
property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into
their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the
economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole
immense superstructure”.
It is clear from the Pocock essay that later in his career, Hill
concentrated more on superstructure than he did on base. This shift must be
said coincided with his leaving of the Communist Party in 1956. Perhaps his
last great book on economic questions was Economic Problems of the Church
written in 1956 although he would later return to the subject from time to time.
The book A Century of Revolution published in 1961 was one such time.
Hill'ss essay The English Revolution was, in many ways, a
piece of classical Marxism. Not the last word on the subject but he did defend
in the teeth of Stalinist opposition several fundamental Marxist conceptions.
It is hard to fathom how much Hill read of the great Russian Marxist Leon
Trotsky but his understanding of qualitative changes in history mirrors that of
Trotsky.
As Trotsky explains "Quality is an aspect of something by which it
is what it is and not something else; quality reflects that which is stable
amidst change. Quantity is an aspect of something which may change (become more
or less) without the thing thereby becoming something else; quantity reflects
that which is constantly changing in the world (“the more things change, the
more they remain the same”). The quality of an object pertains to the whole,
not one or another part of an object, since without that quality it would not
be what it is, whereas an object can lose a “part” and still be what it is,
minus the part. Quantity, on the other hand, is an aspect of a thing by which
it can (mentally or really) be broken up into its parts (or degrees) and be
re-assembled again. Thus, if something changes in such a way that has become
something of a different kind, this is a “qualitative change”, whereas a change
in something by which it still the same thing, though more or less, bigger or
smaller, is a “quantitative change”. In Hegel’s Logic, quantity and quality
belong to being”
One unfortunate by-product of Hill concentration on social or
political aspects rather than the economics of the revolution was his adoption
of the genre “Peoples history”. This particular bad piece of Stalinist baggage
was taken by Hill when he left the CP. His approach to this type of history was directly
influenced by the politics of the bureaucracy.
As Ann Talbot eloquently states "The Communist Party
sponsored a form of People'ss History”, which is typified by A.L. Morton's
Peoples History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels,
revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as
representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach
reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive
sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence
of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic
murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the
approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney
Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and
came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.
Stone- Manning
Hill's concept was not without its admirers or supporters.
One such supporter in the early days of Hill's career was the American
historian Lawrence Stone. Stone it is said described the history of the 17th
century as 'a battleground which has been heavily fought over...beset with
mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight
every inch of the way'.
Stone took a position similar to the Christian Socialist
historian R.H. Tawney, which sought to explain the cause of the English Civil
War from the standpoint of a growing and politically influential section of the
gentry. The growth of this gentry had over the preceding years led to a
destabilising of the English State. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper "inverted
this theory, arguing that in fact the Civil War was caused in part by court gentry
who had fallen on bad times”.
In his book, The Causes of the English Revolution Stone does
present a convincing case for the defence of the English revolution. It is
broken down into two parts with four chapters; the fourth is an update on
Stone’s previous position written in 1985. Part one is titled Historiography
sub titled Theories of revolution. Stone does work through a number of
sociological and Marxist theories as to the revolutionary nature of the English
Civil war. Stone's enquiry on the nature of the English Revolution was prompted
by his time at Princeton University in America. While teaching at Princeton he
came under extensive attack by his students for his leanings towards a
social/economic read Marxist interpretation of the Civil War.
Stone may have considered himself a young Marxist, but he was
nothing of the kind. Stone had a major problem in that he never really
understood the difference between genuine Marxism and a crude form of economic
determinism.
As Nick Beams points out in his outstanding essay Imperialism
and the political economy of the Holocaust “One of the most frequently employed
caricatures of Marxism is the claim that it argues that ideology is just a
cover for the real economic motivations of social actors. Accordingly, Marxism
is disproved by the discovery that individuals act, not according to economic
motives but on the basis of powerful ideologies. For example, the right-wing
British historian Niall Ferguson maintains that since no business interests on
either side of the conflict desired World War I—it served the immediate
economic interests of neither—its origins cannot be said to lie within the
capitalist economic system. It should be noted, in this regard, that no
business or financial interests want recession either. However, recessions
nevertheless occur, and they arise from the contradictions of the capitalist
economy. Marxism does not deny that historical actors are motivated and driven
into action by their ideological conceptions, and it does not claim that these
ideologies are simply a rationalisation for the real economic motivations.
However, it does insist that it is necessary to examine the motives behind the
motives—the real, underlying, driving forces of the historical process—and to make
clear the social interests served by a given ideology—a relationship that may
or may not is consciously grasped by the individual involved.
Stone, after he wrote this book, moved away from any association
with Marxist historiography and in his own words became as he put it in an
interview in 1987, "an old Whig.” The problem is that Stone tried to drag
Hill into the same pit, stating that “Hill and I are thus now in agreement that
the English Revolution was not caused by a clear conflict between feudal and
bourgeois ideologies and classes; that the alignment of forces among the rural
elites did not correlate with attitudes towards ruthless enclosure; that the
Parliamentarian gentry had no conscious intention of destroying feudalism; but
that the result, first of the royal defeat and second of the consolidation of
that defeat in the Glorious Revolution forty years later, was decisive. Together
they made possible the seizure of political power by landed, mercantile and
banking elites, which in turn opened the way to England's advance into* the age
of the Bank of England, the stock-market, aggressive economic liberalism,
economic and affective individualism, and an agricultural entrepreneurship
among the landed elite to whose unique characteristics.”.This was Stone's epitaph not Hill's
Brian Manning
Brain Manning was made of sterner stuff. Manning studied
under Hill and was profoundly influenced by him. He started his academic career
politically tied to the Labour Party later in life he was politically attached
to the radical left group the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This was a
handicap that was to hamper his work for the rest of his relatively short life.
To what extent you could call Manning a Marxist historian” is
open to debate. Usually, these labels are given by people who are too
intellectually lazy to explain what they mean by that term.
In history, accuracy matters. For too long historians have
thrown around terms like Marxist without any real understanding of what they
mean. Whether conscious or not, they do a disservice to any student studying
the English revolution.
Manning first meaningful involvement in politics was through
the Labour Party, but it was not until the 1980s that Manning rejected the
Labour Party and joined the International Socialists forerunner of the
Socialist Workers Party(SWP). The SWP was attractive to Manning as they fitted
into his schemer of history from below. The Communist Party historians heavily
influenced the SWP.
Manning was a student under Hill in the early 1950s and
admired the great historian. In an obituary he wrote “The undoubted dominance
of Christopher Hill in the history of the English Revolution may be attributed
to his prolific record of books and articles, and his continuous engagement in
debate with other historians; to the breadth of his learning, embracing the
history of literature, the law, science, as well as religion and economics; to
the fact that his work set the agenda and the standard to which all historians
of the period had to address themselves, whether in support of or opposition to
his methods and interpretations; but above all to the inspiration he drew from
Marxism. The English Revolution took place in a culture dominated by religious
ideas and religious language, and Christopher Hill recognised that he had to
uncover the social context of religion in order to find the key to
understanding the English Revolution, and as a Marxist to ascertain the
interrelationships between the intellectual and social aspects of the period”.
Manning developed close links with the Communist Party when
he left Balliol College, Oxford. Having his first teaching post at Kings
College London, then Manchester University finally ending up at University of
Ulster. A critical development in Manning's historical trajectory was when he
served on the editorial board of the Magazine Past and Present, which was close
to the Communist Party Historians. While opposing what he called “Soviet
Communism” during his time on the editorial board he was not opposed to
collaborating with British Communists historians.
Much of Manning work concentrated more of the radical groups
in the English Revolution such as the Levellers, diggers etc. According to Alex
Calinicos “At the end of the 1980s, Brian started to attend and speak at the
Marxism week of discussion organised by the Socialist Workers Party every July
in London. What drew us together was a shared commitment to the Marxist theory
of history and an enthusiasm for the English Revolution. (Some of us - John
Rees, for example - have always found it hard to distinguish between the two:
there was a plan in 1994, as far as I remember never executed, to take a
minibus to the battlefield of Naseby to gloat over the destruction of Stuart
power by the New Model Army 350 years earlier.) Not the best epitaph a
historian would want.
Norah Carlin is a little bit scathing of Manning’s defence of
the English revolution, Manning’s work had “alarming absence of explicitly
Marxist explanation. Manning, for example, states his position on the nature of
the class struggle in the Civil War in nine lines of his preface, and in a form
which makes it almost impossible to recognise it as Marxist. Left-wing
historians seem more concerned to establish their fair use of evidence than to
engage in the development of a Marxist understanding of the class struggle”.
Revisionist revolt
While the development of revisionist
historians attacking Hill and the concept of the English bourgeois revolution
was an objective occurrence, it must be said that Hill did very little to
counter this phenomenon. He was after all a better historian than he was a
political thinker.
Hill'ss complacency was expressed in
this statement “we should not take these fashions too seriously: they go in
cycles, and it is no doubt my age that makes me a little sceptical of
latter-day “revisionist” historians who try to convince us that there was no
revolution in 17th century England, or that if there was it had no long-term
causes or consequences.’
As Norah Carlin explains The New History which has grown
up especially in the last twenty years makes no bones about its hostility to
Marxism. In the 1950s, the most vicious attacks on the Marxist interpretation
of the Civil War (by Hugh Trevor-Roper, as right-wing politically and as nasty
personally as you could hope or fear to find) nevertheless offered an
alternative explanation in terms of social conflict, namely the struggle of the
impoverished gentry against the overgrown Renaissance state. But from the
mid-1960s it became right-wing orthodoxy to deny that the Civil War was a class
conflict at all. By 1973, the introduction to a widely-used textbook by Conrad
Russell could claim that ‘For the time being ... social change explanations of
the English Civil War must be regarded as having broken down.’ Lest anyone
should think that that places the burden of providing an alternative
explanation on the shoulders of right-wing historians, the task of explanation
is either postponed until we have enough new biographies of seventeenth-century
politicians and studies of day-to-day debates in Parliament; or cynically
denied altogether. One historian has even taken Marxists to task for over-explaining the phenomena of the past’. We must allow, he says, for the
role of sheer muddle and misunderstanding in history.’
Carlin had a far greater understanding of the dangers of
revisionism than Hill. You would have thought that her own Party(SWP) would
have taken on board her warnings regarding the rise of this anti-Marxism.
While publishing her two significant essays on the English
revolution, they nonetheless stayed with Hill baggage and all. Perhaps one day Carlin
will write about her time in the SWP and its relationship with Hill. As Carlin
states “Ironically, the left organisation I belonged to for many years regarded
me as a heretic because I did not agree with every last word written by
Christopher Hill, including his claims that the gentry were 'the natural rulers
of the English countryside' and that 'the Bible caused the death of Charles I'.
As I said in the 2019 memorial lecture, I value Hill's contribution to the
historiography of the English Revolution very highly indeed, but his writings
are not the last word on everything! It is only when there is no more debate
that history ceases to be interesting”.
Or as Ann Talbot said of Hill “He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and
only bettered by those who have studied him closely.”
"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian
Christopher Hill by Ann Talbot 25 March 2003.wsws.org
