A Marxist Critique of Peter Gaunt’s The English Civil War: The Essential Readings

Peter Gaunt’s The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (Blackwell, 2000) reveals the ideological evolution of academic historiography at the close of the twentieth century. Marketed as an objective collection of key scholarship, the volume actually demonstrates the profession’s retreat from engaging deeply with the English Revolution as a pivotal point in the shift from feudalism to capitalism. Its editorial choices, essay selection, and underlying assumptions mirror the post-revisionist consolidation that dominated universities in the 1990s—a movement closely tied to the broader political reaction of that era.

Gaunt gathers contributions from major schools: Lawrence Stone's social-change thesis, Christopher Hill’s Marxist analysis of radical Puritanism, John Morrill and Conrad Russell’s revisionist views, and eclectic post-revisionist efforts that blend long-term structural change with revisionists’ focus on contingency and religion. While this seems balanced, the actual equilibrium is achieved only after marginalising Marxism. Hill’s essay is included as a relic of a bygone era, and the reader lacks access to any modern Marxist defences of the thesis of the bourgeois revolution. The revisionists are portrayed not as one side of a debate but as the dominant orthodoxy.

This is not just an innocent editorial choice. The revisionist challenge to the idea of the English Revolution was more than just an academic debate. It reflected the ideology of a bourgeoisie that, facing a deep crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, no longer wanted to remember that it had once seized power through revolutionary violence. The end of the post-war economic boom, setbacks for the working class—from Britain’s miners’ strike to PATCO in the US—the decline of Stalinist bureaucracies, and the breakup of the USSR created conditions where the academy moved away from the concept of revolution. Having previously celebrated its revolutionary history, the bourgeoisie now tried to erase it.

This review highlights that this historiographical approach is not purely academic but also political. The revisionist claim that the Civil War was a “war of religion” rather than a class conflict rests on a methodological error: seeking “chemical purity” in revolutionary alliances. Drawing on Marx, Lenin, and Hill, it’s crucial to show that revolutions are not always socially diverse and should be analysed by the class makeup of participants, not just by outcomes. By this standard, the English Revolution was clearly bourgeois: it dismantled feudal structures, expropriated royalist and church land, established parliamentary dominance, and laid the groundwork for capitalist growth and imperialism. The revisionist attempt to disconnect religion from its material foundations is seen as a step back to pre-Marxist idealism, hiding how Puritanism served as the ideological expression of new bourgeois and commoner ambitions.

The rise of revisionism should be seen in the context of the wider political setbacks from the 1970s to the 1990s, including the collapse of the post-war settlement, defeats faced by labour movements, and the dissolution of the USSR. It suggests that the bourgeoisie, which once celebrated its revolutionary history, is now attempting to erase it. Gaunt’s book is thus viewed as part of an intellectual counter-revolution: a historiographical effort that denies capitalism's revolutionary origins precisely as capitalism faces a profound crisis.

Gaunt’s account accurately documents this retreat. The main argument of revisionists—that the Civil War wasn't purely a bourgeois revolution because people from all classes fought on both sides—is accepted as conclusive. However, this view is based on a flawed misunderstanding of Marxism. No credible Marxist has ever expected revolutions to be perfectly pure. Hill “had read enough Marx and Lenin to know that one could not expect a chemically pure revolution." Neither the French nor the Russian Revolutions were carried out or supported solely by the bourgeoisie or the workers. Revolutions are inherently diverse. The key issue isn't who fought but which class’s interests prevailed.

Based on this perspective, the English Revolution was clearly bourgeois. The end of feudal tenures, the abolition of prerogative courts, expropriation of royalist and church lands, the Navigation Acts, and the rise of parliamentary authority were not about religion—they laid the political and legal groundwork for capitalism. The Restoration and Glorious Revolution did not undo these changes but reinforced them. The revisionist view that the conflict was purely a “war of religion” disconnects ideology from material realities and leans into idealism. Puritanism served as the ideological expression for the rising bourgeoisie and common masses to voice their demands. Viewing religion as an independent causal force reverts to pre-Marxist interpretations of history.

Gaunt’s volume of post-revisionist essays struggles similarly. They try to recognize long-term social and economic changes but reject the revolutionary perspective that links these changes meaningfully. Consequently, the collection becomes a diverse list of phenomena—market growth, gentry mobility, fiscal crises—lacking a dialectical explanation of how these forces triggered a revolutionary upheaval. This balanced approach resembles the “Third Way” politics of the Blair-Clinton period: rhetorically refined, substantively conservative, and ultimately unable to account for significant historical change.

A truly Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution must place it in the context of Europe's widespread feudal crisis during the seventeenth century. It should analyze the dialectical class forces driving the revolution and its boundaries, while also understanding revisionism as a political retreat rather than scholarly progress. Gaunt’s anthology fails to do this. It is only helpful for readers who already have a critical perspective to see beyond its ideological biases.

Twenty years after the book’s publication, the world faces a new capitalist crisis marked by war, pandemic, social division, and the collapse of bourgeois democracy. In these conditions, the focus on revolution reemerges in historical awareness. The English Revolution will be reconsidered not as a mere accident or government failure, but as a significant example of revolutionary overthrow of a decaying social order. When this reevaluation takes place, Gaunt’s revisionist history will be seen for what it truly is: a defensive stance against the Marxist view that history progresses through class struggle.