Unfortunately, The book entered a crowded market and was
published before John Morrill’s major work on Cromwell[1].
Like most books on Cromwell Hobson’s resonates today because we still live with
the social and political consequences of the English bourgeois revolution.
Hobson’s books are usually aimed at the general reader but
retain a good academic standard. To his credit, he does not pander to the
latest revisionist historiography. Still, he believes a revolution occurred and
that Cromwell was part of a ruling elite that carried it out.
The book could have done with a better attempt to place
Cromwell in a more objective context. As the great revolutionary Karl Marx once
said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and
personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for
Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795,
the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances
of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under existing
circumstances, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as
they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating
something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary
crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service,
borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present
this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed
language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of
1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the
Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to
parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner,
the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his
mother tongue. Still, he assimilates the spirit of the new language and
expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the
old and when he forgets his native tongue".
To conclude, I would recommend this book. It deserves to be
on every reading list at major universities and deserves a wide read. Hobson is
to be congratulated for his work on this important revolutionary. His books should
be a basic textbook to aid future study.
About the Author
Author James Hobson has written such works as ''Dark Days of
Georgian Britain', 'The English Civil War Fact and Fiction'. Hobson has a
website @ https://about1816.wordpress.com/
[1]
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-letters-writings-and-speeches-of-oliver-cromwell-9780199587889?cc=gb&lang=en&
