More than half a century after Christopher Hill's pioneering
studies restored the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters to the historical stage,
the struggle over the meaning of the English Revolution remains unresolved.
Indeed, it has intensified. Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early
Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context, a collection of essays
arising from a 2006 conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London,
reflects the continuing efforts of a generation of historians to redefine,
fragment and ultimately neutralise the revolutionary content of the most
profound social upheaval in seventeenth-century England.
The volume edited by Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan
contains valuable archival research and several worthwhile contributions. Yet
taken as a whole, it exemplifies a broader tendency in contemporary
historiography: replacing social conflict, class interests, and revolutionary
transformation with a language of discourse, contingency, and context. The editors
ask whether the term "radical" can legitimately apply to movements
and ideas associated with the English Revolution. Behind this seemingly
semantic dispute lies a more fundamental question: whether the English
Revolution can still be understood as a revolution.
The editors begin by surveying three major historiographical
approaches to radicalism. The first, identified with Conal Condren and Jonathan
Clark, is the nominalist position. Since neither "radical" nor
"radicalism" possessed their modern political meanings in the
seventeenth century, these historians object to their retrospective
application. The implication is that historians should employ only categories
available to contemporaries themselves.
This position is untenable. Historical analysis necessarily
employs concepts unavailable to historical actors. If historians were
prohibited from using categories developed after the events they describe,
concepts such as feudalism, capitalism, absolutism and even the Renaissance
would disappear from historical scholarship. The nominalist approach reduces
history to antiquarianism, replacing explanation with the mere cataloguing of
language.
The second approach, traditionally dominant before revisionism's
rise, treated radicalism as a substantive phenomenon. Although divided between
liberal and Marxist interpretations, both schools regarded the English
Revolution as a decisive turning point in social and political development.
Whether understood as the foundation of constitutional liberty or as a
bourgeois revolution driven by class conflict, radical movements mattered
historically because they emerged from broader processes of social
transformation.
The third approach, now dominant and broadly endorsed by the
editors, is the functional definition associated with J.C. Davis, Jonathan
Scott and Glenn Burgess. Here radicalism is defined not by specific social
content but by its relationship to contemporary norms. Any idea or movement
challenging established assumptions may be considered radical. Radicalism thus
becomes entirely relative to context.
At first glance, this position appears more flexible and
sophisticated than either traditional liberal or Marxist interpretations. In
practice, however, it evacuates radicalism of all historical substance. The
Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, Ranters and republicans become isolated
phenomena linked only by their deviation from prevailing conventions. The
social forces that produced them disappear from view.
This framework shapes much of the volume. Several essays
offer important empirical insights. Mario Caricchio's study of the publisher
Giles Calvert reconstructs the network of radical religious writers clustered
around his Black Spread Eagle bookshop in London. Nicholas McDowell explores
the literary and theological influences that shape religious radicalism, while
Noam Flinker examines the Ranter Abiezer Coppe's use of Midrashic methods.
Jason Peacey's contribution investigates royalist pamphleteering during the
civil wars and shows that defenders of established authority could appropriate
apparently radical language.
Yet throughout the collection the relationship between ideas
and social interests remains curiously absent. Peacey's observation that
royalist propagandists employed radical rhetoric does not demonstrate that the
revolution lacked social foundations. It demonstrates only that
counterrevolutionary forces sometimes sought to exploit popular grievances for
their own purposes. The distinction is significant.
Some of the strongest chapters point toward conclusions more
profound than those permitted by the editors' theoretical framework. Stefano
Villani shows that contemporary Italian observers often interpreted English
events as a conflict between social orders rather than merely a constitutional
dispute. Jim Smyth's study of republican imperialism traces the ideological
assumptions underpinning Cromwell's conquest of Ireland, revealing the
relationship between republican government and colonial expansion. These
chapters suggest that contemporaries themselves often perceived dimensions of
social conflict that many modern historians are reluctant to acknowledge.
The collection becomes more problematic when viewed within
the wider historiographical campaign against Christopher Hill and the Marxist
interpretation of the English Revolution. Hessayon's own essay on Gerrard
Winstanley is not objectionable in itself. His emphasis on Winstanley's
religious development usefully reminds readers that the Digger leader emerged
from a world saturated with theological assumptions. Serious historians have
never denied this fact. Certainly Christopher Hill did not.
But Hessayon has repeatedly advanced a broader critique of
Hill, accusing him of selective use of evidence and of projecting modern
concerns backwards into the seventeenth century. Such criticisms form part of a
wider revisionist assault associated with J.C. Davis's Fear, Myth and
History and Alastair MacLachlan's The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary
England. These works challenge not merely particular interpretations of
radical movements but the legitimacy of conceiving the English Revolution as a
revolutionary process at all.
The tendency reaches beyond purely scholarly concerns.
Hessayon's review of Edward Vallance's A Radical History of Britain was
notable less for its assessment of the book than for its warnings about
providing "ammunition" to contemporary extremists. Vallance correctly
responded that the review seemed more preoccupied with present-day politics
than with his work's contents. Such episodes are revealing. The issue is not
simply whether Hill occasionally overstated connections between historical
movements. The deeper objection concerns whether past popular struggles might
retain political relevance today.
Nevertheless, Marxists cannot respond by uncritically
defending every aspect of Hill's legacy. The Communist Party Historians'
Group's achievements were immense. Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A.L.
Morton, E.P. Thompson and others transformed British historical scholarship by
recovering the experiences of ordinary people and insisting upon the centrality
of social conflict. Their work represented a major advance over conservative
political history.
Yet the political conditions under which it emerged shaped
this historiography. The Communist Party of Great Britain's embrace of the
Popular Front following the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in
1935 encouraged the search for a specifically national democratic tradition. As
historians such as Philip Bounds have noted, British Communists increasingly
emphasised an indigenous line of radical development stretching from the
Peasants' Revolt through the Levellers and Chartists to modern labour
movements.
This framework produced important historical discoveries. At
the same time it encouraged a nationalist conception of historical development
in which class conflict was often subsumed within a broader narrative of
"the English people" advancing democratic traditions across the
centuries.
This approach's weaknesses became apparent as political
conditions changed. Because the radical tradition was often presented as a
transhistorical national inheritance rather than a product of specific social
relations, the political spectrum could appropriate it. Appeals to the
Levellers and Chartists have since appeared not only among socialists but among
populists and nationalists of various political persuasions.
A genuinely Marxist approach proceeds differently. Marx and
Engels regarded the English Revolution as the first great bourgeois revolution
in European history. It represented neither the awakening of an eternal
democratic tradition nor merely a collection of competing religious discourses.
It was a struggle rooted in profound transformations of property relations and
state power.
The Levellers and Diggers were not embryonic socialists. Nor
were they dissenting voices within a discursive field. They represented the
aspirations of social layers whose demands exceeded what the emerging bourgeois
order could accommodate. Their defeat stemmed not from defective rhetoric or
from a failure to construct convincing ideological narratives. It resulted from
the revolution's objective limitations and the balance of class forces that
emerged in its aftermath.
Leon Trotsky grasped this essential point in Where Is
Britain Going? Writing in 1925, he insisted that Cromwell's revolution
belonged to the working class's political inheritance because it demonstrated
the necessity of revolutionary methods to break the resistance of an obsolete
ruling order. For Trotsky, the English Revolution's historical significance lay
not in a continuous radical tradition but in the dynamics of revolutionary
struggle.
From this standpoint, the deficiencies of Varieties of
Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context
become clear. The collection allows radicals to exist only after detaching them
from the social forces and historical processes that produced them. They become
localised expressions of difference, stripped of broader historical
significance.
There is much valuable scholarship in these essays. Readers
will learn a great deal from the contributions of Smyth, Villani, Caricchio,
and several others. Yet the volume ultimately remains confined within the
assumptions that have dominated English Revolution studies since the rise of
revisionism in the 1970s and 1980s.
The English Revolution was not merely a clash of languages
or competing discourses. It was a social revolution whose consequences shaped
the development of capitalism, empire and the modern state. Any serious
assessment of seventeenth-century radicalism must begin from that fundamental
reality.
Revisionism has enriched our knowledge of detail. It has not
provided a viable alternative understanding of the revolution itself. A renewal
of historical materialist scholarship, freed from both revisionist scepticism
and the nationalist distortions inherited from Popular Front historiography,
remains an urgent intellectual task.
Selected Bibliography
Bounds, Philip. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and
Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.
Davis, J.C. Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the
Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical
Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972.
Hill, Christopher (ed.). The Law of Freedom and Other
Writings of Gerrard Winstanley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
Hessayon, Ariel and David Finnegan (eds.). Varieties of
Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
MacLachlan, Alastair. The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary
England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History.
London: Macmillan, 1996.
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1843-44).
Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? London: New
Park Publications, 1975 [1925].
Vallance, Edward. A Radical History of Britain:
Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries, the Men and Women Who Fought for Our
Freedom. London: Little, Brown, 2009.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism:
A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London: Verso, 1991.
Wood, Neal. The Social History of Political Theory.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
