Healey has become one of Britain’s most admired popular
historians, recognised for his “fresh” and “vivid” portrayal of the seventeenth
century. However, the positive reception of his work is deliberate. His
narrative serves an important ideological purpose for today's ruling elite: it
dismisses the English Revolution's revolutionary essence. It presents it as a
period marked by chaos, chance, and constitutional happenstance. This isn’t
just poor history; it constitutes political falsehood.
Healey’s main argument that the English Revolution wasn't
truly a revolution but a “crisis of governance" caused by
miscommunication, local grievances, and the emotional atmosphere of the time —
represents the latest effort in a long-standing attempt to minimise the global
significance of the English Revolution. This approach continues the revisionist
trend begun in the late twentieth century, which aims to dismiss the Marxist
view of the Revolution as the first major bourgeois revolution. Healey’s perspective
reflects a society that has lost faith in its future and, as a result,
struggles to recognise the revolutionary events that shaped its history.
Healey’s opposition to
revolution is based on structural reasons rather than personal bias. He
functions within an academic and political sphere that views revolution as
dangerous, irrational, and destabilising. Consequently, the English Revolution
is seen not as a crucial turning point in capitalism’s development but as a
tragic mistake. This ideological fear is rooted in forty years of political
backlash—such as the decline of the post-war welfare state, the rise of
neoliberalism, the discrediting of social democracy, and the deepening crisis
of global capitalism.
In this context, the concept of revolution—even one that's
been around for three and a half centuries—becomes unacceptable. Healey’s book
isn’t just a historical account; it's a political statement aimed at reassuring
modern readers that neither logical nor structural factors drive revolutions.
Instead, they occur when people are confused, scared, or overwhelmed.
Another weakness—rooted in the ongoing focus on national
history in British historiography—is Healey's neglect to place the English
Revolution within the wider international crisis of the seventeenth century.
This revolution was not an isolated event but part of what Marxist scholars
refer to as the "general crisis of the seventeenth century," a series
of revolutionary upheavals spanning from the Dutch revolt and the Fronde in
France to the Thirty Years' War in Germany.
Although these conflicts appeared in different national
contexts, they all revealed the same fundamental contradiction: the progress of
capitalist productive forces versus the persistence of feudal-absolutist
political systems. The English Revolution was the most successful, largely
because England's capitalist class was more developed than in continental
countries and because it successfully dismantled the absolutist state. The
central message of The Blazing World is that history lacks a clear direction,
class struggle is meaningless, and revolution is a mistake.
The Historiographical Context
To properly evaluate Healey's book, it is essential to
understand the intellectual context it engages with. A significant contribution
by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, discussed in Ann Talbot's detailed
2003 obituary on the WSWS, was to identify the upheavals of the 1640s as
a bourgeois revolution: the overthrow of feudal-absolutist rule by a
burgeoning capitalist class, paving the way for England's later capitalist
growth. Despite his political limitations as a former Stalinist who never fully
embraced Trotskyism, Hill showed that the execution of Charles I, the abolition
of the monarchy and the House of Lords, and the creation of the Commonwealth
were not mere mistakes or temporary anomalies, but a big social change where
one class replaced another in state power.
Starting in the 1970s, a revisionist school led by figures
like Conrad Russell and John Morrill systematically challenged this framework.
They argued that since there was no rising bourgeoisie, a bourgeois revolution
did not occur. According to them, the Civil War was a temporary collapse of the
Tudor-Stuart state, driven by war financing, religious rigidity, and Charles
I's personal failings — a "war of religion," not a class struggle,
nor a revolution. This revisionism was politically motivated. It coincided with
a rightward shift among British intellectuals after setbacks in the 1970s-80s
and the fall of the USSR. It aimed to erase the revolutionary aspects of
English history, paralleling the ruling class's efforts to forget the
revolutionary elements of the twentieth century.
Healey is part of a "post-revisionist" generation
that aims to go beyond sterile denial while avoiding the Marxist categories
discredited by revisionists. His book offers a popular synthesis, attempting to
strike a balance: he describes the period as revolutionary, emphasises the role
of ordinary people and radical movements, and captures the drama and scale of
the events — all without presenting a clear class analysis.
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He also cautiously challenges the revisionist denial,
asserting that a truly revolutionary event took place—one that turned the world
upside down—and that the century saw a fundamental shift in the English state
and society. This serves as a helpful correction for readers who have been
influenced by the revisionist view that the Civil War was merely an unfortunate
accident.
The core issue is that Healey seeks the revolution's
benefits without understanding the class analysis behind it. He enumerates the
observable events—such as the breakdown of censorship, the rise of radical
groups, the king's trial and execution, the founding of the Commonwealth, and
the 1688 Glorious Revolution—yet fails to identify the fundamental problem the
revolution addressed. Healey does not label the English Revolution as a
bourgeois revolution nor systematically examine the class forces that propelled
it.
This isn't just a minor omission; it's the key difference
between merely describing events and truly explaining them. A revolution isn't
just a time of upheaval and change; it is a distinct historical event where
contradictions between the development of productive forces and existing
relations of production — specifically, a rising class clashing with an
outdated ruling class — lead to political and military conflict. The English
Revolution reflected this conflict: a rising capitalist class, allied with parts
of the gentry focused on commercial agriculture and trade, versus a
feudal-absolutist monarchy that aimed to rule without Parliament, impose
arbitrary taxes, and sustain monopolies that hinder capitalist progress.
The Marxist perspective, based on Marx's writings on
primitive accumulation and the English Revolution, argues that the monarchy had
to be overthrown because it hindered the development of capitalist social
relations that had been unfolding within feudal society for over a century.
Cromwell's New Model Army was more than just a military force; as Trotsky
noted, it was the organised political tool of the revolutionary
bourgeoisie—regularly purging Parliament to align with its class interests and
ruthlessly suppressing the Levellers and Diggers when they threatened to extend
the revolution beyond the limits necessary for capitalism to thrive.
Healey, in contrast, presents a revolution lacking a
revolutionary class. He outlines the clash between Crown and Parliament,
religious fervour, popular movements, and the eventual constitutional
agreement—yet the driving force behind these events remains unclear. Why did
these conflicts emerge at specific times, in particular forms, and lead to
certain outcomes? Revisionists, at least, offered a straightforward (though
incorrect) explanation: it was all due to random chance. Healey's
post-revisionist view offers a vivid picture of revolutionary upheaval but
fails to clarify what was being changed, by whom, or for what purpose.
This argument is absurd. The
English Revolution resulted from deep-rooted structural conflicts: the growth
of agrarian capitalism, the expansion of merchant capital, the transformation
of the gentry into a capitalist class, the crisis of feudal institutions, and
the emergence of new political ideas among small producers, artisans, and labourers.
Healey cannot accept this, as doing so would mean acknowledging that the
Revolution was a class struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and the
declining feudal system, rather than merely a chaotic crisis. Instead, he
reduces class to vague notions like “ordinary people,” “local grievances,” and
“messy complexity.” This isn’t analysis; it’s avoiding the real issues.
The Levellers, Diggers, and Fifth Monarchists—the most
progressive democratic movements of their time—are now seen merely as colourful
footnotes. Their agendas, which reflected the developing political awareness of
the rising working class and petty producers, are dismissed as curiosities rather
than viewed as vital expressions of historical development. Healey’s account is
thus not just incomplete but also ideologically distorted.
Cromwell Without History
Healey’s depiction of Cromwell highlights his method by
portraying Cromwell as a conflicted character troubled by doubt, fear, and
religious concern. Rather than examining his political decisions through the
lens of class struggle, Healey attributes them to psychological factors. This
aligns with the liberal tendency to reduce historical figures to individuals,
stripping away class context and explaining behaviour in terms of personal
traits. Nonetheless, Cromwell was more than an individual; he represented a
segment of the bourgeois class—the agrarian bourgeoisie—aiming to overthrow
feudal absolutism. To fully grasp his actions, it is essential to consider this
wider class framework. Consequently, Healey’s Cromwell is a fictitious figure:
a person without class, a leader without a social foundation, a historical
actor devoid of history.
The Revisionist Tradition and Its Political Purpose
Healey is part of a tradition
of revisionists such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky, all
of whom aim to challenge the Marxist view of the English Revolution. His
approach is especially influential because it is more accessible, making
revisionist ideas more widely understood. The political goal of revisionism is
evident.
To deny the origin of
revolutions from structural contradictions, the role of class struggle in
history, the agency of the working class, or the revolutionary rupture through
which capitalism emerged is to reject fundamental Marxist ideas. Revisionism parallels
neoliberalism by viewing history as accidental, politics as gradual, and
revolution as unjustified. Healey’s book thus goes beyond historical debate; it
participates in a wider ideological campaign aimed at diminishing awareness of
historical forces.
The Marxist perspective
remains clear in opposition to Healey’s liberal distortion. The English
Revolution was: a bourgeois revolution paving the way for capitalist growth; a
class struggle between the emerging bourgeoisie and the feudal aristocracy; a phase
of radical popular action in which subordinate classes articulated independent
political agendas; and a pivotal event that significantly influenced the
evolution of modern capitalism. This revolution was neither accidental nor
chaotic, nor driven by fear or confusion. Instead, it was the inevitable result
of deep structural contradictions within English society.
Healey and the Politics of
Historical Amnesia
The Blazing World is
a readable, engaging, and in important respects welcome contribution to the
popular historiography of seventeenth-century England. Its willingness to call
the period revolutionary is a partial break from the revisionist orthodoxy that
has impoverished historical understanding for decades. But it is a break that
stops halfway. Healey has restored the drama without restoring the analysis. He
has given us a revolution without a revolutionary class, upheaval without
explanation, transformation without a motor force.
The result is a book that can
satisfy neither the serious student of history nor the politically conscious
worker seeking to understand the dynamics of social revolution. The former will
find too much description and too little explanation; the latter will find a
revolution stripped of the very class content that makes it relevant to the
struggles of the present. For a genuinely scientific understanding of the
English Revolution — its class character, its driving forces, its achievements
and its limits — one must return to the Marxist tradition that Healey's
post-revisionist framework cannot accommodate: the work of Hill at his best,
and beyond Hill to the classical analyses of Marx, Engels, and Trotsky, who
grasped that the execution of a king by his subjects was not a misunderstanding
but a world-historical act of class struggle.
