Friday, 4 April 2025

Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian Michael Braddick Verso, pp. 320, £35

Marx “Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

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

Wednesday, 2 April 2025

Comment on the Daily Telegraph review of John Rees's book, Fiery Spirits Christopher Thompson

 Let me begin by agreeing that the origins of large-scale petitioning on political and religious matters can be found in the records of the movement for a Presbyterian settlement for the Church of England in the 1580s. This was the precedent for the later petitioning activities in the early to mid-Stuart period. However, petitioning itself was common at all levels of English and Welsh society on local and other matters by then. Recognising that such appeals were one of the common features of bargaining between the Crown, the Privy Council and other organs of the State and Church at that time is appropriate. Charles I's critics in the 1620s and again by 1640 utilised such means.

We can see this in the coordinated petitions submitted to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 and later in and after November 1640 when the Long Parliament met. The leaders of the so-called 'Junto', men like the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke, John Pym, Oliver St John and others, understood the importance of exercising pressure on the King and his advisers to secure what they regarded as essential concessions.

Valerie Pearl showed in her 1954 D.Phil. thesis and her 1961 book based on her thesis how these men worked together with their radical allies in the city of London to bring popular demonstrations, charges against recalcitrant proto-Royalists and petitioning to this end. These activities were not necessarily as spontaneous as figures like Brian Manning and Christopher Hill supposed. Take just one example: the M.P.s for London. Cradock and Venn were well known to Warwick and the others from their involvement in the activities of the New England and Massachusetts Bay Companies: Samuel Vassall was one of Warwick's tenants; Isaac Pennington was, like Warwick, one of the supporters of Samuel Hartlieb’s activities.

Owen Rowe was Warwick's brother-in-law from 1625 to 1645. Warwick had important connections with seamen and shipbuilders in London stretching back to the mid-1610s and onwards to the end of 1648. The Providence Island Company's financial affairs throw a revealing light on the connections of these peers and gentlemen with mercantile figures before 1640 and, indeed, in later ventures after the start of the Civil War.

I ought to add that ascribing the term 'revisionist' to John Rees creates a problem since this is the description usually applied to those historians who, from 1976, undermined and replaced the older Whig and Marxist explanations for the events of the 1640s. Perhaps, I may be allowed to add the heretical thought that the English Revolution or the Great Rebellion (or, as I prefer to call it, this 'grand soulevement') took place against the background of a significant improvement in the position of the larger landowners since 1600, as W.R.Emerson argued and which, were I a Marxist, might explain why these conflicts began and why the post-1649 settlements failed and the Restoration took place.

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 1 April 2025

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-William is published on 13 Mar. 2025 by Macmillan (£22).

 

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.”

Sarah Wynn-Williams

“move fast and break things”

Mark Zuckerberg

I must insist upon the masses, and their integrity as a whole. I have great faith in the masses. The noble character of mechanics and farmers—their curiosity, good temper, and open-handedness—the whole composite make. Significant alike in their apathy, and the promptness of their love—I know they are sublime. Before we despair we have to count them in—after we count them in we won’t despair.

Walt Whitman- Democracy

“ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”

WSWS Editorial Board Statement

To a certain extent, you can see why Meta, formerly Facebook would want to ban this book and gag the author from publicizing it. Both actions by Meta failed and backfired spectacularly as the book has sold in the millions.

Careless People is an interesting if limited expose of Facebook. An organization that has been called pretty accurately a ‘diabolical cult’. Wynn-William spent seven years at Facebook and her 400-page book is a pretty damning indictment. The first thing that strikes one about the leading players on Facebook is the stunning level of hypocrisy and duplicity. Williams cites Facebook’s number two Sheryl Kara Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

Sandberg casts herself as a feminist icon however the reality is a little different. Her advice to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – meaning that the mother should work herself to death just before the baby is born. As one reviewer said, “It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.” Wynn-Williams, among others, was also bizarrely invited by Sandberg to sleep in her bed presumably to have sexual relations.

Having said that before Sandberg treated her like a piece of crap Wynn-Williams exhibited a large degree of political naivety and outright fawning over Sandberg and Facebook in general writing “Until this moment, it had never occurred to me to see Sheryl as a celebrity or be awestruck by her... But now I can see how she’s sprinkling some of her stardust, whatever that magical quality is that she has that makes you forget to focus on the substance of the meeting at hand and instead wonder what it is she’s doing differently that makes her better than you.”[1]

The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness.” As a useful analogy for the “Careless People” at Facebook, it only takes one so far. While Zuckerberg and his cohorts were indeed amoral, stupid, reckless and devoid of any principles they were representatives of an oligarch that has now captured the White House in America and is launching attack after attack on the working class. Significant protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants and escalating deportation operations have erupted across the United States. Student leader Momodou Taal has been targeted by the Trump administration who have tried to have him deported for speaking out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

As Robert Reich correctly states “Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry. All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are. They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer. They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them. When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble”.[2]

Or to put it more precisely as a statement by WSWS Editorial Board does “ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”.[3]

This type of wealth is becoming increasingly incompatible with Walt Whitman’s beloved idea of Democracy. But this political and economic situation largely passes Wynn-Williams by. She is completely indifferent to the assault by Oligarch Zuckerberg's Facebook on the Socialist movement. The orthodox Marxists of the WSWS.Org have faced the brunt of Facebook’s wrath and censorship. What is not mentioned in Wynn Williams's book is that Facebook was and still is engaged in an escalating campaign of internet censorship targeting the socialist left. Entire Facebook pages were taken down, and individual accounts were permanently disabled, without any explanation given or recourse allowed.

Facebook began its systematic censorship of the WSWS.Org after the January 6th 2021 attempted coup by Trump and his supporters. As Kevin Reed points out “It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy”[4]

Wynn Williams's book is a well-written but somewhat limited insight into the lives of Facebook Oligarchs. For a far more precise and revolutionary insight into the rise of the oligarchs one should purchase a copy of the newly released book from Mehring books.com entitled The Election of Donald Trump: The insurrection of the oligarchy.

 

 

 

 

 

 



[1] Careless People by Sarah Wynn-William

[2] Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed-Guardian Online 

[3] Socialism against oligarchy, fascism and war- wsws.org 

[4] Facebook’s “depoliticization” aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/10/poli-f10.html


Sunday, 30 March 2025

BOOK LAUNCH: Christopher Hill:The Life of a Radical Historian by Michael...

Interview With Historian Christopher Hill by Penelope J. Corfield (1988)

Book Launch: Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian by Michael Braddick-Saturday March 1 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm at Houseman’s Bookshop

(This is a loosely edited transcript of the above book event. This transcript was done by Christopher Thompson. I include in this publication some comments made by Thompson.) 

Houseman's Thanks everyone for joining today. Thanks for giving up your Saturday night. We are joined today by Michael Braddock, who is the author of a new biography of Christopher Hill, which is out now from Verso. Braddick has written many books before, including a biography of John Lilburn, Common Freedom of the People. God's fury, England's fire. Most recently, a useful history of Britain, the Politics of Getting Things Done. What drove his work? What motivated? And also, I suppose, what motivated you to write his biography? Thanks.

Braddick: Can I just say thanks so much to you for your interest in Hill and for giving up your Saturday night to come and hear about him? So Chris Hill was born in 1912 in York, son of a very prosperous solicitor, and brought up a believing and devout Methodist with the extreme principled view that you should have serious thoughts about the world, and you should act on them to make the world a better place. And that was one of his first important intellectual inheritances, I think, because he lost his faith in the thirties, but he retained that seriousness about living an examined life, leading a life that was serious about how the world could be better and trying to act on that. Although he did spend a lot of time pondering how he could act helpfully in the world.

He lost his faith and gained his Marxism in a process that's not very clear. But he became a convinced Marxist while an undergraduate at Oxford, and he graduated in 1934. Should know that. But didn't join the communist party immediately. He had reservations about the communist party strategy.

He went to the Soviet Union between 1934-36 and came back convinced that he should join the communist party, partly because of what he'd seen in the Soviet Union and partly because the CBGB had changed its political strategy in a way that made it an easier party home for him. He remained a member of the CPGB for nearly twenty years. He left in nineteen fifty-six, fifty-seven. Prompted not by the invasion of Hungary, but by the refusal of the party to allow free internal discussion of the invasion of Hungary. It was he who left on the point of inner party democracy.

And the second part of that was that he didn't think the party had allowed them to discuss the implications of Khrushchev's secret speech, which had been made in secret but published by the CIA quite widely. Both of which made him think that the communists had been misled by the party, had been misinformed by the party, and that the daily work of the party's paper had deliberately suppressed information that was critical of the Stalinist line. So I laid it at that point because he was an intellectual Marxist and a communist, but he was a communist only for those twenty years. And it was a political strategy that he took up in '36, and he dropped it in '57. And it's a distinction that isn't much honoured in liberal commentary on Hill.

He's routinely referred to interchangeably as a communist or a Marxist, but his membership of the party was a strategy. And understanding why he took it on and left it is important for understanding his politics. By the time he left the party in '57, he'd been a fellow of Oxford College. He went to Balliol in 1931 and left in 1978. Not a standard Marxist career.

He had two years in Cardiff in the late 1930s. He had four years, I think, of military service. But he was in Balliol for his whole life. Down to '56 and '57, he'd been doing a lot of work for the party, a lot of publication for the party and party, for explaining Marxism, setting out what a Marxist history might look like. And also, I'm sorry, write or I'm sorry, writing apologies for Stalinist, Russia and Stalinist policies.

Out of the party, he then pursued a freer career, I think, an intellectually freer career to pursue the implications of his intellectual Marxism. Having dropped the political strategy of the CBGB, he was freer to explore the implications of Marxism for his understanding of the world. And there, I got very interested in the relationship between the British left and the British past, and how, at each phase of his writing career, you can see him in dialogue with the contemporary world, trying to understand the past for the present that would equip us better for the future. And in the forties and fifties, that was mainly about the state and reform of the state and political economy. In the early sixties, it was about science and progress, how progressive ideas, but particularly scientific ideas, could be set free.

That's a lot to unpack there, but he did think of politically progressive ideas as scientific in the same way that an understanding of the natural world could be scientific. So he had a view of, you know, scientific progress in the early sixties. Sixties. In the late sixties, he was master of writing, letters to the undergraduates to explain why they couldn't have a condom machine in the college, while writing the world turned upside down, this glorious celebration of personal freedom and personal liberation. So in the late sixties, he was very interested in the possibilities of personal liberation from a Marxist perspective.

And then in the eighties, he wrote about the experience of defeat as the shadow of Thatcherism came to lie over the aspirations he'd been pursuing really for a whole political career. He began to write about seventeenth-century radicals and their experience in the Restoration. What is it like when the world turns against you, and what do you do about your ideals, and how do you nurture them and keep them alive for better times? So, it's an interesting life in several ways. And there is that paradox I kind of alluded to, the difficulty of reconciling a life as a fairly, you know, well, as a very assiduous Oxford Tutor, undistinguishable, really, in his practice from his liberal colleagues in Oxford.

Braddick: He behaved as an Oxford Tutor was expected to do. And then as a master of a college, balancing and representing all the interests in a relatively conservative institution. And doing all that while pursuing this radical career in writing. And one final thought about life is, as I said at the very start, he became a convinced Marxist, also carrying from his Methodism a view that you should act on your beliefs to improve the world. And the way he thought he could do that was by writing.

Writing was for him a way of improving the world, equipping people with a different past to give them a different sense of the present and a different idea about the possibilities of the future. That's what he thought he could contribute to the improvement of society. And he wrote to the communist party leadership, I think, in 1949, saying, I know this is a smallish backwater of activity, but it's the one where I can make a difference. And he juxtaposed it directly with what he'd done leafleting at the factory gate, campaigning and by-elections and so on. But he felt that, as a posh guy with a posh Oxford accent, what he could do for the movement was to develop a radical past on which people could draw in thinking about the present and charting a radical future.

You've kind of mentioned that, you know, to suppose about what drew him to history in the English past, but why, particularly, was the English Revolution? What was it about the English Revolution that appealed to him? And how did his, you know, how did his kind of communism and his Marxism affect how he viewed that particular struggle, particularly in that early period? Yeah. So I think it was taken for granted at the time, and he used the term, ironically, that England was the top nation until the First World War.

Bradick: And the understanding that was to understand the first bourgeois state, the state that had the first bourgeois revolution, the first industrial revolution, the first urbanized mass society. So it wasn't a sort of little Englander patriotism that made him concentrate on England. It was thought that it was the first bourgeois society, and understanding how the first bourgeois society evolved and came about and became supported by, you know, all the structures that support a bourgeois society. You were learning something important for the history of the whole globe. And so he spent a lot of time arguing that the seventeenth-century crisis in England was a bourgeois revolution, and a precursor to the better-known bourgeois revolution in France.

And that was one of his major academic concerns was to establish the view that we should view the seventeenth-century crisis as a bourgeois revolution. Why did he do that's one set of one kind of answer to your question, but another one is that his departure from Methodism was associated with a strong view that bourgeois culture was experiencing its death throes. And, if you wanted to understand what would come next, you needed to understand the birth of bourgeois culture. And he understood that not just as the institutions of economy and society, but also the way that bourgeois culture shapes the family, shapes the transmission of property, gives us, social roles that are necessary to sustain the structures of a bourgeois life and how those bourgeois expectations of us as individuals are ultimately really constraining. They're inventions of the human mind, but we experience them as cages.

And he felt a deep sense of personal alienation in the 1930s. So there are these various ways in which you wanted to understand the origins of bourgeois alienation from ourselves, bourgeois structures, the behaviour of bourgeois states only fifteen, twenty years after the war to end all wars were about to pitch, obviously, on route to yet another one that would be even more destructive and awful. And it was the madness of bourgeois civilization in the thirties and its dissatisfactions that made him interested in the origin interested in the origins of bourgeois society, and he thought they lay in England in the seventeenth century. So it mustn't be a kind of narrow patriotism. It's a real thought that, for this for that question, England was the place to study.

That, you know, if you're looking at the kind of origins of the bourgeois British state, British society, that's very different from what I think most people, if they've approached Hill. They've approached the world, and the world has turned upside down. Here's a kind of great book on, from the late sixties. Is that right? Seventy-two.

Seventy and, you know, which looks at the kind of bubbling undercurrents of radicalism, religious, political, social, yeah. In that revolutionary moment, you know, the moment that kind of bourgeois England emerges, there's also this kind of undercurrent. You know, what drew him to that? And, you know, what were the conclusions that he drew from it? Did that change his view of the revolution generally or of the kind of that period?

Braddick: Well, it so here's a problem for the biographer. He never said. And when he did, I'm fairly sure that he weeded out his papers.  I think I know that he weeded out his papers and didn't want people like me, you know, poring over them after he'd gone. So there's a difficulty in actually answering the question, but the the reconstruction I do in the book is to say that he had always been interested in personal liberation and alienation and his Marxism was ultimately a humanist Marxism about how a fairer society would set us free as individuals to flourish in ways that are healthier than are demanded by a bourgeois society.

So I think that had been his concern from very early on, but he didn't get around to writing it because he got sidetracked into explaining the origins of the bourgeois revolution in England, which  I think was not in retrospect where his interest lay, but it was critical to his heart the whole architecture of his life that there was a bourgeois revolution. And so, World Turned Upside Down is now his most-read book, but in the eighties, probably his most influential book. Well, no. This isn't quite true, but as influential in the eighties was a book called The Century of Revolution, published in 1961, which set out the case for the bourgeois revolution in the whole cultural sense. So, I think he turned he turned to, and the world turned upside down.

And in the early seventies, he was commissioned to write that book. There are there was an enterprising publisher behind it. But I think it allowed him to say something that had been on his mind, really, for forty years. And another interesting point in writing the biography rather than just the history of his work is that in those years, that was the high point of student rebellion in Oxford. And he was in his day job having to deal with radical figures including Alex Callinicos who, Edward Heath visited the college, and Callinicos and Simon Sedgwick Gell were now allowed to say, I think, I'm being recorded, Allegedly, allegedly, two people went into the common room where Ted Heath was going to be entertained and wrote fuck Heath on the wall, you know.

And they were sent down and so on. So, he was dealing with this and occupations and rent strikes. So, radicalism in Oxford was pale back in Paris with Exeter and Essex, and certainly LSE and pale by comparison to Paris. But still, as the head of the college, he had to deal with this. And, it's very interesting that in his day job, he was kinda holding the line for college respectability and saying you really mustn't say rude words about the prime minister while he was writing The World Turned Upside Down.

And literally, there was a fantastic exchange over the condom machine that the students had installed without the permission of the senior members of the college. And the senior members then said, You’ve got to take it out because it's an offense to our moral sensibilities. And anyway, you can buy condoms in Norwich now, it's not very far to travel. And the students took it. And anyway, it had to be, they said we can take it down, but the London Rubber Company can't come and collect it for a while.

And they said, right. We'll take it, and it will go in the dean's room until the London Rubber Company can collect it. And Dean and Hill had to represent all this with a straight face, saying, you know, it's a moral offense to some members of the college to have a condom machine. They're available elsewhere. And on the other hand, he's writing the world turned upside down, which is all about this tremendous effusion of sexual and other forms of personal liberation.

And, it was dramatized on the South Bank by Keith Dewhurst as an, you know, example of radical theatre and theatre that could change the world. And it was put on by a company that was famous for living a, you know, a liberated life and, allegedly. And so Hill was completely in favour of all this liberation. Although I think he thought, you know, some student politics were a bit, you know, tokenistic and gestural politics rather than substantial politics. But basically, he was behind it all.

But in his day job, he was having to maintain the respectable front. And I think it's critical to his personality that he did it. He felt, I, you know, I have this duty. This is my role. This is my job.

It's not me. It's the job I have to do. But really, there's a me off stage that's interested in all this liberation stuff. Yeah. Sorry.

Very long rambling. No. No. That was fascinating. I think, you know, I think it's a testament also to the book itself.

So your chapter on Balliol. I didn't think I'd be so interested in the internal politics of Balliol, your college, but it Yeah. You know, it is kind of fascinating and shows a lot about Hill as a person as well as a writer. I think you get from that. I also wanted to ask about, you know, he left the communist party in '57.

Braddick: Yeah. Not with some of the others, EP Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and others who left the year before, directly after or around the events of Hungary. This was about inner party democracy. It was a year later at the special congress, right, in '57, that he left. I was quite in quite involved, right, with the congress held internally at the communist party about the question of democracy.

Right? But before that, he was very involved with the communist party historians’ group. Yeah. I want to ask about you know, this is an incredible collection of historians who shaped the study and the writing of history in mid-century Britain. Ralph O Samuel, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, and Yeah. Chris Piel and others, and many others. You know, what was it about the communist party that, you know, first of all, kind of nurtured or allowed these historians, right? But what also what did their what did those historians get from both the group of historians around the communist party, or the communist party itself?

 Braddick: Yeah.

The party had turned in the late thirties to a kind of Popular Front strategy that they should build a progressive alliance for change and abandon a kind of class-based conflict. And the only way to achieve change was through class conflict. And what it allowed us to do was build a progressive alliance alongside the core revolutionary ambition. And it trended towards a ref a reformist ambition. And that made it easier for intellectuals.

And so in the late thirties, Margot Heinemann has a very nice chapter on this. The communist party developed a culture strategy, radio, TV in the post-war period, drama, art, visual art, literature, and history to try to build a progressive consciousness and to give people resources to develop a progressive consciousness. And so there is a relatively free hand then for writers and artists to pursue their creative individualism within the service of the party. It was a very creative moment, and some great writing and great history came out of it. And so there's a cultural committee, and then the culture committee had us, effectively a subcommittee, the historians group.

And the historians group was set up with two aims in mind. One was that AL Morton had written a classic history of the people's history of England, and it was being revised. And the party wanted to give him advice on how to revise it. And the second thing was that Hill had written in 1940 a kind of manifesto for his view of a bourgeois revolution that had caused controversy about whether it was properly Marxist or not. And so the second focus was to discuss whether Hill's account of the bourgeois revolution was properly Marxist. And it sounds, you know, terribly sort of restrictive thing, you know, as if the dogma is going to be imposed. But actually, it was an open question about how Marxists should think about the bourgeois revolution and how Marxists should think about sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century England. And it attracted a generation of people who were turned off by an extremely conservative university curriculum and school curriculum that was the story of kings and queens and the doings of great men and, had a kind of liberal continuity to it, that nothing ever unpleasant had happened in Britain, and no change had ever required any unpleasantness. And, we're not like the foreigners. So there was this attempt to recover a kind of radical history of the British past and the way that ordinary people had shaped the conditions of their lives and how understanding the radicalism of ordinary people would help you understand the British past, but it also give the radicalism of ordinary people a present and a future.

So there was a kind of progressive ambition behind it. But it was quite an open-ended, quite open. And the key thing for the party, I don't know if you were going to ask me about this, the party regarded such issues through the lens of democratic centralism. The idea being that you had a democratic discussion until a line was reached, and then the line became the line, and you fell in line with the party line. And on all these issues, rigorous debate was thought necessary so that the party could develop a line.

So that lots of people misunderstand, I think, the role of the party here. They think the party was commissioning a history from these people. But actually, the party was trying to foster a debate about Marxists that would lead to a line that the party could then adopt. And democratic centralism was exactly the issue in '57. And, you know, we'll talk about that later, I suppose.

But in the early post-war period, it was giving these people a lot of freedom to think about how they might reconfigure an understanding of the British past. But they were very concerned that it should meet academic standards. It wasn't simply party-political history. It was that it should be rigorous history, better than liberal history, living by academic standards more rigorously than liberal history, and thus be better history and give a good basis on which Marxists could think about the present and the future. 

You've kind of alluded already to his influence, particularly in the kind of sixties and seventies, right? You know, he was you know, there were plays put on of his history books, you know, his books were taught widely across the curriculum. I think at a kind of level, looked at, you know, the three universities were kind of the defining or one of the defining kinds of interpretations of the English revolution at the time. And what was that like for him to be, you know, he was a very private man. He was very kind, you know, he was, you say quite shy, quiet, you know, he wasn't, very false. What was it like for him to have been this?

And, also, I suppose, what was it like culturally to have this kind of, you know, the dominant narrative of this pivotal moment in history to be one that was explicitly a Marxist reading? 

Braddick: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think he was extremely private and modest, and I think he felt he was putting himself at the service of his readers. You know?

 I'm, you know, I don't think he, I don't think there was much ego involved in being such a big figure for him. I think it was that he, you know, I'm being of help here. And that was important for him because he wanted to be helpful, and he came from a family of Methodist activists in York. Some of whom had been very active in charity. You know, we might think of their activism differently now, but the missionaries and some people wanted to change the world.

So I think it was really important for him to feel useful in the world, and I think he took that seriously, took that responsibility seriously. And I think it was also a tremendous relief because in the early fifties, in particular, well, in the late thirties and then again in the early fifties, communists found it very hard. Communist men party members and Marxists at large found it very hard to get university employment. And several people had jobs and lost them, and it was thought to be political. And Hill was always on their side.

And he said to one confidant in the fifties that he or in the sixties that he only kept his job because Balliol, you know, Balliol just doesn't care what the outside world thinks. You know, he's one of our chaps. So, he benefited from Oxford's privilege, and I think he took all that quite seriously. And at the very end of his career, he worked in the Open University, where lots of former comrades had ended up because they had been pushed out of universities in the fifties. They'd gone into adult education, gone into the Workers' Education Authority, and that had been the obvious place to recruit people for the OU in the seventies.

And so the CPGB was reunited, really, in the Open University in the eighties. But there were very few. Kiernan wrote to him. Kiernan had a job in Edinburgh, but Kiernan wrote to him saying there's no point in going for x or y job because, you know and and Rodney Hilton or Hill's very first article was published under a pseudonym. And Hilton said that was because if you knew this was in '38. And Hilton said if he'd published this with his name on that would have, you know, it would have been a serious problem for his career.

That's when he first set out a Marxist interpretation of the seventeenth century. So he was, I think, conscious of his privilege and anxious that he should make that privilege a benefit to other people. And he wrote letters. I can't remember who it was, but he wrote in defence of someone who'd lost a job. I think it might have been that Arblaster was not given a job at Manchester, having been there for two years.

I think it was Anthony Arblaster. But he anyway, he wrote to him and said no. I remember writing this.  I'll just tell you what he says. He says, it's outrageous that a heretic should be debarred from doing their job because of their heresy alone.

You know, show me that by being a heretic, I'm doing the job badly, then you've got a case. But you cannot dismiss people simply for their heresy. And I think he felt tremendously protected, and he felt a real responsibility to the wider movement, as, you know, the guy in a position. Yeah. He goes in the seventies from that, you know, position of, you know, being at the top of his field.

In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it's kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it's a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.

Braddick: The Thatcherite, yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.

Yeah. And it hit here also I I don't want to talk about me, but I entered the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister read Hill at A level. I didn't. And when I went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in '81, we were given Hill, as this is the wrong idea.

So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it's taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill's work, which are genuine. So, I think there is a generational effect in history writing.

Each generation does better work than its predecessor, and that is certainly true that Hill, and particularly his economic history, doesn't cut the mustard anymore, you know, and you wouldn't do economic history the way Hill did it. So, for a long time, it was difficult to say that sort of thing without being identified with a political program against the kind of history he was trying to promote. So, one aim of the book is to try to disentangle history from politics. And my view is that, you know, if history is simply writing your politics, why do history? Why not just state your political position?

And if history isn't a test of your politics and isn't making you think and examine your politics, then there's no point in doing it. But in the eighties, I talked about the Education Act and the national curriculum and how the battles over that were directed particularly against this progressive history, and people should be taught the greatness of Britain. And, you know, all this nonsense about slavery, we should forget about that and talk about democracy instead. In the national curriculum, the national curriculum was forming people for the next stage. So, it's exactly the politics that he'd set out to challenge.

And he was at the heart of those political debates, saying, Mrs Thatcher knows nothing about history. You know, this is just, authoritarian state trying to input trying to mark its homework. But at the same time, people who were actually on the left and quite sympathetic to left-wing causes were saying, you know, some of these books don't work very well, and we should be doing this work differently and a bit better. So, at the time and coming back to what I said to start with in '81, when I started, I was confronted with this, and I couldn't unpick what was going on here. Whether I was being told Hill was wrong because I was being taught by Thatcherites, or am I being told that Hill is wrong because you can do this another way better?

And that's but it it it so that's sort of a personal way of putting it. But what happened to him in the eighties was that he became conflated with a general attack on leftism and progressivism, the values of the sixties, the world turned upside down, and dismissals of Israel did come from there. But also, from a, you know, academic critique that we should do this differently and better. Yeah. I always find it interesting that Hill was the one who kind of bore the brunt of that.

Yeah. Whereas someone like Hobsbawm, who remained in the party, never you know, there was you know, it was very much kind of still accepted. There still is, I think, in the kind of establishment, yeah. In a different way. Yeah.

Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn't know. I know I'm going to name drop here. I know Sir Keith Thomas a bit. And I didn't realize there was a higher honour than being Sir Keith Thomas, but in fact, there is, as being a companion of honour.

And I knew it because Keith Thomas became the companion of honour at the same time that Elton John did. And then Hobsbawm was a companion of honour. You know, it's the highest thing the establishment can do for you. And I find I do find it hard to judge because one of the things that got him in trouble was that he never although he said to the party, I'm renouncing Stalinism, and I'm not renouncing you because you're Stalinist, he would give comfort to the capitalist press by saying it to the capitalist press. He would never sell out his former comrades by doing it in public.

So he had this repentance, but it was a quiet repentance. And he was beaten with that through the eighties and nineties. Unrepentant Stalinist, you know. Ferdinand Mount said, having an unrepentant Stalinist as Master of Balliol, you might as well have a recently convicted paedophile. He said that you know.

And he wasn't an unrepentant Stalinist either. And somehow, Hobsbawm escaped that. Hobsbawm stayed in the party. He was, I don't know, quite how he did it, except that he's less concerned with the national story. Yeah.

He's not in those national curriculum debates. He talks about Europe in his early career, then he's a global historian. It's less offensive to an establishment view of the British character, yeah. Then Christopher Hill said, you know, it hasn't always been, respectful and deferential and, you know, and people haven't always just abided by the rules of the game that they're given. And I suppose by undercutting the story of the English revolution, you are implicitly or explicitly even kind of undercutting the story of the British establishment.

Now this is, you know, this is the kind of start of where we are now. There's something kind of by going directly there, you're kind of going to the roots of this. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

So this is my kind of interest actually, but the eleven years in the post-Roman history of Britain, where we had a republic, and we call it the interregnum, the period between kings. And it ends in a restoration, although what was restored was nothing like what had been overthrown. So, there's this meta-narrative that's just kind of drilled into us by the very naming of the events. And, to undercut that is to undercut the position of the establishment, I think. So, I think he'll, I mean, he probably couldn't have complained actually because he wanted to undercut.

He wanted to be a threat to the establishment. He wanted his writing to destabilize these comforting stories. But then in the end, you know, when the boot was firmly on that foot, I mean, he did suffer, I think. So I think, you know, if he kind of suffered that kind of revisionist moment, seems we're in a different moment now both I mean, politically, may maybe not actually, but intellectually in terms of the study of English revolution, I think we're in a very different moment now particularly than the eighties and nineties where it was at its kind of peak. Yeah.

And I think that was a factor in you coming to this book now? And also, I suppose, how is and how should we think about Hill's work today? You know, how is it received in the field, and how should we, as kind of general readers, or how should we approach Hill's work? 

Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn't know Chris Hill, but I'm no Chris Hill.

Whatever that John f Kennedy quote is. I mean, I wouldn't compare myself to it at all, but in terms of, you know, importance or influence. But I do want to try to get a post-hill story going about the English revolution because for forty years students have been taught not that, not that, not that, not that. And I sense an appetite among the students I teach, not many nowadays, but for a more constructive, progressive engagement with the seventeenth century and the events of the seventeenth century. So I think there's a moment coming.

I don't think I'm not sure I can deliver. I can pose the question, I hope, about what we should say about all this. I am writing a book about the 1650s, and I’m in Oxford. Normally, I suppose.

But, I taught a graduate class in Oxford this year on the Marxist historians, and there's an appetite among graduate historians. One of the students said to me, we're the generation of no alternative, you know, and they're looking back to this generation of progressive thinkers, not just in, history, but, you know, progressive art and they've they're interested in Frankfurt School and how you can have an authentic culture that's not just, commercial stuff squirted down the Internet at you. And they're returning to Hill more than the new left, actually, interestingly. But Hill and Hobsbawm, Thompson in particular, are fascinated by it.  I realize I've written about the wrong Marxist historian.

But there, they're looking for inspiration not to reproduce and recapture that moment, but for inspiration that might lead them to the birth of a new moment. And I feel we desperately need it, you know. The left hasn't had a game to put up against the rise of the light. And yeah. So, I think that there's an appetite for it.

And the English Revolution. Historical consciousness about the English Revolution could be part of that. But I'm afraid I know, it's beyond me to provide it. I'm afraid. Yeah. But  I do hope that, you know, this brings people to heal to the question and prompts people to think about what the new line new hope could be.

I was thinking about this, particularly this kind of political moment and the political moments that you say he was kind of responding in his work to this political moment. My favourite work of Hill's is the experience of defeat. Yeah. You know, which I think sadly feels very, very kind of relevant again now. You know, it's about the kind of experience of Milton and other revolutionaries after the Restoration.

You know, what happened to them? I don't want to ask you necessarily about that, but do you have a favourite work of Hill's? What is the one that you would know, you want to return to if you still feel the kind of pull? 

Braddick:  I've become so, I would like to say about that, though. He, Bunyan, was really important to Hill very early in life, and it comes from his Methodism.

And there's a lot of fair talk about in a book in the media, as the war was breaking out. And he wrote love letters daily to a woman from the barracks, and they're very moving. And they reveal a lot about his views on love, marriage, authenticity, sex, and politics. Because she was a liberal, he kept correcting her politics. Marriage didn't laugh.

But overshadowing him was the thought that he was going to die. And he reached Bunyan in that moment, too. And the thing in Bunyan he drew on was, he said it then, and he said it again in the eighties. We dare not despair. We betray our ideals.

We betray our ideals if we despair. So the one thing we must not do is despair, and it's struggle which will keep the faith alive and keep the ideals alive. So all that is, I was going to use the word elegiac for that, but it's very it's poignant, isn't it? And it's about his own experience and so on. But there is at the core of it this thing, okay, young uns, the one thing you mustn't do is despair.

Yeah. My favourite book, I’ve become very interested in, he actually, this is relevant to his affair with Sheila Grant Duff, who was very conventionally bourgeois and thought that since she was in love with another man as well as Hill, she shouldn't sleep with Hill. And Hill thought she shouldn't be hung up on these bourgeois values, and he didn't mind. So he urged on her the importance of leaving Andrew Marvel's ode to his coy mistress, you know, with the thought that they were going to die. And, you know, why give in to these bourgeois values?

You know, we must run before the sun. But it made me very interested because he said it was that poetry that first led him to the English Revolution. It's people living in a society, whose values they feel uncomfortable with. And I like that writing of his. He read at the time he read T.S. Eliot in particular, and Eliot was expressing the sense of personal alienation that you have to live within these bourgeois expectations, and they do violence to who you are. And Hill got very interested in that dynamic in seventeenth-century literature. And so I like the Milton book, because he's talking about the conflicts that Milton feels, in the society in which he's required to live and how that does violence to who he is. I don't know if that's my time of life, but I've been more drawn to that kind of he. he was interested in what's often said about him is that he's a determinist and he's not interested in people, but it's untrue.

You know, he's very interested in the experience people have of dislocation from that society. And that's the writing I've become more interested in. I, ironically enough, started my career writing about the state and transformation and so on. And I've ended up writing a biography, and it's similar. Hill got more interested in subjectivity, I think, and the conflicted subjectivities we have as a result of the structures in which we live. So that's my answer.

Yeah. That's a great answer. I think you've probably been talking enough.

Comment by Christopher Thompson

I have been very puzzled to read the transcript of Michael Braddick's interview at Housman's Bookshop in London earlier this month. It was part of the process of promoting the biography composed by Braddick (All Souls College, Oxford) and was, I suspect, given in front of an audience sympathetic to Hill's beliefs and career. What appears to me to be a problem in the talk is the connection drawn between the appearance of 'revisionism' in early to mid-17th-century historiography and the rise of Thatcherism in British political life. The criticisms of Marxist and Whig historiography associated with Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and others came into print in the mid to late 1970s under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.

Russell's essay on Parliamentary politics was published in 1976, as was John Morrill's book on the Revolt of the Provinces. Kevin Sharpe's edited volume of essays appeared in 1978. None of them could remotely be described as apostles of Thatcherism. Nor, indeed, could the essays that were to be found in The Journal of British Studies and the Journal of Modern History across the Atlantic in 1976 and 1977, respectively. One of Lawrence Stone's most distinguished postgraduate pupils at Princeton at that time told me relatively recently that Stone had been unaware - 'blindsided' was his word - by developments in the United Kingdom. In Hill's case, despite the origins of 'revisionism' amongst former and current Oxford University-trained historians, he had been completely unaware of the developing reaction against his soft determinism and Marxist preconceptions. Well before the Conservative victory in the 1979 General Election in Britain, Hill and Stone had ceased to make the historiographical weather. Dismissing 'revisionism' as a form of antiquarian empiricism, as Stone did, or repeating the analytical claims of the 1960s as Hill tried to do, simply did not work. Both had been sidelined by then.

Housman's Bookshop interview extract earlier this month. 

In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it's kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it's a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.

Braddick: The Thatcherite, Yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.

Yeah. And it hit here also I I don't want to talk about me, but I entered the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister, read Hill at A level. I didn't. And when I went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in '81, we were given Hill, as this is the wrong idea.

So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it's taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill's work, which are genuine. So I think, there is a generational effect in history writing."

 

 

 

Monday, 24 March 2025

Reply to CWU’s Reply to Martin Walsh

I want to condemn the unprincipled attack by the CWU’s Martin Walsh on the World Socialist Website. The First thing that strikes me about Walsh’s lashing out at the WSWS.Org is that he talks like a company spokesman rather than a trade union leader.  

The CWU-imposed trials in 37 offices are nothing but a fraud designed to run offices into the ground to impose Amazon-style working conditions. All for what a Saturday off once every blue moon. Walsh says nothing about the fact that the Royal Mail in collusion with the CWU is carrying out unofficial trials of new working conditions which, mimic the 37 trial offices. Walks all over the country are being absorbed and extra walks are being delivered by postal workers outside their normal delivery pattern.

These attacks are opposed by the World Socialist Website and the PWRFC. They have every right to oppose the Royal Mail and CWU-led attacks on postal workers' conditions. It is quite ironic that the CWU bureaucracy attacks the PWRFC for calling strikes to defend working conditions. Walsh says, “The problem is that your organisation has no responsibility at all and is free to shout from the comfort of your anonymous positions.”. Firstly, the WSWS is far from anonymous and has from day one exposed the treachery of the CWU and set up the PWRFC to oppose the CWU’s betrayals.

If the World Socialist Website is so insignificant why is the CWU so scared of it and constantly attacking it from the armchairs of a multi-million-pound media centre? As Walsh said, “Any walkouts they won’t be in control of will be the CWU who have to get the members a return-to-work solution.” Well, he should get used to it because the next round of strike action will be aimed not at Royal Mail but will challenge the control of the bureaucracy and will be led by the PWRFC

Walsh says the “CWU have to respond to the reality of the situation” and that there is no alternative. This is a lie.

The WSWS should not retract a single thing. As Its reply states his “attack is a transparent damage limitation exercise to stem rank-and-file opposition to the Terms of Reference he co-signed with Royal Mail executives in December to ram through the pilot scheme at 37 delivery offices.”

There is an alternative, “The PWRFC has called for workplace meetings so that CWU members can scrutinise Royal Mail’s plans for “USO reform” and their impact on jobs, working practices and the mail service, and agree collective action to halt these attacks. Postal workers should oppose the pile-on by Walsh against their colleagues at Cumbernauld and defend the democratic rights of all CWU members.”

 

 

Tuesday, 18 March 2025

The Other Side: Stories of Central American Teen Refugees Who Dream of Crossing the Border Written by Juan Pablo Villalobos translation by Rosalind Harvey, Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019

This is an important compilation of stories from unaccompanied Central American teenage refugees who risk death to cross the U.S.–Mexico border. Recounted in short vignettes readers learn about the harrowing journey and treatment meted out to young children seeking a better life for themselves and their family. Juan Pablo Villalobos’s introduction indicates that all these stories are true except when he wrote their story to protect some minors’ identities.

The book is aimed at a 12+ audience. It contains significant allusions to violence, including murder and sexual assault. Which unfortunately adds to the compelling nature of the stories. The book is presented in such a way that it works on many levels.

Most of the children are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Such is the massive scale of the problem that in 2016 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees published a major report called Children on the Run: In one interview with 15-year-old Maritza, from El Salvador, she explained to researchers that “I'm here because I was threatened by the gang. One of them "liked" me. Another gang member told my uncle that he should get me out of there because the guy who liked me was going to do me harm. In El Salvador, they take young girls, rape them and throw them in plastic bags. My uncle told me it wasn't safe for me to stay there, and that I should go to the U.S.”[1]

Juan Pablo Villalobos called this collection nonfiction because the stories were collected via first-person interviews. The book is based on a series of interviews Villalobos held did in 2016; The Other Side examines Central American migration through the stories of 10 children who made the murderous trip to the U.S. on their own.

Villalobos adds , my literary ambition, if I can admit to that, was to write a book that is about Central American immigration and the migration of unaccompanied minors, but these stories are happening all over the world — in Syria, in the north of Africa, in Europe — and it was my hope that the book should resonate beyond the specific moment and the American and Central American contexts.”

With the Fascist Trump in the White House, the situation will only get worse. Figures released recently by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that the United States has detained record numbers of unaccompanied minors attempting to cross its southwestern border. In the last few days, various US media have reported, that the Trump White House is imminently planning to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as part of his administration’s ongoing criminal deportation operations.





[1] Children on the Run-www.unhcr.org/us/media/children-run-full-report