Hill was a groundbreaking historian who advocated and
popularised the theory that there was a bourgeois revolution in 1640s England.
Hill was a mass of political and social contradictions, and Braddick had his
work cut out in examining them and placing them in the context of the time.
With his 15 books and dozens of articles, Hill fundamentally changed how we
understood the English Revolution.
Hill influenced how a generation of students and general
readers saw the English Revolution. Although his viewpoint that the events of
the 1640s constituted a revolution has been widely rejected, Braddick will no
doubt establish that many general readers and academics will still have to define
their position on the period in opposition to his analysis.
As I have not seen a copy of Brtaddick’s biography of Hill I
cannot comment too much on it. Hopefully, he has tackled several pressing
issues from Hill’s work and career. One would hope he examines the onslaught he
suffered at the hands of several Conservative and revisionist historians during
the 1980s who rejected the premise that England witnessed a bourgeois
revolution. Perhaps the most important question, and I am a little concerned
that Braddick, who is no radical historian, can answer it, is what was Hill
politically.
As Ann Talbot asks in her excellent obituary of Christopher Hill, “ What any serious reader interested in history or politics wants to know is, when we read Hill’s books, are we reading the work of an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It has to be said that this is a complex question. Not everyone who was attracted to the bureaucratically degenerated Communist Party could be classified with the Webbs. The most gifted and outstanding representatives of the British intellectual elite, whether poets, novelists, scientists, musicians or historians, associated themselves with the Communist Party because the old institutions of church and state had lost their hold over the imaginations of the young while the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.”[1]
I hope Braddick's “judicious “ biography does rescue Hill
for a new generation of readers. I also hope that Braddick’s choice of Verso as
his publisher does not limit the political scope of this book. Verso is the main
Pabloite publishing house. Pabloism has a record of betrayals as long as your
arm. Verso’s role in covering up these betrayals is well documented.
[1]
"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian
Christopher Hill- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
