Saturday 4 April 2020

Conversations With Historians: Christopher Hill



"I think one of the vital qualifications for a historian is to be readable, is to write history which people will read, and is not dry as dust".

Robert Blake

"In a sense, our recordings were almost like a tutorial in reverse, where I interrogated them on why they had come to particular conclusions, and whether they had changed their minds at a later date. "

John Miller

This interview with Christopher Hill (1912-2003) a former Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and leading authority on the English bourgeois revolution was first broadcast on February 1991 on BBC Radio Four for 'Conversations with Historians'. The interviewer is John Miller.

The programme was a product of a "dictum of Jacob Burckhardt". As Miller relates "When producer John Knight and I were planning it we were keen to include a broad cross-section of approaches as well as periods of study. So we were delighted when everyone on our first list accepted the invitation to take part – Lord Blake, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Sir Michael Howard, Lady Longford and David Starkey. As Elizabeth Longford put it, on hearing who else made up the group: 'High Tories to Marxists, with me somewhere in the middle."

One of the things that strike the listener is Hill's tremendous erudition and almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the English revolution.

It must be said Miller was not a hostile interviewer. His questions ranged from the interesting to the mundane.

One of Miller's first question and probably one of his most important was why did Hill study the English revolution? Hill's answer I must admit was a little reticent and defensive. Like most of the historians in the Communist, Party Hill came to study the English revolution through a love of literature.

This was, of course, coupled with an interest in the significant events of his early years. The late 1930s saw the Great Depression. The Moscow Purges in the Soviet Union that saw the mass murder of millions of Communists including the state murder of the entire central committee that had led the Bolshevik revolution. The rise and fall of Italian and German Fascism. While it would have been hard for even the most politically astute person to orientate themselves at this time (Hill was, after all, no great shakes as a political theorist), it is to Hill's credit that he managed to produce such quality and quantity of historical writings on his chosen subject.

Hill's answers to the questions are informative and incisive. They also indicate that Hill had not to any substantial extent revised his previous convictions on the English revolution. He still believed that it was a bourgeois revolution. The older Hill got, the more accurate and precise became his analysis.

The interview begins with Miller attempting some counterfactual questions. Hill quite correctly avoids getting involved in the trap of "what if" school of history.

It is true that Hill in response to Miller's question as to whether a different outcome could have happened if  Charles Ist did things differently he did offer the possibility that a settlement between Parliament and the King which would have given England a constituent monarchy, would have seen Parliament have more say over legalisation, a degree of freedom of the press and toleration of religious groups.

Hill was enough of a Marxist not to rule out the role an individual plays in the historical process. It is clear that the actions of Charles Ist played an integral part in the "long march" towards revolution. His vanity, stubbornness and sheer stupidity played their part, but he was part of a much significant movement of social,  forces. 

As Hill said "Marx himself did not fall into the error of thinking that men's idea was merely a pale reflection of their economic needs, with no history of their own: but some of his successors, including many who would not call themselves Marxist, have been far more economic-determinist than Marx. It seems to me that anybody of thought which plays a major in history – Luther's, Rousseau's, Marx's own takes on because it meets the needs of the significant group in the society in which it comes into prominence".[1]

It is true that the historical process that brought about the English revolution was not predetermined. Hill believed, and his answer to Miller's question expressed his opinion that the revolution and its development could have proceeded in any number of a given number of directions. 

However, in the end, run the material political and economic changes expressed in the revolution would have come out sooner or later, albeit in different forms. Also, the actions of any given character such as Charles 1 or for that matter an Oliver Cromwell represented in distorted constitute the struggle of classes, both characters pursued mutually different but in the end incompatible terms.

Hill expressed in his writings the fact that individuals, classes, even whole parties have socioeconomic interests, and these are sometimes expressed through significant historical figures. But in the end "The breadth and nature of their activity are substantially defined by the laws of the capitalist mode of production".

Some historians have criticised Hill for an overestimation of the political influence of radical groups such as the Levellers or Diggers. It is true that Hill paid substantial attention to the radicals of the English revolution represented by groups such as the Levellers and Diggers and was correct when he said that while these were the most conscious revolutionaries, they were second in importance to Oliver Cromwell as a revolutionary force. At the time of the 1991 interview, Penguin had just re-published Hill's The World Turned Upside Down. Hill's work on the Levellers stands the test of time. He does not overestimates their importance, and he correctly states that in the historical scheme of things the most important revolutionary was not John Lilburne but was in fact, Oliver Cromwell.

Hill justified this by saying that "Some will think that I overemphasise the importance of the defeated radicals at the expense of the mainstream achievements of the English revolution. Yet without the pressure of the Radicals, the civil war might not have transformed into a revolution: some compromise could have been botched up between the gentry on the two sides- a "Prussian path". Regicide and republic were no part of the intentions of the original leaders of the Long Parliament: they were forced on the men of 1649 by the logic of the revolution which they were trying to control."

Hill was accused that he had renounced his Marxist interpretation towards the end of his life, one writer recounted that "Hill gave a talk on radio marking the centenary of the publication of Marx's "Das Kapital". He ended it by recounting how Marx had accidentally come across some former comrades from the 1848 revolutions, many years later. They had become prosperous and one, reflecting on old times, indicated how he felt that he was becoming less radical as he aged. "Do you?" said Marx, "Well I do not."





[1] Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution – Revisited-C Hill