In his first
book, God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, Brodie Waddell uses a
combination of genre, "cultural turn" and "history from below"
to explain the complex changes in the economy and politics of late Stuart
England. However, the book offers a much watered-down version of both. Suffice
to say Waddell rejects previous Whig And orthodox Marxist teleologies.
Waddell's particular
brand of people's history historiography is heavily influenced by historians
who came from the Communist Party Historians Group. One of their many
contributions to the study of Early Modern England was the historiographical
genre "history from below" or 'people's history'. The influence of E P Thompson's book the Making of the English
Working Class is palpable.
Thompson's book
and his other major works have a common theme in that they tend to obscure the
class character of rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders by regarding
them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition.
Whether
Waddell understands or cares where his influences come from is open to question,
but as Ann Talbot writes, People's history was an attempt to give some
historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front.
The
historians inside the CPHG were guilty in one form or another of this political
crime. Historians like David Parker have played down the influence of the
Soviet Communist Party on the historians inside the CPHG. According to Parker
the British Marxists were not "imprisoned in a straight jacket –either
economistic or Stalinist-from which they later escape". This is a very
generous evaluation. Parker would appear to operate a form of political
blindness on this matter.
Despite
being Waddell's first book, he has a significant body of work inside and
outside academia. His blog contains numerous articles based on people's history
genre. In 2013 along with other likeminded historians they held an Online
Symposium titled "The Future of History from Below": Waddell along
with over twenty like-minded historians recently announced on the blog[1]
a follow up the online symposium, 'The Voices of the People'. The series of
articles will further examine the history from below genre.
While this
is an extremely useful exercise, I have several reservations. One is that at no
time has an orthodox Marxist historian been invited to contribute to the
subject and secondly none of the essays examine the political origins of the
genre in any great detail.
The revival
of the history from below genre seems to coincide with a growing
dissatisfaction amongst some historians and the wider public with capitalism.
It cannot be a coincidence that we have over the last six years witnessed the
near-collapse of the capitalist system and growth of social inequality unprecedented in over a century and seen the rise of a new form of history from
below historiography.
Like a large
number of revisionist historians today Waddell sets out in his introduction a quite considerable task of seeking to overturn large swathes of the previous
historiography on his chosen subject. However, his criticism of previous
Marxist and Whig historiography gives succour to more conservative revisionist
historians.
Waddell concedes
that for a substantial part of the twentieth century early modern
historiography in Britain and internationally has been dominated by a disparate
number of historians who in one way or another profess to be Marxist or Marxist
influenced. As Tom Leng points out "notions of early modern social change
have been informed by a series of teleological transitions–from feudalism to
capitalism, community to society, and so on".[2]
It is
debatable how much Marx and Engels Waddell has read, but his book does not
present their writings in any great detail. He does not agree with their
politics or historiography. In his book and his blog, he rejects the notion
that early modern society can be best understood as a transition from feudalism
to capitalism.
I believe
the book would have benefited from a closer study of Marxist methodology. In
fact, like most modern history books Waddell's is very light on methodology.
While not directly concerning the material in the book Engels work on the
family would have given us a deeper insight into the lives of "ordinary
17th-century people, as Engels noted "According to the materialistic
conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the
production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again,
is twofold. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of
articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that
production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the
propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a
particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both
kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and
of the family on the other".[3]
Waddell
rejects Engel's historical materialistic outlook. He instead leans heavily on
the work of E. P. Thompson whose work for too long has been described as
Marxist. Despite borrowing a few phrases or quotes from Marx or Engels Thompson's
work is a negation of orthodox Marxism.
Terms like "moral
economy" have been presented as a sort of Marxist analysis. The term "moral
economy" has usually been attributed to Thompson. However, it was the
Russian economist Alexander Chayanov who first expounded on this idea in the
1920s.
Waddell's
book relies heavily on Thompson's "moral economy", but no matter how
you try you wrap it up Thompson's theoretical mess, it has nothing to do with
any Marxist concepts or methodology. Waddell tends to separate what people
thought about religion, duty and community from the significant economic
changes that took place in the seventeenth century. Waddell like Thompson
rejects the relationship between base and superstructure.
As one
reviewer put it "Waddell does not claim to be an expert on new forms of
economic development that came about during the later Stuart period. In the
latter half of the book, Waddell details the activity of the people. He cites
numerous strikes, protests, and communal actions that took place across England
between 1660 and 1720. Due to his political blindness, these events cannot be
placed in relation to their political or social context. His tendency to
separate base and superstructure means his observations are superficial at best
and are treated only as manifestations of a more general sense of collective
identity and agency."
This
separation between base and superstructure has become the hallmark of several
historians that write on the history from below genre. Despite being labelled
as out of date and unfashionable what Marx wrote on base and superstructure is
as relevant today as when it was written :"In the social production of
their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are
independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to
a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The
totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of
social, political, and intellectual life".
"It
is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with
the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing
in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they
have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces,
these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social
revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to
the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such
transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material
transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be
determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political,
religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge
an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a
period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from
the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations
of production".[4]
While
Waddell correctly points out in the book that the lives of working people in
early modern England, were to a degree influenced by the economic changes
taking place after the revolution. But he rejects the premise that their social
being determined their consciousness.
Again the
book would have benefited from Marx's analysis in The German Ideology: "The
production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly
interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the
language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men,
appear at this stage as the direct afflux from their material behaviour. The
same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics,
laws, morality, religion, and metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of
their conceptions, ideas". [5]
Despite its
shortcoming on the methodology, the book does have merit. It is to Waddell's
credit that in order to present his ideas, he uses a wide range of sources, low
priced pamphlets, Sermons, songs, broadsides. The books show his extensive use
of archival sources such as court records, guild and company records, and
parish registers.
The book is
divided into three sections, and each examines the concepts in the title, God,
duty, and community. One problem encountered by Waddell is the paucity of
records that enable us to have a good idea of how "ordinary" people
viewed the religious developments and how they impacted on economic life.
It is clear
that during the English revolution traditional religious beliefs started to
receive a beating as David north points out "Until the early seventeenth
century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate
answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to
be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been
slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus's De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt a death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not
yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and
the political structures that rested upon it, was well underway.[6]
Waddell can
reject Marx, Tawney and even Weber all he likes but evidence point to large
sections of society both poor and rich alike sharing similar if not the same
attitude towards God and to some extent property.
To conclude,
despite calling for a new approach to historical research, much of Waddell's
ideas have been developed already by a body of writers and historians who
advocated a "cultural turn". Like many "new" approaches
Cultural Studies started life as an attack on revolutionary Marxism, It is
hoped that Waddell's future work does not too far down this road.
[1] https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/
[2] https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38233
[3] The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H.
Morgan preface to the First Edition, 1884
[4] Marx, Karl (1977). A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers:
Notes by R. Rojas.
[5] German Ideology, 1.c. p.
13-4.
[6] Equality, the Rights of
Man and the Birth of Socialism By David North 24
