Karl Marx
“But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet
construction. It is an endeavour toward better understanding.”
Marc Bloch
“We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s
own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are
foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world
what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to
acquire, even if it does not want to.”
Karl Marx, (1843)
“The ‘great’ national historian Macaulay, vulgarises the
social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of
forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial.”
Leon Trotsky
Michael Braddick is to be commended for writing the first
and only biography of the Marxist historian Christopher Hill. Having said that
it is a little surprising that the Pabloites at Verso book publishers want Hill
to be known as a radical historian rather than a Marxist one. Whether Braddick
protested over this is unknown to me but throughout the book he clearly
believes Hill was a Marxist from an early age.
The book is professionally written and researched. If Thomas
Carlyle looked to clear Oliver Cromwell’s reputation from under a pile of dead
dogs Braddick had to do the same with Hill. By any margin this is a significant
and ground-breaking book. Although given the statue and importance of Hill, it
is still hard to believe this is the first biography of the great man.
As Braddick correctly portrays Hill was a mass of political
and social contradictions he was both a Fellow of the British Academy and the
Master of Balliol College, Oxford, a paid-up member of the British Communist
party and gave lectures at the British Socialist Workers party summer schools
on a regular basis.
Braddick had his work cut out in examining and placing Hill
in the context of the time. With his fifteen books and dozens of articles, Hill
fundamentally changed how we understood the English Revolution and popularised
the theory that there was a bourgeois revolution in 1640s England. Hill’s
theory came under sustained attack from the Stalinists inside the Communist Party
of Great Britain. Hill's essay The English Revolution of 1640 was the catalyst
for a wide-ranging and divisive battle within the groups and beyond. Stalinists
which included leading historians inside the group and leading members of the
central committee of the Communist party took exception to Hill's
characterisation of the English Revolution as 'Bourgeois.' They, therefore,
opposed the conception that the 1640s revolution represented major a turning
point in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Anyone who sided with
Hill's position was accused of "Hillism."[1].
Hill influenced how a generation of students and general
readers saw the English Revolution. Although his viewpoint that the events of
the 1640s constituted a revolution was rejected and attacked by a group of
revisionist historians and writers. Undeterred Braddick still believes that
general readers and academics still must define their position on the period from
his perspective.
Hill’s reluctance to take on the revisionists politically
did not stop the Pseudo lefts in the SWP from using Hill to try a launch an
unsuccessful struggle against them. The historical revisionism that struck the
study of the English Revolution began in earnest in the 1960s. Its central aim
was to refute both the Whig and Marxist interpretation of the English
Revolution and, in doing so, conceal the true political and class nature of the
Revolution. John Rees was a former member of the Socialist Workers. Party (now
a member of Counterfire). At the time he was a member of the SWP and like all
Pseudo Left organisations, the SWP was extremely reluctant to take to the
battlefield against a coterie of revisionist historians. The SWP would sooner
wait till it set up a connection with left-leaning historians, such as Hill and
Brian Manning and let them do the fighting. To say the results of this policy
were mixed was an understatement.
In an article John Rees wrote in 1991, “We have waited some
considerable time for Christopher Hill to enter the lists against the
revisionist historians of the English Revolution. Of course, Hill has taken the
occasional pot-shot at the revisionists in articles and lectures, some of which
form the basis for this book. But generally, he seems to have stayed a little
aloof, cultivating a disdain which still lingers in this book’s introduction,
where he claims, ‘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.[2]
Before reading any history book one should always take on
board the great E H Carr’s maxim "Study the historian before you begin to
study the facts."[3]
Braddick is not a Marxist historian and is heavily influenced by the French
historian Fernand Braudel who championed the idea of the “longue durée.”
As “Simon Jenkins wrote “Michael Braddick is a true
Braudelian. He is a historian not of who, what and when but of how and why.
From Stonehenge to Brexit and Danegeld to coronavirus, his concern is for the
setting of history, its intellectual and physical environment, and “the
capacity of British people to use political power to get things done.”[4]
Although Braudel had strengths he also had very deep-seated
weaknesses. As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot points out, “If Braudel’s approach
to history has its strengths, it also has disadvantages. These relate to two
areas-historical change and socio-political history. Braudel was a conservative
historian who, although living in a country whose name was synonymous with revolution,
was averse to change, particularly sudden changes of a revolutionary character.
He attempted to develop a form of socio-economic history that did not rely on
Marxist concepts and stressed continuity rather than change.”[5]
Throughout the book Braddick constantly grapples with the
conundrum of what was Hill politically. Braddick uses the term Marxist without
really examining precisely what that means. Hill was never an orthodox Marxist
and was never remotely close to Leon Trotsky or the Trotskyists inside the
Fourth international who defended Marxism from its Pabloite and Pseudo Left revisionists.
As Ann Talbot writes “The fact that Hill was not among the most politically
advanced elements of the party—those who then joined the Fourth
International—is a greater tribute to them than it is a criticism of him. His
work showed him to be a better historian than he was a political thinker.”
I somehow doubt that Braddick contacted or looked at the
work of the Marxists of the World Socialist Website. If he, had he would have
found an excellent and thought-provoking essay on Hill by Ann Talbot.
As Ann Talbot asks in her excellent obituary of Christopher
Hill, “What any serious reader interested in history or politics wants to know
is, when we read Hill’s books, are we reading the work of an apologist for the
Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely struggling to make a
Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It must be said that this is
a complex question. Not everyone who was attracted to the bureaucratically
degenerated Communist Party could be classified with the Webbs. The most gifted
and outstanding representatives of the British intellectual elite, whether
poets, novelists, scientists, musicians or historians, associated themselves
with the Communist Party because the old institutions of church and state had
lost their hold over the imaginations of the young while the Soviet Union
seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.”[6]
One thing that does surprise me is that a historian of John Rees’s
expertise was not invited to write a major review of Braddick’s book. Rees did
a review for his political organisation Counterfire.[7]
Rees tends to imply in this quote below that Hill and the Communist Party
historians Groups adoption of Peoples history and the so-called Marxist-humanist
current was a valid part of classical Marxism. He writes:
“Hill’s Marxism was certainly formed originally in the 1930s
while he joined the Communist Party. Even then, the historians within the
Communist Party were certainly not a pale reproduction of Moscow orthodoxy. In
part, they were simply more deeply engaged in the study of their various periods
and were producing material in greater depth than could be covered by the
generalities of the orthodoxy. This part of the review I have no qualms about.
It is this part that I have an opposition to. He continues:
“This was not necessarily a hostile counter position.
Generalisations and specific research can often interact in productive ways:
generalisation is amended by specific findings, and specific findings altered
when placed in a general context. However, that may be, by the time Hill and
other members of the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) left the party in
1957 in the wake of the Russian invasion of Hungary, they were also being
shaped by the so-called Marxist-humanist current of that time. This current had
deep roots in Marx’s method, in particular the early writings then for the
first time becoming widely available. It obviously was adopted, and
methodologically defended, by Hill’s friend and comrade Edward Thompson. It was
also common coin for Hill, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Brian Manning, and
other former members of the CPHG.”
This so-called Marxist-humanist current produced “Peoples
History” As Ann Talbot succinctly puts it “the Communist Party sponsored a form
of “People’s History,” which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s 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 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 progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political
action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which supplied 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.” Hil
was enough of a Marxist is not completed absorbed by Morton’s Peoples History genre,
but he did keep Morton’s national approach to historical questions. And the
influence of the popular front politics and national outlook of Stalinism
stayed with him most of his career.
Overall Braddick’s book has been met with serious and mostly
favourable media responses. One ridiculous and dissenting voice appeared in the
form a review entitled A Stalinist chump at Oxford, the Civil War historian who
misjudged his own times by Richard Davenport-Hines in the TLS (Times Literary
Supplement) He writes:
“Four years ago, Braddick published an ambitious study of
political agency, spanning the period from Neolithic to Brexit Britain,
entitled A Useful History of Britain: The politics of getting things done. It
is a compelling study of people outside ruling institutions mustering their
organizational strength, preparing themselves for action and maximizing their
collective force to achieve social and material change: every chapter bears
Hill’s traces. Braddick’s epigraph for his Useful History – Marc Bloch’s remark
that “a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand
the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present” – would serve Hill equally.
He misjudged the conditions in which he lived the first half of his life, and
therefore interpreted the past in terms that could be skewed or incomplete.”[8]
To justify is hack work he enlists other historians to do
his dirty work saying “There was formidable criticism of Hill’s method, and
especially of his arrangement of research notes by predetermined categories.
“Whatever Christopher Hill reads seems to provide him with additional support
for views he already holds,” Keith Thomas noted. Briggs judged that his “highly
dubious categorization” was essential to his work’s “creative richness.” John
Morrill reproached him for neglect of archival sources and original letters.
Others objected that he plucked quotations out of context, omitted material
that contradicted his arguments and made excessively bold jumps in his
conclusions.”
Davenport- Hines’s hack review aside Braddick’s excellent
biography not only situates Hill’s life and work in its historical context but looks
to rescue Hill for a new generation of readers. As Ann Talbot said “As a
historian he stands far above his detractors and his books deserve to be read
and reread, and if with a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge
that his limitations and faults as much as his great historical insights and
innovations are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but never
dismissed, and only bettered by those who have studied him closely.”
[1]
Document 12 (1947) the Basis and Character of Tudor Absolutism-Ideology, Absolutism,
and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians,
1940-1956 (2008) David Parker-Lawrence & Wishart.
[2] Revisionism refuted-https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/rees-j/1991/xx/engrevrev.html
[3]
What is History? (1961)
[4]
Ideas made us: The resilience, so far, of our political institutions. Aug. 20,
2021- TLS.
[5]
Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe-
ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/book-o09.html
[6]
"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian
Christopher Hill- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[7]
Christopher Hill redux-
https://www.counterfire.org/article/christopher-hill-redux-book-review
[8]
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/lives/biography/christopher-hill-michael-braddick-book-review-richard-davenport-hines
