Literature as “Resistance”: Alberto Manguel and the limits of moral protest

 

“Life aims to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem”

Henry Miller- The Wisdom of the Heart

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

“The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure, secret, almost impossible to explain.”
― Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions

"Art is 'the cognition of life.' It is therefore a form of thinking about the world in which the symbols and signs of culture are wielded in the expression of feelings, emotion and thoughts…"

Aleksandr Voronsky-Art as the Cognition of Life

Literature in an age of reaction

Alberto Manguel has spent much of his intellectual life writing about reading, books, libraries and the preservation of cultural memory. That is no small matter at a time when culture is increasingly subordinated to commercial calculation; libraries and other public institutions face financial pressure. Serious reading is forced to compete with a digital environment organised overwhelmingly around speed, distraction and profit. His latest work, Resistance, published in Yale University Press’s “Why I Write” series, poses questions that should concern every serious reader and writer. Can society be compelled to recognise the evidence? Can literature help human beings see the world as it really is? Why have authoritarian regimes repeatedly feared books, and what responsibility does the writer bear when truth itself comes under political attack?

These are not abstract literary questions. Resistance appears amid an increasingly visible crisis of capitalist society in which governments manufacture narratives to justify war and repression, historical falsification becomes integrated into political life, universities and cultural institutions face financial and ideological pressures, and enormous corporations exercise unprecedented influence over the production and circulation of information. At the same time, the extraordinary development of artificial intelligence has provoked understandable anxiety among writers, artists and intellectuals about the future of creative labour and even the distinction between genuine intellectual creation and mechanically generated cultural material. In such circumstances, Manguel’s insistence on the written word as a means of discovering and preserving truth has undeniable value.

The difficulty arises when the argument moves from the defence of literature to the meaning of resistance itself. Manguel suggests that literature may ultimately amount to an affirmation, a continuing refusal to surrender before falsehood and barbarism, before arriving at the tentative proposition that perhaps this is enough. That hesitation is significant. If the statement means that literature cannot overthrow governments or substitute for political organisation, it is obviously true. No serious conception of artistic creation should demand that novels, poems and plays function as political manifestos. But if literature as moral affirmation is proposed as an adequate response to the social forces threatening culture and civilisation, then Manguel has arrived at the limits of the liberal conception of resistance. Literature can illuminate reality, but illumination is not transformation. It can preserve historical consciousness, but consciousness becomes historically decisive only when it enters into a relationship with social forces capable of acting upon it.

Why censors fear books

Manguel is right that censors fear books, but the more difficult question is why they fear them. Writing is not inherently subversive. Libraries contain defences of monarchy alongside celebrations of revolution, justifications of empire beside denunciations of colonial oppression, and reactionary works beside the greatest expressions of human emancipation. The censor does not fear paper and ink. What authoritarian governments fear is the possibility that ideas may articulate suppressed social experiences, preserve memories that official history attempts to obliterate, and give people concepts through which they can understand their circumstances. A book becomes politically dangerous when the truth it contains intersects with the experiences and aspirations of living human beings.

Dante provides an instructive example because the Divine Comedy is inseparable from the historical world in which it was created. Dante does not speak from some timeless cultural realm standing above society. He writes out of the intensely conflict-ridden civilisation of late medieval Italy, from the standpoint of an exile whose personal fate had been intertwined with the political convulsions of Florence. His poem achieves universality not by escaping historical specificity but through it. Dante names individuals, condemns political and ecclesiastical corruption, judges the powerful and places popes and politicians within his moral universe. The enduring power of the Commedia derives precisely from this extraordinary interpenetration of the personal, political, historical and universal.

The contemporary vocabulary of “resistance” frequently moves in the opposite direction. Resistance has become a characteristic term of liberal cultural discourse because it can accommodate almost any form of individual disapproval while leaving the social foundations of what is being resisted unexplored. One can resist by reading, writing, purchasing a particular book, attending an exhibition, making a film or declaring oneself opposed to authoritarianism. The crucial questions gradually disappear: resistance to what social forces, conducted by which social classes, and directed towards what historical objective? Once stripped of these questions, resistance ceases to describe a process through which society might actually be transformed and instead becomes an ethical posture. The individual proves that they have not inwardly submitted, while the conditions producing the catastrophe continue largely undisturbed.

Argentina and the social roots of repression

Manguel’s connection with Argentina makes these questions particularly significant. The savagery of the military dictatorship cannot adequately be remembered merely as an assault upon writers, books and intellectual freedom. The junta certainly censored literature, persecuted intellectuals and attempted to suppress cultural opposition, but this formed part of a far wider programme of social and political repression directed against workers, students, left-wing organisations and all those regarded as threatening the existing economic and political order. The burning of books cannot therefore be separated from the suppression of the people who might read them, distribute them and act upon their implications.

The great upheavals preceding the dictatorship demonstrate why this distinction matters. The Cordobazo of 1969 revealed the explosive potential of the Argentine working class and indicated the depth of the social crisis confronting the ruling elite. What the Argentine state feared was not literature conceived abstractly but the development of political consciousness among social forces capable of challenging the established order. Books could form part of that process because culture can preserve historical experience and provide language through which previously isolated experiences become understood collectively. The dictatorship therefore sought not simply to silence writers but to destroy the political and social environment in which radical ideas might gain mass influence.

Manguel’s later tenure as director of Argentina’s National Library also raises, without requiring any question about his personal sincerity, the broader relationship between cultural institutions and political power. Libraries, museums, universities and publishing houses cannot hover permanently above the economic conditions of the societies that sustain them. Political decisions within a specific economic system ultimately shape their resources, priorities, and accessibility. The defence of cultural institutions consequently cannot be separated indefinitely from questions concerning who possesses society’s wealth, how public resources are allocated and what cultural activities are considered socially necessary. A government can praise national culture while imposing economic policies that undermine the material conditions required for its flourishing. The contradiction is social, not personal.

Literature and objective reality

The strongest aspect of Manguel’s argument is the conviction that literature can enable readers to see reality more clearly. This proposition takes on particular importance after decades in which significant tendencies within academic and cultural thought questioned whether objective reality could be meaningfully represented at all. Postmodernism transformed historical truth into competing narratives, displaced the analysis of social structures in favour of discourse and increasingly treated claims to objective knowledge with suspicion. Whatever Manguel’s differences with Marxism, his insistence that literature participates in the discovery of truth opposes this intellectual retreat.

The great tradition of realism rested precisely upon the conviction that society possesses an objective character that art can penetrate. Balzac and Thomas Mann remain perhaps the classic demonstration. His own conscious political sympathies hardly made him a revolutionary. Yet the artistic seriousness with which he examined post-revolutionary French society compelled him to reproduce, with extraordinary insight, the social forces transforming it. Marx and Engels admired Balzac not because he supplied an approved political programme, but because his artistic honesty revealed the movement of French society with a power that exceeded his conscious political prejudices. Something similar can be said of Tolstoy’s relationship to Russian society, Dickens’s exposure of Victorian England, Theodore Dreiser’s treatment of American capitalism and Thomas Mann's treatment of German society.

Their achievements demonstrate why Marxist criticism cannot be reduced to searching works of art for correct political opinions. The artist who begins with predetermined conclusions and manipulates characters to illustrate them is unlikely to produce significant art. Genuine realism demands that the artist remain sufficiently open to reality for characters, situations and contradictions to develop beyond preconceived ideological formulas. Artistic truth may consequently collide with the writer’s own stated beliefs. The deepest social significance of literature frequently emerges from precisely this conflict between what an artist consciously intends and what an honest confrontation with reality compels them to reveal.

Art is not a political manifesto.

This distinction is essential when considering the most obvious objection to a Marxist criticism of Resistance. Manguel’s defenders could reasonably argue that a meditative essay about literature should not be condemned for failing to supply a revolutionary programme it never intended to provide. They might add that affirmation has its own value: preserving memory under dictatorship, maintaining intellectual independence under censorship, and insisting on human solidarity when political life is saturated with cruelty are not trivial accomplishments. This objection has force, and any criticism that measures literature by its proximity to political programme would be reductive.

But this is not the issue. Marxism does not require every novelist to become a political organiser, every poet to formulate a programme or every playwright to transform characters into spokespeople for socialism. The disastrous experience of Stalinist “socialist realism” demonstrated where such prescriptions lead. Art cannot flourish when reality is subordinated to a bureaucratically predetermined conclusion. Characters become sociological categories, conflicts become predictable and the independent discovery through which serious artistic creation proceeds is replaced by propaganda. A Marxist approach worthy of the name must defend artistic freedom precisely because truth cannot be discovered by administrative instruction.

Manguel's criticism is therefore not that Resistance fails to tell readers which political organisation to join. It is that the increasingly abstract conception of resistance within liberal culture separates moral opposition from the historical forces capable of overcoming the conditions being opposed. The writer bears witness, the reader retains an ethical consciousness, and civilisation somehow continues despite the destruction occurring around it. Resistance progressively becomes consolation. Marxism insists upon reconnecting culture with history without reducing the former to the latter. Art has its own forms and problems, but artists, readers, and cultural institutions nevertheless exist within a society structured by definite relations of property and class.

The Reader and the World, Albert Manguel, Aleksandr Voronsky and Art as the Cognition of Life

For Manguel, reading is never simply the mechanical decoding of words. Across his writings on books, libraries and literary culture, reading emerges as a means by which human beings organise experience, preserve memory and discover possibilities beyond the limits of their immediate circumstances. Yet the philosophical implications of this conception become clearer when placed beside the Marxist aesthetics of Aleksandr Voronsky. In Art as the Cognition of Life, Voronsky advances the remarkable proposition that art is not merely a reflection upon life but one of the means through which life itself becomes known.

The affinity between the two writers begins with their refusal to reduce literature to information. A summary of its contents cannot replace a novel because what literature communicates resides in the artistic organisation of experience itself. Characters, situations, images, rhythm and language enable the reader to perceive relationships that abstract propositions cannot reproduce. Literature matters because it enlarges the field of human experience.

But Voronsky gives this insight a more explicitly materialist foundation. Art has cognitive significance because an objective world exists and can be known. The artist does not simply construct an arbitrary reality out of language. Nor does the reader possess unlimited authority to manufacture whatever meaning they choose. Artist, work and reader confront the accumulated substance of social and natural existence.

This conception distinguishes Voronsky sharply from much of the theoretical thinking about literature that developed later in the twentieth century. If reality becomes merely discourse and the literary work an endlessly unstable network of signs, then literature's claim to disclose anything beyond itself becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Voronsky's aesthetics begins from exactly the opposite direction. Human consciousness arose within the material world and possesses the capacity, however imperfectly and historically conditioned, to understand that world. Art constitutes one particular form of this struggle for understanding.

Here Manguel's lifelong defence of reading takes on broader significance. The library is not valuable simply because old books possess cultural prestige. It represents an extraordinary accumulation of encounters between human consciousness and historical experience. Each generation returns to these works not simply to commemorate the dead but because earlier artistic discoveries can suddenly illuminate circumstances that their creators could never have anticipated.

This helps explain why great literature repeatedly escapes the purposes institutions try to impose on it. Governments, markets, universities and publishing industries classify works, construct canons and transform cultural objects into commodities. Yet the experience contained within a powerful work cannot finally be reduced to its market price, institutional reputation or approved interpretation. The reader may encounter something disturbing precisely because literature reveals contradictions that conventional ideology conceals.

Voronsky's argument also challenges the crude assumption that Marxist criticism demands politically obedient literature. The artistic value of a novel cannot be measured simply by whether its author professes progressive opinions. Reactionaries can perceive important aspects of social life, while writers possessing admirable political convictions can produce lifeless art. The decisive question is whether the artist has penetrated beneath appearances and discovered something truthful about human beings and their relations with one another.

This argument becomes especially important in an age when literature is increasingly subjected to the logic of commodification. Books are marketed through categories, algorithms, celebrity endorsements and demographic niches. Reading itself can become another measurable consumption habit. Against this environment, both Manguel and Voronsky, from very different intellectual traditions, insist upon something considerably more demanding: the encounter with literature changes the reader's relationship with reality.

Yet Voronsky supplies the deeper explanation of why this should be possible. Literature matters because reality is richer than the ideological abstractions imposed upon it. Genuine artists discover contradictions, emotions and social relationships that they may not themselves completely understand theoretically. Their works can therefore contain truths exceeding their conscious intentions.

This also explains the continuing power of literature written under historical conditions radically different from our own. We do not read Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Dickens merely as documents belonging to vanished societies. Their works disclose relationships between individuals and society, aspiration and necessity, wealth and poverty, love and property, freedom and constraint. The historical world changes, but the artistic cognition embodied in such works becomes part of humanity's accumulated consciousness.

The encounter between Manguel and Voronsky therefore points towards a defence of reading more radical than cultural nostalgia. Libraries matter not because civilisation requires temples dedicated to books, but because literature preserves something capitalism continually threatens to diminish: the possibility of sustained attention to human experience outside the immediate requirements of profit and utility.

To read seriously is consequently to engage with the world rather than retreat from it. Manguel reminds us of the inexhaustible relationship connecting books, memory and readers. Voronsky explains why that relationship reaches beyond the private pleasures of reading. Art is a means of cognition, an attempt to penetrate appearances and grasp something truthful about life. The defence of literature therefore becomes inseparable from the defence of humanity's capacity to know the world and, ultimately, to change it.

Artificial intelligence and the social question

The question becomes particularly sharp in relation to artificial intelligence. Writers and artists have legitimate reasons to regard the development of AI with anxiety. Intellectual and creative workers confront the possibility that corporations will use technologies trained on enormous quantities of existing cultural material to reduce costs, eliminate employment, and transform creative production itself. The increasing capacity to manufacture images, texts, music and synthetic media also creates obvious problems concerning authenticity and the social status of creative work. But none of these developments can adequately be understood by opposing human creativity to technology as such.

The decisive issue is ownership. Artificial intelligence did not descend upon society from outside history. It represents the accumulated product of scientific discovery, technological development, social knowledge and the labour of countless human beings. The contradiction is that socially generated productive capacities become concentrated in the ownership and control of private corporations and wealthy investors. The same technology that might be used to reduce monotonous labour, expand access to knowledge, translate vast bodies of literature, assist scientific research and increase the cultural possibilities available to humanity can, within capitalism, instead be employed to eliminate employment, intensify surveillance, strengthen military systems and subordinate intellectual activity still further to profit.

Trotsky identified the essential contradiction long before the development of digital computation when he discussed technology in Culture and Socialism. Under capitalism, machinery becomes an instrument for intensifying the exploitation of labour, but humanity cannot emancipate itself by rejecting the machine. The productive forces created under capitalism simultaneously establish the material possibilities for overcoming scarcity, drudgery and cultural backwardness. The Marxist answer to technological development is therefore neither corporate celebration nor romantic repudiation. It asks which social class controls technology, what economic principles guide its development, and what human purposes its capacities serve.

AI and humanity’s collective culture

Artificial intelligence makes this contradiction unusually visible because the material many AI systems depend on demonstrates the inherently collective character of culture itself. No writer invents the language in which they write. No scientist independently creates the accumulated body of knowledge upon which discovery depends. No historian creates the archive. Every generation inherits an immense cultural and scientific legacy produced by innumerable previous generations, and every genuinely significant intellectual achievement, in turn, enters that developing collective inheritance.

Digital technology has vastly enlarged the technical possibilities for making this inherited culture available. Libraries, historical archives, scientific research and enormous quantities of educational material can potentially become accessible to populations across the planet on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Under rational social arrangements, AI could help organise and navigate that information, overcome linguistic boundaries, and extend access to intellectual resources far beyond the institutions where they have traditionally been concentrated. The genuinely revolutionary potential lies not in the fantasy that machines will replace human thought, but in technologies that could extend human capacity to think, learn, and create.

The obstacle is not technological but social. When accumulated human knowledge becomes privately appropriated, the contradictions surrounding AI become an expression of the contradiction between collective production and private ownership that Marx identified as foundational to capitalist society. A serious discussion of AI and culture therefore must go beyond the fear that the machine threatens the writer. It must ask who owns the machine and who controls access to the accumulated knowledge upon which it operates. Without that transition, cultural criticism risks treating the symptoms of technological change while leaving untouched the social structure determining how technology will be used. 

Trevor Griffiths and the writer’s social orientation

The 2008 discussion between playwright Trevor Griffiths and WSWS arts editor David Walsh provides a useful contrast because it approaches the relationship between artistic work and politics historically rather than merely morally. Griffiths belonged to a generation shaped by the international radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when questions of Marxism, revolution, the working class and political power entered cultural life with an intensity that would become almost unimaginable during the succeeding decades. Writers did not suddenly develop more courageous personalities. Their cultural development occurred within a wider movement of millions of people whose struggles transformed the intellectual atmosphere.

The importance of this experience lies precisely in the connection between culture and social life. Radical writing did not develop simply because writers chose to “resist”. A wider historical movement expanded the possibilities available to culture and made questions that had previously appeared marginal suddenly immediate. The subsequent defeats and betrayals of the radicalisation did not leave cultural life unaffected either. The turn to the right, the attacks associated with Thatcherism and Reaganism, the decline of the old labour organisations and finally the dissolution of the Soviet Union contributed to a profound transformation of intellectual life. Confidence in collective social transformation retreated. Class increasingly disappeared from cultural discussion, while politics became reinterpreted through personal identity, language and individual experience.

“Resistance” fitted this changed intellectual climate remarkably well. Revolution implies a social force, a historical objective and a question of political power. Resistance does not necessarily require any of them. One can resist indefinitely without confronting how society is to be reconstructed. The word therefore captures both the sincerity and the political limits of much contemporary cultural opposition.

From class politics to moral protest

This transformation did not arise merely from incorrect theoretical choices. It followed major political defeats and social transformations. The defeats of working-class movements during the closing decades of the twentieth century strengthened the apparent dominance of capitalism. They encouraged the conception that fundamental social transformation had become impossible. Politics increasingly adjusted itself to what was presented as an unalterable market order. In this environment, opposition shifted from transformation to transgression, personal expression, and symbolic protest. The language changed accordingly. Liberation gave way to representation, revolution to resistance, social transformation to individual empowerment.

None of these terms is necessarily meaningless. People genuinely resist oppression, and defending democratic and cultural rights remains essential. The problem arises when defensive resistance becomes an entire conception of historical possibility. A political culture organised merely around perpetual resistance tacitly assumes that the forces being resisted will themselves remain permanent. The individual may refuse inward submission, but the structure producing oppression survives. What appears radical can consequently conceal a deeply pessimistic historical conception.

Manguel’s final “perhaps that is enough” unintentionally expresses this pessimism. Literature preserves what is humane while the surrounding world becomes increasingly inhuman. The library becomes a shelter from barbarism rather than one element within humanity’s struggle to abolish the social sources of barbarism. Such a conception contains dignity, but it also embodies resignation.

Literature must disturb

Great literature has never confined itself comfortably to affirmation. It affirms humanity frequently through merciless criticism of the actual conditions under which human beings live. Its power lies partly in its capacity to destabilise assumptions so deeply embedded in social existence that they appear natural. The novelist can make visible relations that everyday consciousness conceals; the playwright can expose the contradiction between what individuals say and what their behaviour reveals; poetry can give expressive form to needs and experiences that have not yet found an adequate political vocabulary. Literature thereby does what political analysis alone cannot accomplish.

This disturbing quality is essential. Chekhov’s observation in “Gooseberries” that behind every contented person there ought to stand someone with a hammer reminding him continually that unhappy people exist captures something fundamental about serious art. Kafka’s celebrated image of literature as an axe for the frozen sea within us expresses the same demand in another form. Art should not merely confirm our existing morality. It should penetrate the defences through which individuals reconcile themselves to intolerable circumstances.

The greatest writing therefore does not simply inform readers that injustice exists. Newspapers can do that. It transforms perception. It makes previously accepted relationships strange and forces readers to reconsider their own experience. This process need not produce an immediately identifiable political conclusion. But it has enormous intellectual potential because fundamental social change becomes possible only when people stop treating the existing organisation of life as inevitable.

The reader is also a social being.

Nevertheless, there is a danger in turning reading itself into resistance. Capitalism is remarkably capable of commodifying its own criticism. Revolutionary imagery becomes advertising, rebellious music becomes fashion, political radicalism becomes a publishing category, and resistance becomes a marketable identity. The existence of radical books therefore proves very little about the political health of a society. An economic system can tolerate an enormous quantity of private dissent so long as that dissent remains disconnected from collective action directed against the foundations of social power.

The reader, moreover, is never simply a reader. The person sitting with a novel is also a worker or employer, tenant or landlord, parent, student, pensioner or unemployed person. They occupy a concrete position in society and participate in relationships that extend far beyond the page. Reading can alter how individuals understand these relationships, but the movement from understanding to transformation requires another sphere of activity. At some point the reader closes the book and re-enters the world.

This does not diminish reading. It identifies where its greatest significance potentially lies. A book may articulate something experienced by thousands or millions of individuals separately and thereby help transform private experience into social understanding. Once individuals recognise that what appeared to be a private misfortune is produced by conditions shared with countless others, consciousness has already begun moving beyond the individual. Literature can contribute powerfully to that process. But collective understanding becomes historically transformative only through collective action.

Seeing the world as it really is

Manguel therefore raises a considerably larger problem than his own solution can contain when he asks whether literature enables humanity to see the world as it really is. To confront reality today means recognising that capitalism is not simply an economy within which occasional injustices occur. It is a historically developed system of social relations characterised fundamentally by private ownership of the productive forces, the exploitation of wage labour and competition between corporations and nation-states. War, inequality, austerity and cultural impoverishment cannot be understood comprehensively as separate moral failures because they all arise within this wider social structure.

The same applies to the conditions confronting literature itself. The difficulties facing writers, libraries, publishing, arts education and serious journalism are continually treated as discrete cultural problems. Yet behind them stands the allocation of social resources. A society capable of producing extraordinary quantities of wealth nevertheless claims that it cannot adequately fund libraries, schools, museums, orchestras, theatres and other institutions through which cultural life develops. Writers are urged to accommodate themselves to market demands while publishers operate increasingly according to commercial imperatives. The contradiction is not a lack of technological or material resources, but their organisation around private accumulation rather than social need.

To see the world as it really is consequently requires seeing cultural decline as an expression of a broader social crisis. The defence of literature ultimately confronts the same questions as the defence of every other field of human activity: who owns society’s resources, who determines how they are distributed, and whose interests does production serve?

The question of the working class

This brings the argument to the subject that liberal theories of resistance generally avoid: the working class. Marxism did not assign workers a revolutionary role because Marx had a sentimental preference for industrial labour. The working class's revolutionary significance arises from its position within capitalist production. Capital increasingly organises production collectively across national boundaries while ownership remains concentrated privately. Workers therefore participate every day in a highly socialised system whose productive capacities contradict the private appropriation of the wealth they create.

Modern technological development has intensified this contradiction rather than removed it. The global systems underlying digital communication, artificial intelligence, logistics, finance and scientific research depend upon vast networks of collective labour. Technologies celebrated as autonomous creations of entrepreneurs are actually impossible without generations of publicly and privately employed scientists, programmers, engineers, teachers, technicians and countless other workers, alongside accumulated cultural and scientific knowledge inherited from the past.

For writers, this question is decisive because culture itself increasingly depends upon the same globally integrated technical infrastructure. The interests of the serious artist ultimately collide with the same monopolistic relations that confront workers elsewhere. Intellectual property, digital platforms, publishing corporations and AI systems cannot be considered independently of the ownership structures controlling them. The defence of culture therefore develops an objective connection with the broader struggle over control of society’s productive and intellectual resources.

Literature is not a substitute for politics.

To argue this is not to demand politically obedient literature. On the contrary, literature becomes artistically impoverished when converted into political instruction. A novel organised to demonstrate conclusions that the author already possesses ceases to discover reality and becomes illustration. The greatness of art lies partly in its unpredictability, its capacity to uncover contradictions that neither the artist nor the reader initially anticipated.

But acknowledging the independence of artistic creation does not require pretending that literature exists outside historical development. The artist's task is not identical to that of a political party, yet both confront the same objective world. Serious art and revolutionary politics approach reality through different forms, methods and purposes, but neither can indefinitely avoid the fundamental contradictions of its historical epoch.

The question is therefore one of orientation rather than prescription. Does the writer look towards society and attempt to penetrate its contradictions, or retreat from society into the assertion of individual moral integrity? Does cultural opposition seek historical clarification, or does it construct an enclave within which humane values can survive while the external world becomes increasingly barbaric? At this level, Manguel’s conception of resistance becomes inadequate.

Giving the argument against this criticism its due

There remains a serious counterargument. Admirers of Manguel can reasonably insist that Resistance is a literary meditation rather than a work of political economy. They may argue that the demand for cultural affirmation itself possesses value when censorship, historical falsification and political demoralisation threaten intellectual independence. Montaigne did not need to formulate a revolutionary programme for his essays to enlarge human self-understanding, nor must every contemporary writer transform reflections upon books into an analysis of capitalist property relations. Literature has moral, imaginative and aesthetic capacities that cannot be reduced to its relationship with class struggle.

This warning against reductionism should be taken seriously. A mechanical Marxism that treats every poem or novel simply as an ideological document generated by class position would be incapable of explaining why works produced in remote historical circumstances continue to move readers centuries later. Human beings have emotional and intellectual experiences that cannot be reduced to economic categories. Love, mortality, memory, betrayal, loneliness and hope are genuine elements of human life, and literature’s exploration of them possesses its own legitimacy.

But recognising this does not invalidate historical materialism. The universal in art does not exist by eliminating the particular. Human emotions themselves are experienced within historically developed social forms. Love in feudal society is not socially identical to love in modern capitalism, even though both contain recognisably human experiences. Literature becomes universal not by escaping the historical world but by rendering particular human experiences so truthfully that people living in different circumstances can recognise themselves within them. Marxism at its best therefore enlarges rather than diminishes the understanding of artistic universality.

Beyond “Perhaps that is enough”

Manguel’s hesitant conclusion can now be reconsidered. Perhaps, he suggests, affirmation and continuing resistance are enough. But enough for what? Enough to preserve personal integrity? Certainly. Enough to maintain historical memory against those seeking to destroy it? Sometimes. Enough to produce great literature? Possibly, because artists have never required correct political theories as prerequisites for artistic achievement. But enough to confront the social processes threatening culture, democratic rights and human civilisation? No.

Books did not abolish slavery, overthrow feudalism or defeat fascism. Yet intellectual and artistic culture played enormous roles in the historical struggles through which people became conscious of these conditions and acted against them. The distinction is fundamental. The Enlightenment contributed to the intellectual preparation of bourgeois revolution because its criticism of inherited authority intersected with major changes in European society. Marxism acquired world-historical significance not simply because Marx wrote extraordinarily penetrating books, but because those works articulated the objective historical interests of a social force capitalism itself created.

Ideas become material forces when they enter into the consciousness of masses of people. Literature forms part of this process because it can transform perception long before political conclusions become fully articulated. It can reveal what society tries to hide, recover what official history seeks to forget, and show that apparently natural social relationships have histories and therefore can have endings.

Literature is not enough, but it is necessary.

The conclusion should therefore be neither the liberal celebration of literature as resistance nor a philistine dismissal of books as politically powerless. Literature is not enough, but it is necessary. Books constitute one of humanity’s greatest repositories of accumulated consciousness. Through them, individuals separated by centuries enter into conversation. The dead continue to participate in the living's intellectual life. Historical experience survives the societies that created it, and readers encounter modes of human existence radically different from their own.

No socialist movement worthy of the name can regard this inheritance indifferently. The struggle for human liberation is inconceivable without defending and expanding culture because socialism is not simply a different mechanism for distributing goods. Its historical justification rests on creating conditions in which the productive, intellectual, and creative capacities of every human being can develop to a degree impossible in a society dominated by exploitation, economic insecurity, and social inequality.

Manguel is consequently right to defend literature against the forces seeking to diminish it. He is right to insist that books can challenge falsehood and enlarge perception. He is right to regard cultural memory as something worth preserving in an age increasingly characterised by historical amnesia. But the logic of his own questions points beyond the conclusion he offers. If literature teaches us to see the world as it really is, then eventually it must help us confront the historical character of that world. It must make visible not only suffering but the social relationships that reproduce suffering, not merely authoritarianism but the forces giving rise to it, not simply technological anxiety but the structures of ownership determining the purposes towards which technology is directed.

The writer cannot transform society through writing, and it would be disastrous for art to pretend otherwise. But the writer need not accept a permanent separation between cultural truth and social action. Literature reaches towards something greater than private consolation precisely when the truth it discovers becomes part of humanity’s consciousness of itself. At that point, the distinction between the library and the world does not disappear, but their relationship becomes clearer. The reader carries historical experience out of the book and back into society.

“Perhaps that is enough” expresses the honourable pessimism of an intellectual determined to preserve culture while uncertain that society itself can be transformed. The challenge confronting writers and readers in the twenty-first century requires a more ambitious perspective. Literature should not pretend to replace political struggle, but neither should it reconcile humanity to a permanent condition of resistance. Its highest function is not to reassure us that conscience survives. At the same time, the world deteriorates, but it deepens our understanding of that world, disturbs our accommodation to it, and enlarges our conception of what human beings might become.

Manguel asks whether society can be compelled to recognise the evidence of facts. History suggests that it can, but never through books alone. It requires human beings who have understood their circumstances, recognised their collective interests and become determined to act upon that understanding. Literature can profoundly help develop such consciousness. That is why the answer to Manguel should not be that literature is powerless. It is something more demanding: literature becomes historically powerful when the truths it reveals encounter a social force capable of acting upon them.

The task, then, is to move beyond resistance as permanent moral protest. The defence of culture must become inseparable from creating a society in which culture, science, and technology cease to be subordinated to private accumulation and become part of humanity's common inheritance. Literature will not accomplish that transformation by itself. But the literature worthy of the coming struggles will undoubtedly help human beings understand why such a transformation is necessary.

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BBC HistoryExtra and Robert Tombs: The “better story” of British imperialism and the rehabilitation of the national past

Robert Tombs's appearance on the BBC’s HistoryExtra platform promoting Our Islands’ Story: A Better Story About Britain, co-written with Nigel Biggar, matters for reasons that extend far beyond the merits of another popular history of Britain. The central issue the book and its promotion raise is not whether every aspect of British history should be condemned, nor whether historians should acknowledge achievements as well as crimes. It concerns something far more fundamental: whose history is being written, which social forces are concealed when “Britain” is treated as a unified historical subject, and why a rehabilitated national narrative has acquired renewed political importance.

Biggar and Tombs make no secret of wanting to challenge what they regard as an excessively negative conception of British history. Swift Press describes their book as a challenge to a supposedly “fashionable” narrative that emphasises the worst of Britain's past while neglecting its best. The publisher goes further, describing the volume as an “antidote to contemporary cynicism” and declaring that the authors seek to tell a “better story about Britain”, one that recognises achievements of “enduring value” that supposedly deserve “our appreciation and care”. Our Islands’ Story was published on 22 October 2026. [swiftpress.com]

That language deserves serious attention. “Our”, “inheritance”, “appreciation” and “care” are not merely neutral historiographical categories. They construct a relationship between contemporary readers and the British state's history. The effect is to transform history from the critical investigation of past societies into an argument about national inheritance. Events separated by centuries and produced by antagonistic social classes can therefore be gathered under an encompassing national “we”.

The accompanying endorsements make the political thrust still clearer. Andrew Roberts praises the book for rejecting what he calls “corrosive woke self-hatred”. At the same time, John Gray commends its opposition to a supposedly “crude progressive mythology” depicting British history principally through oppression and exploitation. The question is therefore not whether the book has politics. Its presentation makes clear that it consciously intervenes in contemporary disputes over national identity and historical memory. The question is what politics these arguments express and what conception of history underpins them.

Who is the “our” in Our Islands’ Story?

The title itself poses the central problem. Who exactly are “our”? No single British historical experience exists. The aristocrat enclosing land and the peasant deprived of customary rights did not inhabit history in the same way. The plantation owner accumulating wealth through enslaved labour and the enslaved labourer were not participants in a common achievement. The Manchester mill owner and the child employed in the factory cannot be dissolved into a collective national “we” without concealing their social relationship.

The British Empire similarly cannot be understood as the collective accomplishment or collective crime of an undifferentiated British population. Its governing apparatus, military power and commercial expansion arose from definite social interests. The profits generated by colonial commerce, plantation slavery, finance and industrial exploitation accumulated overwhelmingly within the possessing classes. British workers could themselves absorb imperial and nationalist ideology, and sections of the working class could derive particular advantages from imperial supremacy, but this did not abolish the fundamental class division within British society.

That is why the apparently straightforward language of national inheritance is so misleading. Tombs has long defended a more affirmative interpretation of England and Britain. Yet the central Marxist objection to this approach does not depend upon establishing whether England has been, at one moment or another, relatively prosperous, politically stable or constitutionally liberal compared with other countries. The real question is how such developments arose and which social forces struggled over their direction.

A national narrative inevitably converts contested achievements into national attributes. Parliamentary government, civil liberties, trade-union rights and extension of the franchise appear retrospectively as components of an evolving British political tradition. What disappears is the struggle required to obtain them and, above all, the resistance mounted by property and the state against those demanding them.

The material foundations of British power

Britain did not become the “workshop of the world” because of some timeless national predisposition towards liberty, enterprise or good government. British capitalism emerged from profound transformations in property, agriculture, commerce, production, and class relations.

The enclosure and commercialisation of agriculture helped produce both an increasingly capitalist system of farming and populations increasingly dependent upon wage labour. Colonial commerce expanded alongside the Atlantic slave economy. Wealth generated in the Caribbean, commercial expansion in Asia, and the growing power of finance interacted with transformations taking place within Britain itself. The Industrial Revolution did not descend from the ingenuity of an undifferentiated British people. It developed inside a new system of class relations in which the means of production were increasingly concentrated in private hands while millions possessed primarily their capacity to work.

The resulting wealth was extraordinary. So too was its social cost. Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England lies precisely in this. Engels did not look upon industrial Britain and see a single national community becoming progressively richer. He perceived interconnected classes. The factory system that generated enormous wealth at one pole of society generated insecurity, exhausting labour, overcrowding and premature death at another. The splendour of capitalist civilisation and the misery of the proletariat were not two unrelated phenomena. They arose from the same social relations.

This is what disappears whenever national prosperity becomes the principal measure of historical success. To ask whether Britain was rich is consequently inadequate. One must ask who controlled the wealth, who produced it, under what conditions it was accumulated and how it was distributed. To speak of British power without these questions is to convert the history of a class society into a national success story.

Empire and the morality of the balance sheet

The same methodological difficulty becomes still more visible when discussion turns towards empire. Biggar's attempt to reconsider the morality of colonialism rests upon the claim that the historical record should not be reduced exclusively to oppression and atrocity. Our Islands’ Story extends the broader intellectual project into a national history advertised as recovering positive achievements against pervasive pessimism. The publisher explicitly presents the book in these terms.

At first sight, the demand for “balance” sounds unassailable. Any serious historian considers contradictory evidence. British imperial rule differed across regions and centuries. Its administrators did not possess identical motives. Colonial subjects were themselves divided by class, caste, religion and political outlook. Institutions transported around the world could acquire meanings unintended by those who introduced them. None of this, however, answers the essential question: what was empire?

Empire was not an assortment of disconnected moral actions awaiting classification as beneficial or harmful. It represented systems of political domination constructed within a developing capitalist world economy. British imperialism secured strategic territory, commercial routes, markets, investment opportunities and access to labour and resources. The forms of this domination varied enormously, but you cannot understand the social relationship by placing railways, schools, and legal institutions in a positive column while placing famine, dispossession, and repression in a negative one.

Railways themselves illustrate the problem. Infrastructure that later becomes essential to the economic life of an independent society cannot retrospectively explain the social purpose for which colonial authorities and investors supported its construction. A material development may have contradictory historical consequences. Marxism has never required denying this. On the contrary, contradiction stands at the centre of historical development.

The problem begins when consequences are converted into moral credits attributed to “Britain”. The Irish Famine, Amritsar, the Bengal famine of 1943 and repression in colonial Kenya cannot simply be positioned alongside legal institutions and infrastructure before historians calculate whether empire generated a positive or negative final score. Instead, historians must locate such events within the economic and political relations of the societies in which they occurred. The issue is explanation rather than retrospective national judgement.

The struggle for democracy was a class struggle.

This distinction matters especially when discussing the genuinely progressive traditions in British history. There is an enormous democratic inheritance. But its most powerful episodes repeatedly emerged through struggle against the existing political and social order. The seventeenth-century English Revolution shattered forms of monarchical government and released political arguments of extraordinary radicalism. The Levellers demanded an extension of political participation far beyond what Parliament's propertied leaders were prepared to concede. The Putney Debates revealed that even within the parliamentary military coalition, profound disagreement existed over property, political rights, and the revolution's meaning.

The radical tradition did not end there. The development of industrial capitalism produced a modern working class that created its own organisations and increasingly advanced its own political claims. Peterloo revealed how the state could answer demands for political reform. The Tolpuddle labourers demonstrated the hostility directed against collective organisation. Chartism created the first mass independent political movement of the working class, linking democratic demands with the experience of industrial society. The British political system eventually incorporated reforms once denounced as dangerous and revolutionary. But to transform that outcome into proof of Britain's uniquely evolutionary genius is to reverse historical causation.

Rights conceded under pressure subsequently become celebrated components of a national tradition. The struggles that made concessions unavoidable recede into the background. This process of historical appropriation is crucial to understanding conservative national history. It does not necessarily deny popular struggle. More commonly, it absorbs its accomplishments. Democracy becomes British. Parliamentary sovereignty becomes British. Freedom becomes British. The working population is subsequently invited to identify with institutions whose democratic content was expanded precisely through generations of struggle against privileged elites. Marxism insists upon restoring that conflict to the centre of historical interpretation.

The working class has a history, not a national myth.

The alternative to conservative nationalism is therefore not national self-loathing. Workers living in Britain today have no reason to experience personal guilt for imperial crimes committed before they were born. A child in present-day Manchester is no more personally responsible for Amritsar than an Indian worker today is responsible for the actions of former Indian ruling classes. Collective hereditary guilt is an intellectually bankrupt approach to history. But collective national pride mirrors the same error. If contemporary workers are not personally guilty of the crimes of empire, they cannot logically inherit personal credit for Britain's victories, imperial conquests or ruling-class achievements either.

History is something to understand, not something into which individuals should be conscripted in search of either inherited innocence or inherited guilt. This is where the conflict between Marxism and both sides of the conventional culture war becomes important. Racialist theories may present “whiteness”, “Europeans” or “the British” as collective historical subjects bearing responsibility across generations. Conservative national history responds by taking the same national categories and reversing the moral verdict. Instead of collective guilt, it offers collective pride. The apparent opponents consequently share far more than either acknowledges. Both can dissolve class antagonisms into identities extending across generations. Both obscure the fact that the decisive divisions in capitalist society arise from social relations of production, property and power. Marxism rejects the choice.

From the 1619 Project to History Reclaimed

This is also why opposition to racialised interpretations of history must not be surrendered to the political right. Legitimate criticisms of racial reductionism give Tombs and other conservative historians part of their intellectual opportunity. When enormous and complicated histories are rewritten as essentially eternal confrontations between racial categories, the resulting distortions make nationalist counterattacks easier. But the answer to racial essentialism cannot be national essentialism.

The history of Atlantic slavery, for example, becomes incomprehensible if the fundamental historical agency is relocated from class relations and developing capitalism into a timeless conflict between “white” and “black” people. But it becomes equally incomprehensible if the fact that Britain later participated in suppressing the Atlantic slave trade is employed to establish a moral credit for the British national story.

Historical materialism asks different questions. What economic relations generated racial slavery? Which classes accumulated wealth through it? How were racial ideologies developed to legitimise exploitation? Which economic, political and social transformations contributed to abolition? What interests subsequently shaped Britain's use of anti-slavery in its international policy? Those questions lead away from moral competition between national pride and national shame and towards historical explanation.

Why resurrect the imperial inheritance now?

The timing of the dispute matters. Britain in 2026 is not the Britain that dominated nineteenth-century world commerce. Nor is it the imperial power that once controlled enormous territories. It is a capitalist society marked by intense social inequality and political disaffection, operating within a global system increasingly characterised by military confrontation and geopolitical instability. Under such circumstances, the ideological significance of national history increases.

A state demanding social sacrifice must perpetually present national interests as interests shared across class lines. Military expenditure must become “our” defence. Geopolitical objectives become “our” security. International competitors become threats to “us”. The tremendous disparities separating wealth and poverty disappear temporarily behind the image of national community. History provides this political vocabulary with a past. Empire consequently becomes more than a historical question. If the imperial past can be reinterpreted as on balance constructive, a source of institutions and values worthy of appreciation, then the contemporary British state can present itself as inheritor of a fundamentally progressive national tradition.

This was one of the central arguments in my earlier A Trumpet of Sedition article, “Biggar and Tombs’ Our Islands’ Story: An ideological brief for an empire preparing for war”. Published on 15 October, the article argued that the rehabilitation of empire should be considered within a wider ideological turn towards militarism and national cohesion. , [keith-pers...ogspot.com]

The BBC and the limits of “neutral” history

In principle, I have no objection to the BBC interviewing Tombs. His position deserves examination, particularly because it sits at the centre of a major contemporary historical controversy. The problem arises when a deeply political interpretation is treated principally as an exercise in correcting excessive negativity rather than subjected to sustained scrutiny of its assumptions. The questions to ask of this interpretation are not difficult to formulate.

What is gained and what is lost when Britain itself becomes the subject of history? Who possesses the collective inheritance repeatedly invoked in discussions of the national past? How can the accomplishments of ruling classes and the victories secured against them legitimately be incorporated into the same narrative of national achievement?

Does the parliamentary system demonstrate an inherent British attachment to liberty, or does its development reveal centuries of conflict over who possessed political rights? Can empire be morally evaluated apart from the economic system that shaped imperial expansion? And above all, what does the word “our” mean in a society divided by class? A genuinely searching discussion would have forced the national narrative to confront these contradictions. Instead, the danger of the “history wars” framework is that the argument is organised between two positions that reinforce one another: Britain as historical villain and Britain as historical benefactor. Once debate takes this form, Marxist historical explanation disappears almost completely.

 

Our Islands’ Story and the politics of historical memory

The publisher's presentation of Our Islands’ Story is particularly revealing in this respect. The book is not advertised simply as offering discoveries about Britain's past. It is offered as a corrective to attitudes towards the past. Readers are encouraged to recover something worthy of “appreciation and care” and to carry valuable elements of the inheritance “into the future”. That is an argument about historical consciousness.

The difference matters because history and memory perform different intellectual functions. Historical investigation should challenge inherited assumptions. National memory frequently seeks continuity. History disaggregates supposedly unified communities and discovers conflicts beneath them. National mythology instead tends to turn contradictory experiences into a common inheritance. Marxist history's task is precisely to uncover those contradictions.

We should therefore reject the argument that criticism of empire involves hating Britain just as emphatically as we reject claims that acknowledging cultural or political achievements requires defending empire. Shakespeare does not belong to imperialism. Newton does not require colonial apologetics. The Levellers do not belong to the historical tradition of the British ruling class simply because their struggles occurred in England. Chartism cannot be transformed into an ornament of British constitutionalism without doing violence to the social conflict that created it. Cultural achievement, scientific discovery and democratic struggle are part of humanity's inheritance. The history of ordinary people struggling to improve their conditions belongs most profoundly to those continuing the struggle for human emancipation.

Against both national shame and national pride

The choice facing historians is therefore not between denunciation and celebration. Neither category provides an adequate method. The British Empire should not be studied so that contemporary Britons can be instructed to feel ashamed of themselves. Nor should it be studied so they can emerge feeling reassured that the national ledger ultimately remains in credit. Both approaches subordinate historical explanation to contemporary moral identity. The materialist historian instead seeks to reconstruct the social relations from which events arose.

This means examining Britain's transformation through agrarian capitalism, colonial expansion and industrialisation. It means tracing the formation of classes and the relationship between domestic accumulation and international exploitation. It means investigating the state as an instrument shaped by historically developing property relations rather than imagining it as the political embodiment of a timeless national character.

It also means paying attention to resistance. The enslaved person who rebelled against plantation slavery, the Irish tenant resisting landlordism, the Indian opponent of colonial domination and the British worker confronting the factory owner do not belong in separate moral histories. Their experiences were connected through the developing world capitalist system. This is precisely why Marxism possesses an international conception of history fundamentally at odds with conservative nationalism.

There was never one British story.

Finally, no single British story can reconcile these experiences without distorting them. The history of the landowner is not the history of the dispossessed agricultural labourer. The imperial administrator did not have the same historical experience as the colonised population. The millionaire and the docker inhabited the same country without occupying the same social world. The attempt to merge them produces precisely that mystified entity Marxism exists to penetrate: the nation conceived as a community standing above class.

Biggar and Tombs want the reader to recover confidence in national inheritance. The description issued by Swift Press leaves little ambiguity on this score, presenting Our Islands’ Story as an uplifting corrective to cynicism about the British past. But workers need no such reassurance. They possess a historical inheritance far richer than the achievements of their rulers. It includes those who resisted enclosure and dispossession; those who carried the English Revolution beyond the limits acceptable to its propertied leadership; the Levellers who argued over political equality at Putney; the reform movements brutally confronted at Peterloo; the Tolpuddle labourers; the Chartists; generations of trade unionists, socialists and anti-imperialists; and all those who insisted that ordinary men and women were capable of directing society themselves. This history cannot be made the property of the British state. Nor is it exclusively British. Its greatest significance lies precisely in its connection with the struggles of workers and oppressed populations internationally.

A better history requires abandoning the national myth

The weakness of Our Islands’ Story ultimately lies in its title. A “better story about Britain” remains organised around Britain as its fundamental historical subject. But the history that genuinely needs recovering is the history concealed when the nation takes centre stage. Britain certainly has a past. That does not mean everyone who lived within it shared the same historical interests.

The critical question for history is not whether “we” should be proud or ashamed. It is who constituted this “we” in the first place. Who owned the land? Who worked it? Who owned the factories? Who laboured inside them? Who profited from colonial expansion? Who administered the empire? Who experienced its domination? Who controlled Parliament, and who struggled for admission into political life? Who accumulated the wealth, and who produced it?

Once those questions are asked, the harmonious national picture begins to disintegrate.

That is why the current rehabilitation of national history has contemporary political significance. A society divided ever more visibly between immense private wealth and widespread insecurity requires ideological mechanisms that can assert an overriding community of interests. National history provides one such mechanism. It takes the conflicts through which modern society developed and transforms their outcomes into common property. The state ceases to appear as a product of historical struggles and becomes the guardian of a supposedly shared inheritance.

The possibilities contained in British history are far greater than that conservative narrative allows. They lie not primarily in the state's continuity but in repeated challenges to established authority. From the revolutionary ferment of the seventeenth century through Chartism and the establishment of an organised working-class movement, Britain's most enduring contribution to human progress cannot be separated from struggles waged from below.

Workers and young people therefore require neither an education in national guilt nor lessons in patriotic pride from historians seeking to restore confidence in Britain's past. They need history in its most rigorous sense: the reconstruction of the social forces, material interests and class struggles through which the present world came into existence. Tombs and Biggar's “better story” responds to the crisis of national confidence by attempting to repair the national narrative. Marxist history begins from an altogether different premise. The task is not to produce a better national myth, but to dispense with the myth that rulers and ruled ever possessed one common history. What deserves to be recovered is not an imperial inheritance but the revolutionary and democratic tradition that repeatedly challenged property, privilege and empire. That inheritance belongs to neither Westminster nor the British state. It belongs to the international working class.

Bibliography and further reading

Biggar, Tombs and the current controversy

Biggar, Nigel and Robert Tombs. Our Islands’ Story: A Better Story About Britain. Swift Press, 2026. The publisher gives 22 October 2026 as the publication date and explicitly advertises the book as an antidote to contemporary pessimism concerning Britain's history.

Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. London: William Collins, 2023.

Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. London: Allen Lane, 2014.

Tombs, Robert. This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe. London: Allen Lane, 2021.

Marx, Engels and imperialism

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. 1867.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.

Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? 1925.

British capitalism, empire and the working class

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. 1944.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.

Kiernan, V. G. The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.

Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. London: Verso, 1997.

From A Trumpet of Sedition

A Trumpet of Sedition. “Biggar and Tombs’ Our Islands’ Story: An ideological brief for an empire preparing for war.” 15 October 2026. This is particularly worth retaining in the bibliography because the present article works naturally as its companion: the earlier essay focuses on the ideological rehabilitation of empire and argues that this must be located within a wider turn toward militarism. [atrumpetof...dition.org],

Publisher material

Swift Press. Our Islands’ Story, publisher's description and endorsements. [swiftpress.com]

The Guardian Bookshop. Our Islands’ Story, publication details and author biographies. Its listing identifies Biggar as Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas and Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford, noting that he entered the House of Lords as a Conservative peer in January 2025; it identifies Tombs as Emeritus Professor of French History at Cambridge and a Life Fellow of St John's College. [guardianbookshop.com]

 

Friends in Youth: An elegy for the “moderates” of the English Revolution

Minoo Dinshaw’s Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War has been warmly received. The book is an impressive achievement: learned, elegantly written, densely researched, and unusually attentive to personality, friendship, and the texture of political life. But the critical enthusiasm surrounding it also speaks to the political atmosphere in which the English Revolution is now being interpreted. The publisher presents its protagonists as principled young men hoping to restore harmony between Crown and Parliament. At the same time, the book’s publicity repeatedly emphasises reluctant choices, subtle differences, accident and the tragedy of unnecessary civil conflict. [penguin.co.uk]

That interpretation has proved especially congenial to reviewers. The Telegraph described the book as a “necessary cautionary tale about the human cost of political division”. At the same time, the Financial Times praised its “elegiac portrait of well-meaning moderates who tried to halt the slide towards violent division”. The publisher’s material and elsewhere reproduce these descriptions. Andrew Gimson’s ConservativeHome review goes further, explicitly welcoming Dinshaw’s resistance to the supposedly inadequate division of seventeenth-century politics into Cavaliers and Roundheads and concluding with Dinshaw’s own vision of his subjects as embodying an “attractive common world” opposed to party enmity.

The response matters because Dinshaw’s book frames the English Revolution as, above all, a tragedy of political polarisation: a catastrophe in which thoughtful, cultivated, and essentially decent men found themselves divided by forces that wiser statecraft might have controlled. Against revolution stands conversation; against ideology, friendship; against mass political mobilisation, the civilised intercourse of lawyers, scholars and gentlemen.

But this framing raises a more fundamental historical question. What if the destruction of that “common world” was not primarily the consequence of a failure of moderation? What if the institutions within which Edward Hyde, Bulstrode Whitelocke, John Selden and Lucius Cary moved were themselves being destabilised by transformations that no amount of cultivated conversation could reconcile? The great limitation of Friends in Youth is that it approaches a social revolution through the consciousness of men who desperately wanted to prevent it from becoming one.

Two friends and the collapse of a political world

Dinshaw builds his narrative around the remarkable parallel careers of Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, and Bulstrode Whitelocke. Their friendship developed in the intellectual and social environment of the Inns of Court. Both became lawyers, parliamentarians, politicians, and eventually historians of the revolution they lived through. Yet in 1642 they chose opposing camps.

This imaginative strength is central to Dinshaw’s project. Rather than starting with the armies already assembled, he reconstructs the political world before those divisions hardened. John Adamson notes that the originality of the conception lies partly in recognising how deep the friendship between Hyde and Whitelocke had been and how closely their political careers and attitudes had once converged.

Both men belonged to the extraordinary cultural world surrounding the Inns of Court, which functioned as far more than professional training grounds for lawyers. They brought together law, politics, literature, patronage and intellectual discussion. Their association with the Great Tew circle around Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, placed them within a cultivated milieu that recoiled from both Laudian authoritarianism and what its members regarded as Puritan fanaticism. Jackie Eales describes this circle as characterised by scepticism towards religious dogmatism and a tolerance of political disagreement, even as its individual members eventually divided over the war. [historytoday.com]

The tragedy at the centre of Dinshaw’s story therefore has genuine historical substance. Hyde and Whitelocke were not ideological opposites destined from youth to become Cavalier and Roundhead. Both opposed important features of Charles I’s Personal Rule. Both were hostile to prerogative government. Their differences sharpened as the parliamentary movement itself developed. Hyde interpreted Parliament’s increasingly radical demands as constitutional innovation, whereas Whitelocke remained with Parliament while continuing to seek compromise. Blair Worden summarises Dinshaw’s interpretation by noting his emphasis upon the comparatively small original political distance between the two men and upon the tragedy of their eventual separation. This makes for compelling biography. But it does not in itself explain the revolution  [the-tls.com].

The virtues and limitations of political biography

Dinshaw possesses an exceptional eye for character. His narrative brings court, chambers, country houses, parliamentary debates, and personal relationships to life in remarkable detail. His use of memoir, correspondence, and Hyde and Whitelocke's later historical writings lets him reconstruct how contemporaries understood their own decisions without simply accepting their retrospective accounts at face value.

The book should therefore not be dismissed as merely conservative history dressed up in elegant prose. The emotional consequences of political rupture were real. Friendships were broken, families were divided, property destroyed and careers overturned. It is also historically unsatisfactory to imagine that everyone entering political conflict in 1640 already knew England would experience civil war, regicide, and republican government before the decade was out. Dinshaw is right to restore uncertainty to historical experience. History is lived forwards even if it is written backwards. The danger arises when uncertainty becomes explanation. Neither contingency nor individual political actors' reluctance shows that the structural crisis producing their choices was accidental. A revolutionary situation can contain innumerable contingencies yet still emerge from profound contradictions within a society. This is precisely where biography reaches its limits. The crucial historical question is not simply why Hyde eventually chose Charles while Whitelocke remained with Parliament. It is why, by 1642, those alternatives confronted them at all.

Revisionism rendered as literature

In this respect Friends in Youth belongs, even if not programmatically, within the historiographical landscape created by the revisionist assault on older interpretations of the English Revolution. From the late twentieth century, historians including Conrad Russell, John Morrill and Kevin Sharpe challenged explanations that emphasised long-term social transformation and class conflict. They drew renewed attention to religion, political contingency, the composite monarchy, conflicts among the three kingdoms, parliamentary-political contingencies, and Charles I's decisions.

That intervention corrected real weaknesses in schematic accounts in which a “rising bourgeoisie” appeared almost automatically upon the historical stage to overthrow feudalism. Historical materialism cannot be reduced to assigning political actors fixed class labels and then treating everything they subsequently do as an expression of an economically predetermined script. But the revisionist reaction frequently produced the opposite distortion. In discarding crude determinism, they also erased social development itself. The causes of revolution dissolved into a chain of political accidents, misunderstandings, confessional disputes and personal decisions.

Dinshaw’s narrative is particularly effective as a literary expression of this approach because biography naturally privileges the immediate field of individual consciousness. His protagonists knew one another personally. Their choices were difficult. Their disagreements could sometimes appear surprisingly narrow. Therefore the subsequent catastrophe appears all the more tragic. Yet revolutions rarely begin because everyone wants a revolution. On the contrary, revolutionary crises historically develop precisely through the failure of successive attempts at compromise.

Beneath Westminster: the transformation of English society

The weakness of a history organised around political friendship becomes apparent once the social transformation of seventeenth-century England is restored to the picture. England experienced enormous changes in agriculture, property relations, commerce, and the concentration of population and wealth. Agrarian capitalism had advanced further than in much of continental Europe. Competitive leasing, market dependence, enclosure, and the transformation of relations among landlords, tenant farmers, and rural labourers reshaped the countryside. London expanded dramatically, becoming the centre of government, finance, trade, printing, and popular political mobilisation. The dispute between Crown and Parliament developed within this changing society.

This does not mean that Charles I represented “feudalism” while Parliament straightforwardly represented “capitalism”. Both camps contained landowners; commercial interests crossed political divisions; religious allegiance mattered enormously; and Parliament itself included men terrified by popular radicalism. But these complexities do not abolish class relations. They show how political institutions inherited from an earlier social order mediate class interests.

Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution matters precisely here. Brenner showed that political conflicts surrounding Parliament cannot be reconstructed solely from parliamentary speeches or constitutional theory. The changing organisation of overseas commerce and the interests of London merchant groups shaped the material environment of political radicalisation. Similarly, Brian Manning insisted that the revolution cannot be understood exclusively through the political nation. London crowds, apprentices, artisans, tradespeople and poorer sections of society intervened directly in political events. Street pressure affected Parliament itself. Once these forces enter the picture, “moderation” ceases to be a politically neutral category.

The problem of the crowd

The parliamentary crisis of 1640–42 cannot be understood simply as a dispute within an educated governing class. Calling the Long Parliament created a political opening through which grievances accumulated during the Personal Rule could be articulated on a different scale. Petitions circulated. Print expanded. Crowds gathered around Westminster. Religious disputes became mass political issues. The struggle over Strafford, episcopacy, and the militia increasingly took place in an environment where political action could not be confined to the Commons and Lords.

Here Hyde’s evolution takes on a social dimension that describing him merely as a constitutional royalist cannot capture. Hyde had opposed important abuses of royal government. But as the opposition movement increasingly mobilised forces outside the established political elite, his overriding concern became preserving political and social order. The controversy over the Grand Remonstrance marked the widening division. The question was no longer merely whether to correct particular royal abuses. It increasingly became a question of who possessed political authority and on which forces that authority would depend.

For men such as Hyde, mobilising wider layers of the population threatened to transform constitutional opposition into something altogether more dangerous. This is the contradiction within the politics of the celebrated “moderates”. They could oppose arbitrary monarchy when the issue concerned the political rights of the propertied classes, but recoiled when resistance threatened to mobilise those below them. Moderation therefore describes not an absence of political interest, but a definite social standpoint.

Falkland and the tragedy of moderation

No figure better embodies Dinshaw’s elegiac interpretation than Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland. Falkland's death at the first Battle of Newbury in September 1643 became inseparable from the mythology that was later constructed around him. He appears as a sensitive intellectual destroyed by political fanaticism, a gentleman so disgusted by civil conflict that death became a release. Dinshaw’s world naturally gravitates toward such a figure. Yet Falkland's tragedy was also the tragedy of a political programme.

The constitutional royalists hoped to restrain the monarch and preserve the monarchy; defend Parliament while containing the popular forces increasingly mobilised behind it; oppose religious authoritarianism without permitting radical religious pluralism; and reform the state without letting reform develop into revolution. The programme became increasingly impossible because the conflict itself transformed the forces engaged in it. War required taxation, administration, recruitment and mobilisation. Parliamentary victory ultimately demanded a reorganisation of military power. The creation of the New Model Army in 1645 produced not merely a more effective army but a social and political institution within which religious and political radicalism could flourish. The revolution was beginning to develop its own organs and political language.No Great Tew conversation could halt that development.

Hyde, Whitelocke and the search for peace

Dinshaw does not end his story with Falkland’s death, which makes his account of attempted reconciliation more interesting than a simple elegy ending at Newbury would have been. As Blair Worden notes, Hyde and Whitelocke met during wartime negotiations, including at Oxford and Uxbridge, where Dinshaw portrays them as continuing their attempts to settle. But these negotiations actually reinforce the deeper historical problem. Why did peace repeatedly prove impossible? If civil war resulted principally from misunderstanding or extremist passions, reasonable negotiators ought eventually to have discovered a constitutional formula capable of reuniting the protagonists. Yet every stage of the conflict produced new facts on the ground and new demands.

A settlement had to determine control of the armed forces, religion, parliamentary authority, and the King's position. Behind these questions stood competing conceptions of sovereignty and different social constituencies that the war itself had encouraged to mobilise. The failure of negotiation therefore cannot simply be reduced to inadequate statesmanship. Contradictions progressively consumed the middle position it could not resolve.

Revolution breaks through its moderates.

This was the process that Leon Trotsky, looking back on the English Revolution from the revolutionary struggles of the twentieth century, considered essential. In Where Is Britain Going?, he emphasised the conflict's revolutionary significance and how political leadership passed beyond those initially seeking limited opposition to the monarchy. The history of the 1640s repeatedly confirms this pattern. The Presbyterian leadership sought victory over the King but feared the social and religious forces the struggle released. The Independents pushed further. The military crisis produced the New Model Army. Within the army, political radicalisation increasingly challenged the gentlemen who believed Parliament's victory should end the revolutionary process. Then came the Levellers.

At the Putney Debates of 1647, questions implicit during the initial constitutional conflict became explicit: who constituted the political nation? Did political authority ultimately derive from property or from the people? What political rights did men who had fought for Parliament but lacked sufficient property to qualify for conventional political power possess? Putney's enormous historical significance lies in the fact that the revolution brought into political speech people whose voices had previously been largely excluded from the constitutional arena. This is precisely the world that is not easily seen from Great Tew.

The people enter history.

The Levellers represented one expression of the radicalisation. Their programme of political reform, religious toleration, and substantially enlarged male political participation went far beyond anything the constitutional opposition envisaged in 1640.

Beyond them stood the Diggers, whose challenge went further still. Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down remains indispensable not because every theological radical can be translated into a modern political category, but because Hill grasped something that much subsequent historiography has tried to push back to the margins: once the old structures of authority fractured, groups previously excluded from political discourse began asking questions about property, religious authority and social hierarchy that the parliamentary leadership had never intended to place on the agenda. The revolution opened political possibilities larger than the objectives of those who began the parliamentary struggle. That is what revolutions do.

It also explains why the language of “moderation” must be treated critically. Moderate relative to whom? Moderate in defence of what? From the perspective of the Leveller soldiers who demanded political rights after risking their lives in Parliament's army, restrictions imposed in the name of property and social stability did not constitute political neutrality. The centre was already situated inside a social order.

Clarendon and the memory of revolution

Hyde’s later career as Earl of Clarendon adds significance to the story. His monumental History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England became a foundational interpretation of the revolution. The title itself announced the perspective. What later generations might interpret as revolution appeared, from Clarendon’s standpoint, as rebellion: a rupture of legitimate government, social hierarchy, and political order. Clarendon was far too intelligent an observer to produce simple royalist propaganda. The enduring power of his history comes precisely from its psychological acuity and its understanding of political character. Yet these literary qualities should not obscure the social assumptions organising the narrative.

Clarendon’s hostility to political enthusiasm and mass mobilisation expressed the standpoint of a governing elite traumatised by discovering what could happen when political conflict escaped the established political classes' control. Dinshaw approaches Clarendon critically, rather than taking his retrospective account at face value. John Adamson praises the book for its alertness to distortions in its subjects’ later accounts. But the larger problem remains: Friends in Youth reconstructs an emotional world that is overwhelmingly that of the educated and propertied classes.

We learn what revolution felt like through the eyes of gentlemen who feared losing control of it. Whitelocke is in some respects the more revealing figure because he survived politically through successive revolutionary regimes. His career shows the inadequacy of dividing the period into revolutionaries and conservatives solely by formal allegiance in 1642. He remained Parliamentarian without becoming a social revolutionary. Under the Republic and Protectorate, he held important state positions; John Adamson describes him as a senior legal figure in the English Republic and a Cromwellian confidant.

This career matters beyond personal adaptability. The English Revolution destroyed one political order without abolishing property or creating social equality. Its bourgeois character lay precisely in the contradiction between its revolutionary destruction of essential components of the old political structure and the social limitations that constrained that transformation. The propertied classes required revolutionary methods against the Crown, yet feared the democratic implications of mobilising the lower orders.

Cromwell himself personified this contradiction at a far higher historical level. The force capable of defeating royalism had to be mobilised through religious and political energies that could not subsequently be switched off at will. Hence the revolutionary army could become a political threat to the very property-owning forces whose victory it had secured. The suppression of the Levellers cannot be separated from Parliament's victory. They were contradictory moments within the same bourgeois revolutionary process.

1660 did not turn the clock back

The Restoration therefore did not simply erase the revolution. Charles II returned, but neither the political nor the social world of the 1630s could be reconstructed. The revolutionary decades had transformed relations between monarchy, Parliament, taxation, religion, landed wealth and commerce. The later settlement culminating in 1688–89 would confirm a political order fundamentally more congenial to the development of capitalist property and parliamentary government than the Personal Rule of Charles I had been. This is one reason why interpreting the 1640s exclusively through tragedy is inadequate.

Revolutions are undoubtedly tragic for individuals. They involve violence, dislocation and suffering. But historical judgement cannot stop at registering catastrophe—the enslaved person who rebels causes disorder. The peasant who refuses feudal obligations disrupts established custom. The worker who strikes interrupts economic life. Judging every social struggle primarily by the tranquillity it destroys already adopts the standpoint of the existing order. The English Revolution must therefore be judged not only by what collapsed but by what historical possibilities were created.

Marxism and the bourgeois revolution

The older Marxist interpretation was never as simple as its critics suggested. Karl Marx recognised the seventeenth-century English Revolution and the French Revolution of 1789 as struggles whose significance extended far beyond the political language consciously employed by their participants. The actors might appeal to religion, ancient liberties, or constitutional precedent; nevertheless, the struggles they pursued transformed the conditions of European social development. This distinction between political consciousness and objective historical function is essential.

Hyde did not have to understand himself as defending one configuration of class society for his actions to possess a class content. Whitelocke did not need to imagine himself an agent of capitalist development for parliamentary victory to affect the political environment in which capitalist relations subsequently expanded. Historical materialism asks not simply what people said they were doing, but what social relations made their activity possible and what consequences followed from their victory or defeat. Revisionism often turns the discrepancy between intention and outcome into an argument against social explanation. Marxism sees that discrepancy as one of the central problems historical explanation must solve.

The contemporary appeal of the “moderate”

This brings us back to the remarkable reception of Dinshaw’s book. Readers are not wrong to find parallels between the political divisions of the seventeenth century and those of the present. Indeed, the Guardian review explicitly opened this comparison, linking the appeal of Dinshaw’s subject to more recent experiences of political division. But such analogies themselves require political examination. “Polarisation” has become a preferred category for discussing contemporary political crises. Political conflict appears as a disease of democratic culture. The solution is dialogue, moderation, civility, and rebuilding a political centre. This language excludes the possibility that polarisation itself has objective causes.

Growing social inequality, declining living standards, war, collapsing confidence in established parties and institutions, and widespread hostility towards existing political arrangements cannot simply be explained as failures of civility. A political centre can disintegrate because the social relationships that support it have become unstable. From this perspective, Dinshaw’s reconstruction of the “common world” of Hyde, Whitelocke and Falkland resonates unmistakably today. It presents a lost world of cultivated men who disagree but keep talking, whose tragedy is being overwhelmed by less restrained political forces. The danger lies not in telling their story. It lies in mistaking their story for the revolution's meaning.

The view from Great Tew and the view from Putney

Friends in Youth deserves to be read. Dinshaw's achievement is considerable. He reconstructs a political and intellectual milieu with unusual intimacy and reminds readers that historical actors cannot be reduced to the labels later attached to them. Hyde was more complicated than “Royalist”; Whitelocke more complicated than “Roundhead”. Men who eventually fought on opposite sides could start with overlapping assumptions and still be haunted by the destruction of their earlier friendships. Dinshaw’s strength is that it lets us understand these people from inside their world. But historical explanation must also stand outside that world.

The gentlemen of Great Tew believed civilisation depended upon moderation, learning, hierarchy and conversation among educated men. The revolution demonstrated that England contained other voices and other interests. The distance between Great Tew and Putney is therefore more than geographical. At Great Tew, cultivated members of a narrow elite discussed how England should be governed. At Putney, the political revolution raised a far more disturbing question: who possessed the right to govern England at all? Friendship could not answer that question.

Conclusion: the revolution the moderates could not prevent

A collective loss of political manners did not cause the English Revolution. Neither was it the mechanical product of an economically predestined bourgeoisie marching towards capitalism. It emerged from the interaction of profound social transformation, religious conflict, constitutional crisis, capitalist development, popular mobilisation and the international and British crisis of the Stuart kingdoms. Contingency operated everywhere. But contingency operated inside structures.

The tragedy of Hyde, Whitelocke and Falkland was therefore more substantial than the tragedy of friendship destroyed by political extremism. They represented a political milieu that wanted reform without revolution and resistance without mobilising forces from below. Events repeatedly demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining that position. The revolution advanced because the moderates could neither defeat the King decisively nor restore the old equilibrium. The forces required to win the struggle transformed it. The New Model Army, the Independents, the Levellers and the Diggers did not appear because English political society temporarily forgot the virtues of moderation. They arose from contradictions that moderate constitutionalism could not resolve.

That is why the story cannot end emotionally with the lost civilisation of Great Tew. It must proceed to the army councils, the Leveller petitions, the Putney Debates, the regicide and the republic. Minoo Dinshaw has written a beautifully crafted portrait of men watching their political world collapse. Friends in Youth deserves praise for helping us understand what that collapse looked like from their chambers, libraries, and country houses. But the observer who remains there will misunderstand the revolution.

To understand why the old world collapsed, you must leave Great Tew and Westminster and follow the revolution into London’s streets, the parliamentary army, and the debates at Putney. There artisans, soldiers and men without great property entered a political argument from which the established order had largely excluded them, and asked the question the cultivated moderates could never satisfactorily answer: if ordinary people had fought to determine the future of the kingdom, by what right should political power remain the monopoly of the propertied few? That democratic eruption from below, rather than the disappearance of an “attractive common world” among gentlemen, gives the English Revolution its enduring historical significance.

Bibliography

Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. Various editions.

Dinshaw, Minoo. Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War. London: Allen Lane, 2025.

Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940.

Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Nelson, 1961; later editions.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972.

Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649. London: Heinemann, 1976.

Manning, Brian. 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1992.

Morrill, John. The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650. London: Allen & Unwin, 1976.

Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? 1925.

Whitelocke, Bulstrode. Memorials of the English Affairs. First published 1682; various subsequent editions.

Reviews and contemporary responses

John Adamson, “Lawyers in Arms”, Literary Review, review of Friends in Youth. Adamson describes the work as a major exercise in historical narration, emphasising Dinshaw's discovery of the extent of Hyde and Whitelocke's early friendship and political affinities. [literaryreview.co.uk]

Jackie Eales, review of Friends in Youth, History Today, March 2025. The review stresses Dinshaw's treatment of the Great Tew circle, the parallel legal and political careers of Hyde and Whitelocke, and their developing constitutional disagreements. [historytoday.com]

Andrew Gimson, “Book review: Politics is not just a battle between Cavaliers and Roundheads”, ConservativeHome, 31 January 2025. Particularly useful for assessing the conservative reception of Dinshaw's conception of moderation and the supposedly lost common political culture. [conservativehome.com]

Kathryn Hughes, review of Friends in Youth, The Guardian, 22 January 2025. Hughes focuses on the parallel lives and reluctant divergence of Hyde and Whitelocke, and explicitly places the book in a modern context of political division. [theguardian.com]

Blair Worden, “Long divisions: A friendship broken by war”, Times Literary Supplement, 24 January 2025. Especially valuable as a critical counterweight to the more celebratory notices: Worden identifies both the gains produced by Dinshaw’s close-focus method and the historical problems generated by that restricted perspective. [the-tls.com]