James Harrington and the Bourgeois Republic: A Polemical Reassessment

James Harrington, born in January 1611, holds a unique and revealing role in the intellectual history of the English Revolution. Unlike Levellers, Diggers, or advocates for social equality, he was a prominent theorist of the rising gentry—the class that overthrew the old monarchy but was wary of social change extending beyond property rights. Despite his background, Harrington offered a profound insight: that "political power flows from property," highlighting the crucial link between landownership and political authority.

This single sentence, stripped of its republican veneer, reveals a truth that bourgeois political science has long tried to hide. Harrington recognised that the English Revolution was not merely a conflict between a tyrant and his rivals but a reflection of a deep shift in land ownership. The dissolution of monasteries, the sale of crown estates, and the gradual decline of feudal tenures all changed the economic foundation of English society. The monarchy did not fall simply because Charles I was stubborn; it collapsed because its economic base had eroded. As Harrington explained, “The cause lay in the soil, in who owned it and who worked it.”

This was a significant breakthrough. Harrington recognised, even if imperfectly, that political structures originate from property relations. Marx later acknowledged him—quite dryly, in a footnote—as one of the “imaginative” thinkers who had seen the link between economic systems and political authority. While Harrington did not yet see property as a social relation of production, but rather as a thing to be allocated, he nevertheless understood enough to reject the conspiratorial explanations popular at his time.

The Gentry’s Republic

Harrington’s materialism was confined to the interests of his class. He was a thinker for the gentry, not the common people. His well-known “agrarian law,” which set caps on land holdings, was more about safeguarding existing power than promoting equality. It aimed to block the return of a landed elite that could threaten the republic. Harrington sought to halt the revolution at the stage where the property-owning middle class had already gained control.

The lower orders—the copyholders, the landless labourers, the urban poor—were excluded from political life. Harrington’s commonwealth was not a democracy; it was a constitutional mechanism for stabilising the rule of property owners. His elaborate system of rotation, indirect elections, and the separation of debating from voting was designed to prevent factional domination, but equally to prevent the masses from exercising political power. It was republicanism for gentlemen.

This was the core contradiction of the English Revolution. The Levellers and Diggers derived much more radical conclusions from the same assumptions. If political authority is tied to property, then true democracy would demand the elimination of property distinctions. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers recognised this so clearly that it scared both Cromwell and the propertied republicans. In contrast, Harrington aimed to stop the revolution right at the start of social change.

Harrington, Winstanley, Milton, Spinoza: A Comparison of Revolutionary Thought

The English Revolution and the broader seventeenth-century crisis sparked the emergence of a group of political thinkers whose ideas are closely linked to the social classes they represented. Harrington, Winstanley, Milton, and Spinoza were not merely detached intellectuals; they embodied the specific interests of different social groups and reacted to the decline of feudalism alongside the rise of bourgeois society. Their differences extend beyond ideas—they are fundamentally rooted in material circumstances, reflecting the evolving conflict over property arrangements. Comparing them dialectically reveals how each thinker sheds light on a particular aspect of a transitioning world, while also being limited by their class perspectives.

Harrington: The Gentry’s Materialist

Harrington marks a turning point in modern political science by recognising that “political power flows from property.” He saw the English Revolution not as a conflict of personalities, but as a reflection of changes in landownership. His republicanism represented the ideology of a rising gentry class aiming to secure its newfound dominance. He was the first to systematically connect property distribution with political structure, offering a proto-materialist view of the revolution: “The cause lay in the soil, in who owned it and who worked it.” His constitutional ideas sought to prevent oligarchic reassertion, but his agrarian law prioritised protecting property over promoting equality, excluding the propertyless from political participation. He aimed to halt the revolution at the point where gentry power was solidified. Consequently, Harrington is viewed as an early theorist of bourgeois republicanism—knowledgeable but ultimately limited by class interests.

Winstanley: The Proletarian Prophet of the Revolution

Harrington voiced the ambitions of the gentry, while Gerrard Winstanley expressed the nascent awareness of the modern working class. The Diggers were more than just agrarian communists; they were the first political movement to follow Harrington’s premise logically. If power correlates with property, then democracy must mean the abolition of private property. Their radical materialism was rooted in the lived experience of dispossession and envisioned common ownership, anticipating socialist ideas. They critiqued both monarchy and bourgeois republicanism as forms of class control. Historically, their ideas were premature because the productive forces had not yet advanced enough to support a society beyond private property. They also lacked a clear organisational strategy to challenge the army and the state effectively. Winstanley embodies the revolutionary strain that the English Revolution could not fully realise. He is the negation of Harrington, representing the voice of those excluded from the gentry’s republic.

Milton: The Intellectual of the Revolutionary Bourgeoisie

Milton’s stance is complex and somewhat contradictory. Unlike Harrington, who defended property, or Winstanley, who was a communist, Milton was a poet-theorist representing the revolutionary bourgeoisie. He championed liberty, opposed tyranny, yet was ultimately reluctant to challenge the sanctity of property. His republicanism, rooted in human dignity and reason, strongly critiqued monarchy as both a spiritual and a political form of oppression. He envisioned liberty beyond narrow constitutional limits, yet maintained his republican ideals, aligned with the interests of educated, propertied citizens. Milton hesitated to accept the Leveller and Digger proposals that challenged property relations. His idea of freedom was more individualistic than social. In this way, Milton occupies a middle ground between Harrington and Winstanley: more progressive than Harrington, but less radical than Winstanley. He embodies the most idealistic phase of the bourgeois revolution.

Spinoza: The Continental Counterpart—Materialism Without Revolution

Spinoza, writing in the Dutch Republic, faced a different social context but dealt with similar contradictions. His political philosophy is the most philosophically detailed among the four, though also the most removed from immediate revolutionary action. It is based on a profound materialism grounded in natural necessity rather than divine command. He advocates for democratic participation as an expression of collective rationality and recognises that freedom is inseparable from the conditions that enable it. His materialism remains philosophical rather than rooted in history. Unlike Harrington, he did not see property as a key factor in shaping political systems. His democratic theory assumes social stability, which seventeenth-century England lacked. Thus, Spinoza can be seen as the philosophical counterpart to Harrington: both are materialists, but Harrington’s focus is on class struggle, whereas Spinoza’s is on metaphysics.

The Bourgeois Legacy

After the monarchy was restored in 1660, Harrington’s ideas did not vanish; they went underground and later influenced the radical Whig movement and shaped the American and French revolutions. However, class restrictions persisted. The American republic, grounded in Harringtonian ideas of balanced government and property-based citizenship, was constructed on slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and a constitution—Madison openly acknowledged—that aimed to safeguard the interests of the “opulent minority” against the majority.

Harrington’s republicanism thus served as a key ideological basis for bourgeois rule: a political system that claims equality but is supported by deep economic inequality.

Why Harrington Matters Today

We revisit Harrington not due to curiosity about history, but because his identified contradiction has become most apparent. The accumulation of wealth among a global financial elite has weakened bourgeois democratic institutions. Elections are bought, legislatures are controlled, and the state operates as the capitalist class's executive arm. The fundamental myth of bourgeois republicanism—that political equality can exist alongside significant economic inequality—has broken down.

Harrington’s strength was demonstrating that this fiction was fundamentally false. Political structures are linked to property relations, and a society dominated by capital will create a state that benefits capital.

Beyond Harrington: The Socialist Resolution

Harrington was unable to conclude what history called for due to the limitations of his era. While he recognised that property influenced power, he did not believe that democracy necessitated abolishing private control over the means of production. This insight would come only with the rise of the modern working class and the theoretical contributions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. The English Revolution resulted in a republic dominated by property owners; in contrast, the socialist revolution aims to establish a republic of cooperative producers. Only by the working class gaining political control, dismantling the bourgeois state, and socialising the means of production can the contradiction Harrington observed be resolved.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Harrington, James. The Commonwealth of Oceana. London, 1656.
Winstanley, Gerrard. The Law of Freedom in a Platform. London, 1652.

Secondary Sources

Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I. London: Penguin Classics, 1976.
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso, 2002.
Holstun, James. Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London: Verso, 2000.
Hammersley, Rachel. The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

John Morrill, Bourgeois Historiography, and the Marxist Question of the English Revolution

Professor John Morrill’s inaugural Barry Coward Memorial Lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Birkbeck Early Modern Society, was by any measure an impressive scholarly performance. Morrill is one of the most accomplished historians of the English Revolution working today, and his five‑volume edition of Cromwell’s writings — supported by a substantial Leverhulme grant — will now become the definitive textual resource for future scholarship. His tribute to Barry Coward was warm, sincere, and entirely fitting.

But Morrill’s lecture, and the monumental editorial project, also expose the deeper limits of contemporary Cromwell studies. It reveals a historiographical method that is technically rigorous yet politically anaemic; a scholarship capable of restoring Cromwell’s words with unprecedented precision while leaving the social and class content of the English Revolution fundamentally untouched.

From a Marxist perspective, Morrill’s method exemplifies the wider trend in bourgeois historiography: focusing on textual precision and individual agency, which masks the revolutionary forces of the 1640s and the social classes that shaped Cromwell. This essay presents a summary of Morrill’s lecture alongside a Marxist critique of its underlying historiographical approach.

Morrill’s Project: Restoring Cromwell’s Voice

Morrill has produced a much-needed scholarly project: a detailed, critically edited collection of Cromwell’s speeches and writings. Current editions—Carlyle’s romanticised 1845 compilation and Lomas’s 1904 revision—are full of errors, missing details, and editorial changes. Morrill’s team of eight editors produced the most accurate text yet by examining all manuscripts and printed editions, aiming to eliminate two centuries of inaccuracies.

The example he offered — two versions of Cromwell’s speech opening the Barebones Parliament highlights the issue. A 1654 version refers to “the day of the power of Christ,”. In contrast, a later edition softens this to “a day of the power of Christ,” subtly transforming Cromwell from an apocalyptic prophet to a devout statesman. Morrill contended that these modifications add up to a significantly changed perception of Cromwell. The project is undoubtedly valuable, as it aims to provide scholars with the most precise texts of Cromwell ever compiled. However, ensuring textual accuracy does not necessarily mean that the historical understanding will be equally precise.

The Fetish of Accuracy: A Technical Solution to a Political Problem

Morrill’s lecture consistently focused on the importance of “accuracy.” He pointed out Carlyle's carelessness, Lomas's slight improvement, and Abbott's strong ideological stance. Morrill’s edition aims to address these issues. However, this focus on textual precision reveals a broader methodological belief: that understanding Cromwell depends on finding his “true” words. This approach reflects scholarly obsession — the idea that the authentic sentence will reveal the genuine Cromwell.

A Marxist perspective emphasises the importance of class struggle in understanding Cromwell’s words. Whether he referred to “the day of the power of Christ” or “a day” is less important than analysing the social forces behind his speech. The key questions are: what social interests motivated Cromwell’s language, and how did it serve revolutionary goals? Morrill’s method falls short because it views Cromwell’s speeches as isolated entities, ignoring their role as ideological expressions shaped by class interests.

Cromwell as a Figure Re‑Made to Suit Ruling‑Class Needs

Morrill recognised that each century has its own version of Cromwell—whether Carlyle’s Victorian hero, Abbott’s proto-fascist leader, or the moderate constitutional figure of the mid-century—each reflecting the ideological needs of its time. However, Morrill did not explore the deeper implication: Cromwell’s image is not merely misinterpreted but is intentionally constructed as a political tool. Bourgeois historiography repeatedly reimagines Cromwell to reinforce the ideological foundations of the modern British state. From a Marxist perspective, Cromwell cannot be viewed as a timeless “great man.” Instead, he must be seen as the political representative of an emerging bourgeois class whose interests called for the dismantling of feudal absolutism, the creation of a national market, the consolidation of capitalist property, and the suppression of plebeian democratic movements. This is the version of Cromwell that bourgeois historiography refuses to acknowledge—and thus remains invisible.

Against Revisionism: The Bourgeois Evasion of the English Revolution

For over forty years, "revisionist” Civil War scholarship has held sway in the British academic world. It claims to be objective, fact-based, and opposed to Whig history. However, it is actually the most politically cautious interpretation ever used to analyse the English Revolution. Its main accomplishment has been to undermine the idea of revolution itself—instead portraying a major historical turning point as merely a collection of local conflicts, religious feelings, and personal miscommunications.

Revisionism’s approach is straightforward: break down, remove politics, and dissolve distinctions. While earlier thinkers viewed history as a revolutionary clash between social orders, revisionists see only “multiple kingdoms,” “local contexts,” and "parish politics." Where Marxists highlight the rise of the bourgeoisie and the fall of feudal absolutism, revisionists claim class is “anachronistic,” “over-systematised,” or simply “not evident in the sources.” Similarly, movements like the Levellers and Diggers, originally seen as democratic and proto-communist, are reinterpreted by revisionists as “pressure groups,” “agitators,” or “political minorities.”

The outcome is a historiography where events lack intentional causes, especially social ones. The English Revolution appears as a chain of accidents. Cromwell is seen as a man responding to crises. The New Model Army is viewed as a disciplinary issue. Ireland is considered a tragic misunderstanding. Radicalism is dismissed as mere noise. This is not genuine scholarship; it is ideological suppression.

Revisionism appeared in the late 20th century, coinciding with the British academy's move away from social history, class analysis, and materialist views. It presents a reassuring story: the Civil War was not a revolution but just a “war of three kingdoms.” Its participants are seen not as representatives of social forces, but as individuals driven by religious differences. Its conclusion is not the end of feudalism but just a constitutional adjustment. Essentially, revisionism rejects the revolution to dismiss its repercussions.

It cannot acknowledge that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It cannot acknowledge that Cromwell was the political instrument of a rising class. It cannot acknowledge that plebeian movements represented the unfulfilled democratic content of the struggle. It cannot acknowledge that revolutionary violence was structurally necessary.

Instead, it presents a Cromwell who is psychologically nuanced but socially insubstantial, a Parliament that is complex in structure yet devoid of class distinctions, and a revolution that paradoxically isn't truly a revolution. This is why revisionism has become so appealing to the modern academy: it sanitises history. It strips away the explosive elements of the 1640s—the overthrow of monarchy, the mobilisation of people with low incomes, the rise of democratic calls, and the development of capitalist social relations—and substitutes a politically neutral mosaic of “contexts." A Marxist critique pierces through this illusion. The English Revolution was not a mistake, nor a local crisis, nor a religious conflict. It was the first major bourgeois revolution, and its contradictions—its radicalism, violence, and repression of democratic forces—mirror the conflicting interests of the class driving it. Revisionism fails to recognise this because it cannot accept it. Its goal isn't to explain the revolution but to diminish its significance.

Ireland and the Politics of Sanitisation

The most insightful part of Morrill’s lecture focused on Ireland. He highlighted uncertainties in casualty numbers, questioned the reliability of Cromwell’s letters, and noted Parliament’s tendency to "tidy up” his words. He carefully differentiated between civilians killed in combat and those killed after surrender. While this stance of meticulous neutrality seems objective, it serves a political purpose by diverting attention from the underlying reality: the Irish campaign was an element of the brutal consolidation of a new bourgeois state.

The Drogheda massacre—regardless of how its details are reconstructed—was not merely a tragic mistake. It was a calculated act of terror executed by a revolutionary force whose triumph depended on dismantling the ancient Irish order. Morrill’s approach, by emphasising textual uncertainty, downplays the revolutionary violence central to the English bourgeois revolution.

Morrill’s approach exemplifies the broader shift towards revisionism in Civil War historiography. This perspective critiques the traditional Whig narrative of constitutional progress, replacing it with an equally ideological focus on local grievances, religious sensitivities, and individual agency. It breaks down the revolution into a series of contingencies, interprets class struggle through cultural anthropology, and views Cromwell as a psychologically intricate individual managing crises. Instead of seeing the revolution as driven by material forces, it portrays it as a patchwork of personal decisions. Conversely, a Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell was not merely contingent but a necessary outcome—shaped structurally by the decline of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

The Erasure of Radical Movements

A key aspect of Morrill’s historiography is how it downplays radical movements. Levellers, Diggers, and Army agitators—the democratic and proto-communist groups of the 1640s—are only seen as “pressures” on Cromwell, not as independent class movements driven by their own historical logic. Cromwell’s suppression of these groups is viewed as political prudence, not as a reflection of his role in defending property and supporting the “gentlemen Independents." This approach is not objective scholarship; it reduces plebeian politics to mere background noise, ideologically diminishing their significance.

The Cleaned Portrait Without the Canvas

Morrill concluded his lecture with a metaphor: Cromwell is like a Great Master painting that takes on a new life when cleaned and restored. The metaphor is insightful—Morrill restores the portrait but leaves the canvas untouched. The Cromwell he depicts is precise in text but stripped of political context, portraying him as a man of conscience rather than a revolutionary. A Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell’s significance lies not in his personality but in his role as the military and political representative of a rising bourgeoisie, both triggering and holding back revolution. Morrill’s approach cannot uncover this deeper, class-based understanding of Cromwell because it doesn't address the class dynamics of the English Revolution.

Morrill’s edition will be invaluable, providing the most precise collection of Cromwell texts to date. However, it won’t answer the fundamental question Morrill asked: What do we truly know about Oliver Cromwell? To truly understand Cromwell, we must grasp the class forces that drove him to power, the economic changes that enabled the revolution, the social tensions that influenced his religious rhetoric, and the historical necessity that positioned him as the figurehead of a rising bourgeois class. Achieving this understanding requires a Marxist analysis—an approach that the bourgeois academy has largely avoided for decades. Morrill’s project cleaned the portrait. It will not reveal the painter.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources on Revisionism

Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Journal of Modern History. A foundational critique of revisionist approaches, surveying Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Paul Christianson, and others.
Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629. Oxford University Press, 1979. A key text in the revisionist dismantling of long-term social explanations.
Russell, Conrad. The Origins of the English Civil War. Macmillan, 1973. The central revisionist statement rejecting class-based interpretations.
Morrill, John. The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650. Longman, 1980 (orig. 1976). A major revisionist work emphasising localism and provincial grievances.
Sharpe, Kevin (ed.). Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History. Oxford University Press, 1978. A revisionist collection emphasising political culture over social structure.
Christianson, Paul. “The Causes of the English Revolution: A Reappraisal.” Journal of British Studies 15:2 (1976), 40–75. A revisionist attack on Marxist and Whig causal frameworks.
Ashton, Robert. The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603–1649. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. Often grouped with revisionists for its scepticism toward long-term structural causes.

Responses to Revisionism

Hexter, J. H. “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England.” Journal of Modern History 50:1 (1978), 1–50. A rebuttal defending structural and ideological explanations.
Hill, Christopher. “Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 100–124. A Marxist counter-argument emphasising popular mobilisation.
Rabb, T. K. “The Role of the Commons.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 55–78. A critique of revisionist minimisation of parliamentary radicalism.
Hirst, Derek. “The Place of Principle.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 79–99. A defence of ideological and principled motivations against revisionist reductionism.

Marxist and Social-Historical Works

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972. The classic Marxist study of Levellers, Diggers, and plebeian radicalism.
Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. Lawrence & Wishart, 1940. Foundational Marxist interpretation of the revolution as a bourgeois upheaval.
Bernstein, Eduard. Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution. Allen & Unwin, 1930. A pioneering Marxist analysis of radical democratic and proto-communist movements.
Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. Heinemann, 1976. A major social-history rebuttal to revisionism, emphasising class mobilisation.
Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 2006. A detailed study of radical class forces suppressed by Cromwell.
Shaw, A. L. The Levellers. Longman, 1968. A key study of democratic radicalism within the New Model Army.

Historiographical Context

Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Journal of Modern History. Essential for situating revisionism within broader historiographical debates.
Rosenberg, John S. “Toward a New Civil War Revisionism.” Journal of Modern History. Although focused on the American Civil War, it provides a comparative framework for understanding revisionist cycles in national historiography.

Cromwell, Restored: A Marxist Critique of the New Oxford Edition of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell

This extensive three-volume collection — comprising 1,077 documents carefully gathered over years by nine editors — is more than a scholarly achievement. It serves as a challenge in the ongoing ideological debate about the significance of England’s only revolution. For centuries, Cromwell has been co-opted, sanitised, and reinterpreted by those in power to hide the revolutionary aspects of the events he was part of.

This edition, by returning to Cromwell's actual writings and statements, pierces through the ideological haze and confronts the true historical forces of the seventeenth century: class conflict, religious radicalism as a sign of social upheaval, and the complex figure of Cromwell himself, who represented both the revolutionary overthrow of the old regime and the constraints of the rising bourgeoisie. This isn’t just about fixing footnotes; it’s about reclaiming the English Revolution from two centuries of distortion.

The Manufacture of a Bourgeois Cromwell

Jackie Eales demonstrates that the version of Cromwell familiar to popular memory is mostly a construct from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The commonly cited 'warts and all” comment—often used as evidence of Cromwell’s supposed modernity—is in fact an eighteenth-century fabrication. Similarly, the well-known quip dismissing the Rump Parliament, “you have sat too long here... in the name of God, go!”, is not from the seventeenth century; it is a 1940 parliamentary remark by Leo Amery, aimed at Chamberlain, and taken from Carlyle’s 1845 edition.

Carlyle played a crucial role in shaping this ideological reconstruction. His edition, once seen as definitive, was created with considerable liberty — including reworded sections, added commentary, and even forged documents. Nonetheless, Carlyle’s portrayal of Cromwell evolved into the archetype for Victorian liberalism — portraying Cromwell as an early parliamentarian, a constitutional moderate, and a revolutionary whose actions could be seen as the nascent stages of bourgeois democracy.

Cromwell and the Manufacture of a Usable Past

Few figures in English history have undergone as prolonged an effort of ideological redefinition as Oliver Cromwell. This redefinition has never been purely academic; since the eighteenth century, it has served as a political tool: transforming a mid-seventeenth-century revolutionary leader into a figure that suits the agendas of subsequent ruling elites. The new Oxford edition of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell—comprehensive and rigorously faithful to the original documents—presents a direct challenge to this longstanding mythmaking. It urges us to view Cromwell not through the lens of Victorian liberalism nor as a caricature by twentieth-century reactionaries, but as a complex reflection of a society in the midst of revolutionary change.

To understand why Cromwell has been so frequently rewritten, it's essential to consider the nature of the English Revolution itself. Marxist theory describes it as a bourgeois revolution expressed through religious means: the overthrow of feudal absolutism by a rising class whose ideological language was still tied to theology. The social forces that dismantled the monarchy, abolished the House of Lords, and executed Charles I could not clearly articulate their goals in secular, materialist terms. Instead, they relied on concepts of providence, divine reformation, and divine judgment. Cromwell, as the most skilled military and political leader of this movement, exemplified its contradictions: acting as a revolutionary, yet justified by divine providence; being radical in destruction but conservative in settlement.

Later generations found this complexity unacceptable. The ruling elite after 1688 needed a genealogy that supported its constitutional legitimacy. The English Revolution, with its regicide and republican experiment, was seen as an embarrassment—too radical, violent, and overtly destructive of monarchy. Cromwell had to be softened. The process began in the eighteenth century through anecdotal invention and culminated in the nineteenth century with Carlyle’s extensive yet biased edition of Cromwell’s writings. Carlyle’s Cromwell differed from the original documents; he was portrayed as a Victorian moral hero—characterful, sincere, and an early Liberal ideal. Carlyle altered passages, added commentary, and even included forged documents to craft a Cromwell who could be seen as an ancestor of bourgeois constitutionalism.

This was mythmaking used to reinforce class dominance. The revolutionary Cromwell—who saw regicide as divine will, dissolved parliaments when they opposed him, and prioritised divine commands over constitutional norms—did not align with Britain's stable parliamentary system in the 19th century. Therefore, a new figure resembling Cromwell needed to be created: one who could be represented as a pioneer of modern liberty instead of a destroyer of the old order.

The twentieth century introduced its own distortions. During crises, Cromwell was frequently reinterpreted. Leo Amery’s 1940 attack on Chamberlain, with its faux quote "in the name of God, go!”, was not a genuine historical remark but a political tool. Cromwell was portrayed as a symbol of parliamentary strength, invoked to defend the constitutional order that his revolution had momentarily overturned. Meanwhile, reactionary historians crafted the opposite myth: portraying Cromwell as a proto-fascist dictator and a forerunner of modern tyranny. Both narratives catered to current agendas and obscured the real historical figure of Cromwell.

The new Oxford edition clearly departs from previous traditions by meticulously assembling the documents, thereby reestablishing Cromwell's role within the revolutionary crisis that shaped him. The Cromwell presented here is neither a liberal hero nor a fascist villain but a figure influenced by the class forces of his era. His religious language is not indicative of personal eccentricity but represents the ideological framework through which the revolutionary bourgeoisie interpreted its struggles. His political actions—such as military victories, dissolutions of parliament, and constitutional experiments—mirror a class trying to dismantle feudal power while simultaneously fearing the radical potential of the popular forces that contributed to that transformation.

Ireland: The Colonial Violence of the Bourgeois Revolution

Victorian mythmaking never fully captured the history of Cromwell’s 1649 Irish campaign, and the new edition resists sanitisation. The documents affirm what Irish memory has always recognised: Drogheda and Wexford were massacres, not mere battle excesses. Resistance had already ceased before civilians and soldiers were killed. This exposes the limitations of the bourgeois revolution—while it toppled the English monarchy, it also carried out a colonial war marked by extreme brutality. The rising English bourgeoisie, fighting for political power domestically, also pursued imperial dominance internationally. The ideas of providence and a divine mission provided a convenient justification for the material reality: the expansion of English capitalism. Victorian liberalism could not accept this, and twentieth-century parliamentarianism avoided it altogether. The new edition does neither; instead, it restores the record to its full, uncomfortable clarity.

Why does this matter? Because historical mythmaking is never innocent. The transformation of Cromwell into a constitutional moderate was part of a broader ideological project: the rewriting of the English Revolution as a precursor to the stable parliamentary order that followed. This narrative obscures the revolutionary nature of the seventeenth century, erases the class struggle at its core, and transforms a moment of genuine social rupture into a comforting origin story for bourgeois rule.

Restoring Cromwell to history—stripped of Carlylean invention, Victorian sanitisation, and twentieth‑century distortion—is essential for understanding the English Revolution on its own terms. It reveals a society in transition, a class overthrowing feudal power, and a leader whose actions cannot be understood outside the revolutionary dynamics that shaped them.

What the Documents Reveal: Revolution in Religious Form

The Cromwell depicted in the documents isn't the hero from Carlyle or the caricature of a proto-fascist dictator from the twentieth century. Instead, he is a more historically tangible figure: a revolutionary shaped by the tensions of a society shifting from feudalism to capitalism. Cromwell’s use of religious language was more than mere decoration; it was the ideological language through which the revolutionary bourgeoisie and their allies understood their fight. When Cromwell spoke of his early life as being amid spiritual “darkness,” or saw victories at Marston Moor, Dunbar, and Worcester as divine acts, he was expressing—using the only vocabulary at his disposal—the awareness of a class breaking away from the old order but struggling to articulate its goals in secular, materialist terms.

This is exactly why it is historically incorrect to try to link Cromwell to the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. He justified regicide as divine justice, contemplated the crown in spiritual terms, and prioritised God's will over constitutional norms. Therefore, transforming him into a Whig predecessor ignores the revolutionary essence of his actions. The editors’ success lies in reestablishing Cromwell as a product of the revolutionary crisis—complex, providential, radical, and closely connected to the class forces he led.

Why Accuracy Matters: Reclaiming the Revolution

Correcting Carlyle’s distortions isn't just antiquarian fussiness; it's essential for reclaiming the true story of the English Revolution from bourgeois historiography. Each phase of Cromwell’s mythmaking—whether Walpole’s anecdote, Carlyle’s editorial choices, or Amery’s wartime rhetoric—served to reshape him to fit the ideological needs of the ruling class. As a result, Cromwell has been depicted variably as a democrat, tyrant, patriot, or proto-liberal, depending on the prevailing narrative.

The new edition breaks that cycle. It forces us back to the seventeenth century, to a revolutionary crisis whose central figure was neither a secular constitutionalist nor a simple despot, but a man formed by — and inseparable from — the religious, social, and class upheaval of his age. To understand Cromwell is to understand the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution in religious form — radical in its destruction of feudal power, limited in its inability to transcend the ideological frameworks of its own class.

Priced at £190 per volume, this edition will primarily reside in university libraries. It features dense annotations and formidable scholarship. However, its importance extends well beyond its expected audience. By removing two centuries of ideological distortions, it repositions Cromwell within the revolution that shaped him—a complex figure marked by contradictions, providence, ruthlessness, and a tendency to resist sanitisation. For scholars of the English Revolution, it is essential. For those interested in how ruling classes craft influential narratives of the past, it offers profound insights.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

Cromwell, Oliver. The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Vols. I–III. Ed. Andrew Barclay, Tim Wales, John Morrill, Elaine Murphy, Micheál Ó Siochrú, Jason Peacey, Joel Halcomb, Patrick Little, and David L. Smith. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Carlyle, Thomas. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations. Chapman and Hall, 1845. (Important chiefly as an example of nineteenth‑century editorial intervention and mythmaking.)
Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Painting in England. 1762–71. (Source of the invented “warts and all” anecdote.)
Amery, Leo. House of Commons Speech, 7 May 1940. (Origin of the modern “in the name of God, go!” line falsely attributed to Cromwell.)
Rushworth, John. Historical Collections. 1659–1701. (Contemporary documentary material on the Civil Wars and Interregnum.)
Thurloe, John. A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe. 1742. (Key administrative and diplomatic papers from the Protectorate.)

Secondary Sources: Cromwell and the English Revolution

Modern Scholarship

Morrill, John. Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Longman, 1990. (Essential for understanding Cromwell’s religious-political worldview.)
Eales, Jackie. “The Myth of Cromwell.” History Today, Vol. 73, No. 3 (2023). (Concise account of the invention of Cromwellian myths.)
Peacey, Jason. Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2013. (On the ideological construction of political figures in the 1640s–50s.)
Reid, Kirsten. Cromwell’s War Machine: The New Model Army and the Revolution. Manchester University Press, 2021.
Ó Siochrú, Micheál. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. Faber & Faber, 2008. (The definitive account of Drogheda and Wexford.)
Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford University Press, 2002. (A comprehensive political narrative.)
Smith, David L. Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Marxist and Materialist Historiography

Marx, Karl. “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany.” 1851–52. (Foundational analysis of bourgeois revolutions; relevant for framing the English case.)
Engels, Friedrich. The Peasant War in Germany. 1850. (On the ideological forms of early bourgeois revolutions.)
Hill, Christopher.

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972.
God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Penguin, 1970.
The English Revolution 1640. Lawrence & Wishart, 1940. (Hill remains indispensable for understanding the class dynamics and ideological contradictions of the revolution.)

Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 1991. (A class analysis of the revolutionary process.)
Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650. Verso, 2016. (On the popular forces whose pressure shaped Cromwell’s actions.)
Callinicos, Alex. The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. Bookmarks, 1983. (Useful for framing bourgeois revolutions within Marxist theory.)

Mythmaking, Ideology, and Historical Memory

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1983. (Framework for understanding Cromwell’s later ideological reconstruction.)
Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Penguin, 2001. (On imperial ideology; relevant to Cromwell’s Irish campaign.)
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. University of Chicago Press, 1980. (Useful for analysing how figures like Cromwell are constructed in cultural memory.)
Kelsey, Sean. “The Death of Oliver Cromwell.” Historical Journal, 1999. (On the political uses of Cromwell’s image after 1658.)

Archival and Documentary Collections

British Library Manuscripts (Thurloe Papers, State Papers Domestic).
National Archives (SP 18, SP 25, and Interregnum administrative records).
Bodleian Library (Carte Manuscripts; Rawlinson MSS).
Cambridge University Library (Morrill Papers; Cromwellian correspondence).

Suggested Further Reading for Marxist Analysis

Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. 1930. (For comparative revolutionary dynamics and the dialectic of leadership and class forces.)
Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso, 1974. (On the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe.)
Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653

Against Antiquarianism: A Critique of Margaret Willes’s The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn

Margaret Willes’s The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn exemplifies more than just a flawed book; it highlights a broader intellectual decline in modern historiography. A retreat from social analysis characterises this decline, the abandonment of class as a key historical category, and the transformation of history into a refined part of the heritage industry. Willes’s work serves as yet another instance of a widespread trend in academia and publishing—portraying history as a lifestyle rather than an analytical discipline.¹

The book’s premise is simple: Pepys and Evelyn were curious individuals and keen observers of Restoration England, with diaries that provide charming glimpses into a vibrant era. While this follows the typical bourgeois-antiquarian pattern, it is also historically unjustifiable.

Pepys and Evelyn lived “through and after the greatest social upheaval England had ever experienced.”² They were not mere floating personalities in a timeless Restoration scene. Instead, they were actors—though minor—who revealed much in the aftermath of the English bourgeois revolution. To dismiss them as eccentric hobbyists, as Willes does, undermines their historical significance and reduces the Restoration to a depoliticised space of wigs, gardens, coffee houses, and domestic trivia. This shift is more than an interpretive mistake; it is an act of ideological shaping.

The Academic Abdication: Class Removed, Revolution Denied

Modern historians have mostly set aside the Marxist ideas that once fuelled serious research on the 17th century. Today, Christopher Hill’s work—often seen as outdated by many scholars—still stands as the only comprehensive framework for understanding that era. Hill showed that the mid-17th-century crisis dismantled one social class’s dominance and installed another.³ This is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of historical fact.

Yet Willes, like her peers, writes as though the English Revolution never occurred. The Civil War becomes background noise. The Commonwealth is reduced to a curiosity. The Restoration is treated as a return to normality rather than a class compromise forced upon a frightened bourgeoisie. The Glorious Revolution is barely acknowledged as the culmination of capitalist consolidation.⁴ This is not ignorance. It is avoidance.

Pepys and Evelyn: Not Curiosities, but Class Representatives

Pepys was not a gossiping flâneur. He was a bureaucrat of the capitalist state. His diary is saturated with the machinery of empire—shipbuilding, naval contracts, colonial administration. As the accompanying document notes, this was “the apparatus of a nascent capitalist state projecting its power across the globe.”⁵ Pepys’s rise through the Admiralty reflects the increasing importance of administrative competence in a society transitioning from feudal personal rule to capitalist state rationality.

Pepys exemplifies what Ellen Meiksins Wood has described as the “political form of capitalist social relations,” in which the early modern state becomes increasingly central to the organisation of economic life.⁶ His diary reveals the emergence of bureaucratic rationality, contract management, and logistical planning—key features of the developing capitalist state.

Evelyn was more than just a gentleman gardener; he was an innovative scientist whose Sylva was created to fulfil the navy’s timber needs. His interests in pollution, architecture, and horticulture mirrored the bourgeoisie's rationalist ideals. As a Royal Society member, he played a key role in shaping bourgeois science. Engels recognised this well: contemporary science arose from the breakdown of the medieval worldview under the pressure of capitalist progress.⁷ Willes perceives the Royal Society as a charming assembly of inquisitive individuals, reflecting the commonplace liberal view. However, in actuality, the Society served as a tool for maintaining class dominance. Its focus on empirical research, experimentation, measurement, and progress aligned with the interests of a growing capitalist elite. Fields such as navigation, metallurgy, ballistics, forestry, and colonial mapping were not merely genteel hobbies but the technical backbone of capitalist growth.⁸ To present the Royal Society as an apolitical intellectual salon is to falsify its historical function.

Bourgeois Antiquarianism: The Ideology of Contemporary History Writing

Willes’s book exemplifies “bourgeois antiquarianism.”⁹ This is not simply a methodological flaw; it is an ideological stance. It is the refusal to acknowledge that history is shaped by class struggle. It is the displacement of social conflict by personality, of revolution by anecdote, of material forces by domestic interiors.

The World Socialist Website (WSWS) has criticised this trend repeatedly, most recently in its appraisal of Lucy Worsley, whose work “consistently displaces class antagonism, economic crisis, and mass political struggle, fixating on monarchs, courtiers, domestic interiors and historical cosplay.”¹⁰ Willes belongs to the same school: history as entertainment, history as escapism, history as depoliticised spectacle. This is not accidental. It reflects the ideological needs of the present bourgeois order, which seeks to naturalise itself by erasing the revolutionary processes that created it.

The Academic and Media Establishment: A Catalogue of Evasion

Let us speak plainly. The contemporary historical establishment has abandoned the English Revolution. It has abandoned class analysis. It has abandoned materialism. It has abandoned the very concept of historical causality. Worsley’s output—generously funded, heavily promoted, and ever-present—embodies the essence of bourgeois-antiquarian kitsch. As the WSWS pointed out, her work repeatedly shifts focus away from class conflict, economic crises, and large-scale political struggles, instead emphasising monarchs, courtiers, domestic settings, and historical cosplay.¹¹ Willes’s book belongs to precisely this tradition: history as costume drama. Other historians follow a similar path. One being David Starky.

Starkey’s extensive career has centred on the idea that history is primarily shaped by monarchs, courtiers, and individual personalities. He is widely known for his disdain for social history. His impact has been damaging, as he contributed to fostering an intellectual climate where a book like Willes’s could be published without shame.¹² Antonia Fraser’s Restoration biographies are elegant but politically vacuous. They treat the 17th century as a theatre of personalities rather than a battleground of classes. Her approach has shaped public expectations of the period, encouraging precisely the depoliticised reading Willes reproduces.¹³ Simon Schama stands out as the most polished in the group, but his work ultimately portrays a liberal-bourgeois narrative that highlights continuity, compromise, and national identity. His perspective on the English Revolution is somewhat vague and sentimental, and it sidesteps class analysis.¹⁴ He has helped normalise the idea that the Revolution was a cultural moment rather than a social rupture.

These historians are not purely neutral chroniclers but ideological architects. Their influence has cultivated a cultural setting in which the English Revolution is either minimised or overlooked, thereby enabling Pepys and Evelyn to be seen as charming eccentricities rather than as representatives of a burgeoning class consolidating its authority.

The shift from viewing history as heritage is more than a cultural trend; it’s a political move. When historians avoid addressing class issues, they make the past incomprehensible and the present fixed. This creates a world where social conflicts vanish, revolutions are unthinkable, and the bourgeoisie seems timeless. Pepys and Evelyn become mere charming curiosities instead of symbols of a class whose victory transformed England and established modern capitalism. Willes’s book isn’t just lacking; it reflects a wider intellectual surrender.

Restoring History to History

It is time to say openly what many historians privately acknowledge: the field has been intellectually captured by a bourgeois‑antiquarian sensibility that is hostile to social analysis and allergic to class. The English Revolution has been domesticated. Pepys and Evelyn have been trivialised. The Restoration has been aestheticised.

A Marxist critique restores what Willes and her peers omit: class, revolution, contradiction, and the emergence of the capitalist state. Pepys and Evelyn were not eccentric diarists. They were functionaries and intellectuals of a class consolidating its power after a revolutionary upheaval.

Their diaries are not curiosities. They are instruments of history. Contemporary historians who refuse to confront this reality are not writing history. They are producing ideology.

Footnotes

For the concept of “heritage history,” see Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry (London: Methuen, 1987).
Previous Draft, p. 2.
Christopher Hill, The English Revolution 1640 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), 7.
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967).
Previous Draft p. 3.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1999).
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1883).
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Previous Draft p. 4.
WSWS, “Lucy Worsley and the Politics of Heritage History,” accessed 2024.
Ibid.
See David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2002).
Antonia Fraser, King Charles II (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).
Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The British Wars 1603–1776 (London: BBC Books, 2001).

The Restless Republic: A Restorationist Fable for the Present Crisis

Anna Keay’s The Restless Republic offers a lively account of Britain from 1649 to 1660. Still, beneath its refined language, it reveals a strong ideological stance: the suppression of the revolutionary aspects of the English Civil War and Interregnum. Keay writes not as an independent scholar but as a longstanding member of Britain’s heritage sector—“she writes from within the institutions that exist to manage and curate Britain’s official historical memory”—and her book aligns closely with the political goals of those institutions.

Her framing reveals a clear bias. The title, The Restless Republic, depicts the Interregnum as a pathological deviation — a nation unable to "settle" — suggesting it was a temporary disruption in the natural order. The subtitle, Britain Without a Crown, emphasises absence, implying that monarchy is the default state of political life and that its absence is a cosmic mistake. This approach is not objective history but ideological signalling.

The Revisionist Orthodoxy Repackaged for a Popular Audience

Keay’s work aligns well with the post-revisionist consensus that has dominated academic history since the 1970s. Revisionists like Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Kevin Sharpe systematically challenged the Marxist interpretation put forward by Christopher Hill. Their core argument, now widely accepted, is that “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie” and that the Civil War was mainly an avoidable mistake, resulting from Charles I’s political errors.

Keay presents this orthodoxy confidently, as if she has never needed to defend it. Her story focuses on elite figures — Cromwell, Lambert, Monck, and the Rump — whose actions are seen as the main causes of history. The mass movements from below — the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists — are shown only as interesting side notes or annoying disruptions. The class forces behind the revolution are ignored. This is intentional. It serves the ideological purpose of revisionism: to diminish the English Revolution's revolutionary significance and portray it as merely a constitutional debate among aristocrats.

Keay vs Hill: Two Histories of the English Revolution, Two Visions of Britain

Anna Keay and Christopher Hill differ not just in their academic specialities but also in their perspectives on history: one emphasises Britain’s heritage institutions, while the other aligns with Marxist and revolutionary ideas. Comparing Keay and Hill illustrates that discussions about the English Revolution also reflect broader debates on Britain’s political identity and future.

Keay functions within Britain’s official historical memory framework; she writes from within the institutions that exist to manage and curate Britain’s official historical memory.” Her positions at English Heritage and the Landmark Trust place her directly in the system responsible for preserving, interpreting, and showcasing the national history to the public.

Hill was a Marxist historian influenced by the mid-twentieth-century intellectual movements, including the workers’ movement, anti-imperialist struggles, and global revolutions. He viewed the seventeenth century not as a mere heritage but as a conflict zone of class interests. In contrast, Keay’s perspective is conservative, focused on institutions, and seeks to restore traditions. Meanwhile, Hill’s outlook is revolutionary, grounded in materialist analysis, and internationalist.

Keay’s framing is notably negative. Her title, The Restless Republic, depicts the Interregnum as a period of instability, unrest, and a nation out of sync. The subtitle, Britain Without a Crown, highlights what is missing — the monarchy — suggesting that the natural order has been temporarily halted. In contrast, Hill’s framing is more positive. He views the 1640s–1650s as the first significant bourgeois revolution in European history. The execution of Charles I is seen not as an accident but as a pivotal historical event that marks a fundamental break. “When the people execute their king… it has a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past.” While Keay perceives absence, Hill perceives emergence. Where Keay sees chaos, Hill recognises transformation. What Keay considers an interlude, Hill interprets as a revolution.

Keay’s narrative centres on elite figures—Cromwell, Lambert, Monck, and the Rump—while the common people are hardly more than background noise. The Levellers and Diggers are seen as curiosities rather than main actors. This approach exemplifies the revisionist view: history is shaped mainly by elite misjudgments, constitutional crises, and personal conflicts.

Hill’s work reestablishes agency among the masses, illustrating how the rising bourgeoisie, agrarian capitalists, and the “middling sort” challenged the feudal nobility. He highlights the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, and radical sects as manifestations of broader social forces unleashed during the revolution. Hill emphasises that understanding the English Revolution requires recognising the central role of class struggle. While Keay depicts England ruled from above, Hill depicts an England transformed from below. Keay inherits the revisionist dogma that the Civil War was essentially avoidable — a tragic accident caused by Charles I’s political incompetence and the breakdown of the “ancient constitution.”

Hill completely rejects this view. He sees the Civil War as the inevitable result of a deep social change: the emergence of capitalist relations within a collapsing feudal system. For him, the conflict was not accidental but a fundamental clash between two incompatible modes of production. While Keay views the Civil War as a constitutional failure, Hill considers it a necessary revolution.

Keay views the Restoration of 1660 as a return to rationality — a re-establishment of the natural order following a period of risky experimentation. This aligns with the classic Whig perspective: Britain’s strength lies in moderation, continuity, and steering clear of continental extremes. Conversely, Hill considers the Restoration a political compromise. The monarchy was reinstated, but only on conditions that maintained the core achievements of the revolution — primarily safeguarding bourgeois property. The old regime was not simply restored; it was made subordinate. Keay’s Restoration symbolises a homecoming, whereas Hill’s version is a settlement enforced by victorious social forces.

Keay’s work, like much of established historiography, plays a political role: to erase Britain’s revolutionary roots and promote the myth of peaceful, gradual change. As your document highlights, this tradition spans from the late seventeenth century through Macaulay to the present day. Trotsky’s critique of Macaulay also applies to Keay: “vulgarises the social drama… with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial.” Hill’s work takes a different stance: to emphasise the revolutionary nature of the English Revolution, to bring class struggle back to the forefront, and to link the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century with the socialist revolution of the future. Keay’s history offers comfort; Hill’s history invites challenge.

What Keay Cannot Admit: The Revolution Was Real.

The Marxist analysis, shaped by Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and Hill, views the 1640–1660 events as Europe's first major bourgeois revolution. Keay cannot accept this because it would mean recognising that Britain’s modern state emerged not gradually but through a break—marked by civil war, regicide, and the overthrow of feudal absolutism.

Charles I's execution was not merely a mistake but a historic act: “when the people execute their king after a solemn trial… it has a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past." Consequently, no monarch remained securely on the throne until the late 19th century.

This act was driven by deep social forces. The growing bourgeoisie—merchants, capitalist farmers, and the “middling sort”—faced a feudal nobility whose economic base was deteriorating. The Civil War wasn't just an internal elite dispute but a class struggle, with emerging economic forces dismantling the old political power.

The revolution sparked mass movements whose demands exceeded the cautious goals of the gentry. The Levellers called for democratic rights and the end of aristocratic privileges. The Diggers claimed the earth as a “common treasury.” Radical sects foresaw a complete overhaul of the social order. Cromwell harshly suppressed these movements—not because they lacked relevance, but because they threatened to push the revolution beyond the boundaries needed for capitalist property relations. This is the true drama of the English Revolution. Keay’s narrative fails to include it.

The Restoration Myth and the Sanitisation of Britain’s Past

Keay’s book continues a long tradition of sanitising Britain’s revolutionary origins. Since the late seventeenth century, the ruling class has preferred to frame its legitimacy around the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688—a peaceful palace coup—rather than the turbulent events of the 1640s. Macaulay, a prominent Whig historian, turned the revolution into a comforting myth of steady, peaceful progress. As Trotsky noted, “Macaulay vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes.”

Keay modernises this tradition for the twenty-first century. The Interregnum is depicted as a tumultuous, unsuccessful experiment and a cautionary tale against radical shifts. The Restoration is seen more as a return to rationality rather than merely a political compromise that safeguarded the core achievements of the revolution, especially the preservation of bourgeois property. Her book isn't mere crude propaganda; rather, it functions more subtly as an institutionally embedded narrative that renders revolution unthinkable by concealing it.

Why This Matters Today

The debate over how to interpret the English Revolution is more than just academic; it reflects a wider ideological campaign against the very idea of revolution. The revisionist shift of the 1970s happened alongside the suppression of workers' struggles, the rise of postmodernism, and a move away from class analysis. Disputing the occurrence of a bourgeois revolution in seventeenth-century England is akin to denying the proletarian nature of 1917—it essentially removes revolution from history.

Keay’s book is a well-crafted addition to this topic. It reassures readers that radical breaks are deviations, that it is elites who shape history, and that overthrowing oppressive systems is neither essential nor beneficial. The goal isn’t to dismiss Keay’s work but to uncover its ideological underpinnings. The English Revolution should be recognised as a crucial moment in global history—a bourgeois revolution whose contradictions and successes highlight the route toward the socialist revolution, an ongoing goal of our era.

Jonathan Healey and the Liberal Falsification of the English Revolution

Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World is more than just a flawed book; it functions as an ideological effort to undermine historical understanding, oversimplify class conflict into basic stories, and portray revolution solely as chaos. It reflects a declining liberal order that fears revolution because of its fear of the working class.

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.

Having said that, Healey's book has notable strengths. It vividly narrates the era's social history for general readers. The Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and Quakers—the remarkable surge of radical ideas and working-class activism that Hill helped restore—are thoroughly discussed. Healey emphasises that the 1640s and 1650s were more than elite disputes; they marked a time when ordinary men and women began to think and act in radically new ways, challenging not just the monarchy but the entire social hierarchy. The title, borrowed from Margaret Cavendish's 1666 utopian book The Blazing World, highlights Healey's focus on the creative and intellectual fervour during the political upheaval.

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.

Michael Braddick’s Christopher Hill: A Biography That Evades the Central Political Truth

Michael Braddick’s Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian appears at a time when bourgeois academia is gradually withdrawing from the study of revolution. Unsurprisingly, though it remains politically significant, Braddick’s biography does not address a crucial aspect of Hill’s intellectual journey: his deep and ongoing connection to Stalinism, which shaped his achievements, limitations, and contradictions. Any biography that ignores this truth cannot truly explain Hill, and Braddick’s work seems deliberately constructed to overlook it.

The International Committee of the Fourth International has historically set the Marxist framework essential for understanding Hill’s development. Ann Talbot’s 2003 review, “These the times … this the man,” is arguably the most insightful analysis of Hill’s work and political progression. It forms the crucial basis for evaluating Braddick’s biography and highlighting its political evasions.

Political Tragedy of 20th-Century British Intellectuals

Hill’s life reflects the tragedy faced by many British intellectuals of his generation, who turned to Marxism amidst the revolutionary waves of the early 20th century but saw their growth stifled by Stalinism. He had remarkable talents, including a vivid historical imagination, a strong empathy for the oppressed, and an intuitive understanding of the collective, mass nature of revolution. However, these talents were never fully able to flourish. Hill was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group alongside E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Rodney Hilton. The political pressures of

Stalinist bureaucracy shaped the intellectual work produced in this environment. Their approach to 'People’s History' was not authentic Marxism; instead, it mirrored Popular Frontism in historiography—a nationalist, class-collaborationist distortion that negated the class aspects of historical struggles and instead presented them as a narrative of “progressive” Englishness.

Hill’s early political development demonstrates his deep integration into the Stalinist system. He was brought into the Communist Party's network, received an extended stay in the Soviet Union in 1935, and was later assigned to the Foreign Office as an intelligence officer — a role that indicates the British elite’s perception of Stalinism as, in Trotsky’s words, “insurance against revolution.” Although Hill never publicly admitted to reading Trotsky, his most insightful ideas — such as viewing Cromwell as a revolutionary bourgeois leader and identifying the Levellers as a plebeian force striving beyond the limits of the bourgeois revolution — clearly reflect Trotsky’s analysis in "Where Is Britain Going?"

Hill's main contradiction was that a Marxist approach influenced his best work, which he couldn't openly acknowledge, as doing so would have put him at odds with the Stalinist bureaucracy on which he depended for his career.

Braddick’s Biography: A Study in Evasion

Braddick is a skilled historian of early modern England, but he is not aligned with Marxist theory. His work aligns with the post-revisionist consensus, which has spent decades dismantling Hill’s main argument—that the English Civil War was a bourgeois revolution—without offering a clear alternative. The dominant view holds that “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie,” framing the overthrow of Charles I as a constitutional misunderstanding. This intellectual environment influences Braddick’s writing and shapes the political bounds of his biography.

Post-Revisionism

Over the last forty years, the post-revisionist approach to English Civil War history has effectively initiated an intellectual counter-revolution. Its scholars have not only dismissed Christopher Hill’s Marxist view of the English Revolution but also sought to eliminate the idea of history as a class-struggle-driven process. Their research reflects the ideological priorities of a bourgeois academy that has moved away from meaningful involvement with social dynamics, political economy, or revolutionary change.

This environment shapes Michael Braddick’s biography of Hill. As a result, it is not merely limited—it is also politically biased. It originates from a school whose main goal has been to undermine Hill’s accomplishments while hiding the political reasons for doing so.

Post-revisionism did not emerge from new evidence or scientific breakthroughs. Instead, it was rooted in the political environment of the late 1970s and 1980s— during the Thatcher era, the fall of the post-war consensus, and an ideological push against Marxism. Its purpose was clear: to undermine the very idea of revolution. Post-revisionists argue that there was no bourgeois revolution, denying the existence of a rising bourgeoisie; no class struggle, dismissing it as a mix of “local grievances,” “religious sensibilities,” and “constitutional anxieties"; and no revolutionary consciousness, reducing political ideas to “discourses” detached from material realities. This is not genuine scholarship but political reaction disguised as sophisticated methodology.

The English Revolution—the pivotal overthrow of a feudal monarchy by the emerging bourgeoisie—is reinterpreted as a constitutional misunderstanding, a tragic misstep, or a moment of chaos. Cromwell appears as a hesitant reformer. The Levellers are reduced to a pressure group. The majority of the people become unseen. This is not genuine history; it is a form of historical negation.

The Academic Class Offensive Against Hill

Christopher Hill’s work challenged the post-revisionist narrative by asserting three claims that bourgeois academia typically rejects: that the English Civil War was a revolution, that it was motivated by class forces, and that its ideas stemmed from material conditions and social conflict. His research clarified that the execution of Charles I was not a mere constitutional accident but a revolutionary act—signifying the overthrow of one class by another. Such assertions threaten the university's current stance, which has shifted towards liberal proceduralism and the view that history is contingent.

The post-revisionists initiated a continuous effort to dismantle Hill’s legacy. Instead of refuting his ideas, they declared his categories outdated. They substituted class analysis for micro-history, political economy for “localism,” and revolution for “multiple kingdoms.” They replaced detailed historical explanations with mere descriptions, and descriptions with anecdotes. This has led to a historiography that is politically neutral, intellectually lacking, and methodologically inconsistent.

Braddick’s biography of Hill mirrors this intellectual environment. It's not only that Braddick isn't a Marxist; he comes from a tradition focused on challenging Marxist historiography. As a result, his biography tends to avoid direct engagement: Hill’s Marxism is portrayed as youthful zeal; his CP membership is a minor detail; his departure from Stalinism is seen as a personal crisis instead of a political transformation; and his key ideas are labelled as "interesting interpretations” rather than outcomes of a consistent Marxist approach.

Braddick cannot directly challenge Hill’s work because it implies that Hill’s accomplishments reveal the flaws of post-revisionism. Hill’s focus on class struggle, revolutionary consciousness, and the material foundations of ideas directly criticises the academic views Braddick supports. Consequently, Hill needs to be domesticated—made less threatening. He must be repositioned from a Marxist historian to a “radical"—a politically meaningless term, academically practical, and ideologically convenient.

The Political Function of Post-Revisionism

Post-revisionism is not just mistaken; it is a politically reactionary stance. It aims to invalidate the revolutionary nature of history, especially as capitalism faces a renewed crisis. Essentially, it serves as an ideological shield for the status quo. By rejecting the bourgeois revolution, post-revisionism dismisses the potential for any revolution. When it reduces class to mere “local grievances,” it dismisses the reality of class struggle. Similarly, framing ideas as “discourses” undermines the material foundation of consciousness. This behaviour is deliberate, reflecting the bourgeoisie’s fear of revolution and their dread of history.

Hill’s work remains powerful because it asserts that revolutions are tangible events created by the masses and rooted in material conditions. Post-revisionism rejects this view because it cannot accept that social forces drive history beyond the ruling class's control. For Marxists, post-revisionism should be seen not just as a mistaken approach but as an ideological adversary—a political project aimed at eliminating the revolutionary significance of history. It mirrors neoliberalism, austerity policies, and the suppression of workers' struggles in its historiographical stance.

The title — Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian — suggests a softened depiction of Hill. The term “Radical” is presented as safe and diluted, losing its revolutionary weight. This framing makes Hill seem colourful, eccentric, and somewhat left-leaning, while distancing his work from the Marxist roots that heavily influenced him. Braddick’s biography treats Hill’s Marxism as just a youthful phase, an ideological period, or a personal eccentricity—not the central political approach that shaped his entire intellectual development. As a result, the story feels sympathetic and accessible, while somewhat avoiding deep political analysis.

A comprehensive biography would have addressed Hill's 1957 split from the CP following the Soviet invasion of Hungary—an event that sparked his most productive era. It would also cover his decision not to focus solely on 20thcentury history, despite the strong Stalinist influence. Additionally, it would explore the distortions caused by Stalinism, such as the national framing of history, the neglect of international perspectives, the romanticisation of sects, and the avoidance of Trotsky's revolutionary legacy.

Braddick avoids these issues altogether because addressing them would mean admitting that Hill’s life is inseparable from the conflict between Marxism and Stalinism — a conflict that bourgeois academia is unwilling to acknowledge.

Hill’s Enduring Significance — and His Limits

Despite the restrictions of Stalinism, Hill’s work remains highly valuable. In a time when bourgeois historians often adopt a “born-again Whig” perspective — with Simon Schama being a prominent example — Hill’s assertion that the execution of Charles I was a revolutionary act remains compelling. Hill recognised that revolutions result from mass movements whose awareness must evolve, and he vividly expressed the natural, human essence of revolution with remarkable clarity.

However, Hill’s shortcomings were genuine. His broad national perspective on the English Revolution, romanticised view of religious sects, neglect of the global context, and avoidance of the revolutionary party all stemmed from the political restrictions imposed by Stalinism. These limitations need to be addressed openly rather than hidden.

A truly Marxist biography of Hill would situate the English Revolution within its broader international context, trace its ideas through the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, and place the revolutionary party and the fight for political power at the heart of the analysis. It would explore how Stalinism influenced, warped, and ultimately constrained Hill’s intellectual growth. Such a biography would need to engage with the political significance of Hill’s work, rather than simply recounting his life as part of 20th-century intellectual history. It would also acknowledge that Hill’s most profound insights stemmed from a Marxist approach he could not openly adopt.

Braddick’s biography cannot accomplish this because it is authored within an academic environment that is antagonistic toward Marxism, opposed to class analysis, and dismissive of Hill’s revolutionary implications.

The Struggle for Historical Truth

Hill’s work is still crucial, but advancing it demands more than just his contributions. Developing a truly Marxist historiography of the English Revolution won't be achieved by scholars confined to university settings. Instead, it will be accomplished by Marxists who recognise that the pursuit of historical truth is inherently linked to the fight for socialism.

Braddick’s biography, despite its strengths, aligns with a tradition that aims to tame Hill, diminish the revolutionary aspects of his work, and conceal the political struggles that influenced his life. A Marxist perspective must oppose this tendency, emphasising that Hill’s life can only be fully grasped within the broader political conflict of the 20th century: the clash between Marxism and Stalinism.

Cromwell, the English Revolution, and the Global Genesis of Capitalist Modernity:

A Marxist Analysis of Historical Falsification and the Crisis of Bourgeois Historiography

Part I: The English Revolution and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness

1. The Political Stakes of Historical Interpretation

The seventeenth-century English Revolution holds a special place in human history. It marked the first successful overthrow of a feudal monarchy by a rising bourgeoisie and the first time a king was executed by his own people. It also represented the first continuous effort to establish a political system based not on divine right but on the secular needs of property, trade, and the growing global market. Essentially, it was the foundational moment of the modern world.

In today's era—defined by the accelerating crisis of global capitalism, the breakdown of democratic institutions, and the resurgence of authoritarian governance—the English Revolution has been systematically misrepresented. The bourgeoisie, faced with the effects of its own historical decline, avoids acknowledging its revolutionary roots. It aims to hide the truth that its rise to power was not the result of slow reforms or constitutional changes, but was achieved through violent upheavals, mass mobilisation, and the overthrow of the old order.

The debate over Cromwell's role in history is mainly a political contest regarding the interpretation of revolution. The bourgeoisie, facing a legitimacy crisis not seen since the early 20th century, struggles to accept its revolutionary origins. It tends to dismiss, downplay, or psychologize the English Revolution to preserve the illusion that social change happens through parliamentary politics, constitutional stability, and gradual reforms. In reality, the bourgeoisie seized power via insurrection, civil war, and severe suppression of radical left movements—actions that are unacceptable to a ruling class now cautious of the working class's revolutionary capacity. Hence, the distortion of the English Revolution is shaped by current political interests.

2. The Bourgeoisie Renounces Its Own Revolution

The bourgeoisie's ideological shift away from its revolutionary roots is a notable aspect of modern historical consciousness. In the 1800s, liberal historians like Macaulay praised the English Revolution as a victory for liberty over tyranny, Parliament over monarchy, and reason over superstition. At that time, the bourgeoisie, still convinced of its historical purpose, upheld the revolutionary aspects of its history.

However, as capitalism advanced into its imperialist stage—characterised by worldwide competition, colonial control, and the rise of the working class as a distinct political entity—the bourgeoisie began to distance itself from the revolutionary violence that had initially elevated it. By the mid-20th century, amid the rise of fascism, Stalinism, and the Cold War, the bourgeoisie had completely dissociated from revolutionary ideals. Its historians shifted focus, highlighting continuity, moderation, and constitutional principles.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this stance shifted toward outright denial. Revisionist scholars—such as John Morrill and Mark Kishlansky—contend that the English Revolution was not truly a revolution. Instead, they describe it as a “war of religion,” a “crisis of authority,” or simply a “series of misunderstandings." They minimise class conflict, dismiss mass mobilisation, regard the Levellers as a statistical anomaly, and depict Cromwell as a devout soldier caught in uncontrollable circumstances. This historiographical counter-revolution reflects the political interests of a ruling class that fears the resurgence of revolutionary movements. To deny the English Revolution is to deny the possibility of revolution today.

3. The Liberal-Biographical Tradition: Fraser and the Humanisation of Power

Antonia Fraser’s *Cromwell: Our Chief of Men* illustrates the liberal-biographical method. Fraser depicts Cromwell as a man driven by a strong conscience, a conflicted Puritan whose moral integrity is central to his greatness. The revolution acts as a backdrop that reveals his personality. This method plays three key ideological roles: it personalises structural change by framing class conflict through character; it moralises colonial violence by viewing Cromwell’s Irish atrocities as tragic yet somewhat understandable; and it limits the revolution’s focus to the development of English constitutional identity.

Fraser’s biography is not just inadequate; it is also politically reactionary. It portrays Cromwell — the military leader of a bourgeois revolution — as a tragic hero whose actions are only understandable through personal faith and psychological nuances. The masses vanish; class conflict is overlooked; the revolution turns into a moral story rather than a social upheaval. This exemplifies the ideological role of bourgeois biography: to humanise authority, sentimentalise violence, and conceal the structural forces driving history.

4. The Marxist Tradition: Hill, Manning, and the Restoration of Class

The Marxist tradition, chiefly represented by Christopher Hill and Brian Manning, opposes this falsification. Hill’s work is the most significant Marxist contribution to understanding the English Revolution. He reestablished the importance of the masses in history, highlighted the class dynamics in the conflict, and uncovered the ideological role of Puritanism.

Hill’s Cromwell is not a heroic figure but the political representative of the gentry faction within the emerging bourgeoisie. The Levellers are not just a fringe group but the revolutionary left of the movement. The New Model Army functions as a political entity rather than merely a military force.

Hill’s Marxism was influenced by the national scope of the Communist Party Historians’ Group. His view of revolution is centred on England, not the global context; his concept of bourgeoisie is confined to the nation, not the international scene; and his analysis stops short of framing the English Revolution within the broader emergence of capitalism worldwide.

In contrast, Manning’s work is more radical and considers wider international effects. He emphasises the importance of the lower classes, such as artisans, small producers, and soldiers, who played a key role in the revolutionary movement. Manning portrays the Levellers as a mass movement rather than a fringe group. He contends that the revolution was incomplete because the bourgeoisie feared that the lower classes’ democratic ambitions could threaten their interests.

Together, Hill and Manning exemplify the peak of Marxist historiography on the English Revolution. However, their work needs to be expanded, enhanced, and connected more broadly internationally.

5. The Internationalist Breakthrough: Pashukanis, Slaughter, and the World-Systemic Perspective

The most sophisticated Marxist analysis of the English Revolution does not originate from British Marxist historians but from the internationalist perspective crafted by the Trotskyist movement. Evgeny Pashukanis offers the key theoretical insight: the bourgeois revolution generates the legal subject, embodying the juridical expression of the commodity form. Cliff Slaughter, working within the International Committee of the Fourth International, provides the only fully coherent Marxist interpretation of the revolution. He situates the revolution within the global rise of capitalism rather than solely within England's national development.

For Slaughter, Cromwell’s Irish campaign exemplifies primitive accumulation rather than a mere military conflict. In the end, the bourgeois revolution is viewed as a fundamental historical break that goes beyond just a constitutional change. This internationalist view shows the English Revolution as part of a worldwide process, including the shift from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of the global market, and the development of the modern state.

6. The Contemporary Relevance of the English Revolution

The political lessons from the English Revolution remain relevant today, directly addressing the current crisis of capitalism. The bourgeoisie rejects its revolutionary roots because it is now afraid of revolution. Liberal historians tend to sentimentalise Cromwell, as they avoid confronting the violence that accompanies capitalist growth. Revisionists omit the masses to prevent the resurgence of mass politics. Marxists emphasise the revolutionary nature of the seventeenth century because the working class needs to understand how ruling classes ascend and decline within historical processes. The English Revolution demonstrates that no ruling class relinquishes power voluntarily, that the masses make revolutions, and that the bourgeoisie, once victorious, turns ruthlessly against those who carried it to power.

Part II: The World-Systemic Origins of the English Revolution

1. The English Revolution as a Product of Global Transformation

Viewing the English Revolution as a global event requires rejecting the narrow, nationalist viewpoint common in both liberal and revisionist histories. It was not merely an isolated act of English exceptionalism or a simple domestic struggle over constitutional issues. Instead, it reflected a deep transformation in the world economy: the rise of capitalist social relations, the growth of the global market, and the breakdown of feudal systems across Europe.

The English Revolution must be viewed in the context of wider historical shifts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. These include the growth of Atlantic trade, the increase of colonial silver wealth, the expansion of international commerce, the rise of financial capitalism in the Dutch Republic, the decline of feudal rent practices, and demographic and agricultural changes in early modern Europe.

England actively contributed to these forces, serving as a key testing ground. The enclosure movement, expansion of merchant capital, emergence of a commercially driven gentry, and deeper integration into global trade networks fostered social conditions conducive to revolutionary upheaval. Thus, the English Revolution was not merely a national anomaly but an essential stage in the worldwide shift from feudalism to capitalism.

2. The Bourgeoisie Before the Bourgeoisie: The Gentry and the Transformation of Property

A common myth in English historiography is the idea that the bourgeoisie was weak, marginal, or lacked political influence in the seventeenth century. This misconception supports the revisionist view that the Civil War was driven not by class struggle but by conflicts among elites over religion and constitutional power. In truth, the English bourgeoisie was emerging within the gentry — a class increasingly connected to capitalist agriculture, commercial rents, and trade investments. The gentry were not merely feudal remnants but served as the transitional class through which capitalist relations spread into the countryside.

The transformation of property relations—such as enclosure, leasehold reform, and the monetisation of rents—led to the emergence of a class whose interests conflicted with the absolutist state. The monarchy, reliant on feudal privileges, monopolies, and arbitrary taxation, hindered the free growth of capitalist accumulation. Consequently, the clash between Parliament and the Crown was not merely a constitutional dispute but a conflict between incompatible modes of production.

3. The New Model Army and the Political Form of the Bourgeois Revolution

The New Model Army served as the crucial force behind the revolution. More than just a military entity, it functioned as a political organisation — the first modern army in history, characterised by discipline, centralisation, and a unified ideology. Its members primarily came from the upper segments of the petty bourgeoisie, including artisans, small producers, and radicalised yeomen. The Army’s political discussions — such as the Putney Debates of 1647, the petitions from the Agitators, and the Leveller manifestos — mark the earliest sustained efforts to define a democratic political agenda rooted in the interests of the lower classes. In essence, the New Model Army was the revolutionary party of the seventeenth century.

The Army also embodied the revolution's internal contradiction. While the bourgeoisie relied on the Army to overthrow the monarchy, it simultaneously feared the soldiers' democratic hopes. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649, including the execution of the Burford mutineers, marked the point when the bourgeoisie turned against the very masses that had helped it rise to power. This illustrates the core dialectic of the bourgeois revolution: it mobilises the masses to dismantle feudalism, only to repress them to secure capitalist stability.

4. Cromwell as the Instrument of Class Necessity

Oliver Cromwell’s importance in history lies less in his personal traits, faith, or psychological intricacies—common themes in liberal biographies—and more in his role as the political figure who embodied the growing bourgeois class. He served as the means for the bourgeoisie to address and overcome the contradictions arising from the revolution.

Cromwell’s measures—such as dissolving Parliament, suppressing the Levellers, conquering Ireland, and establishing the Protectorate—were motivated by the goal of stabilizing the new social order rather than personal ambition. He executed the king not out of fanaticism, but because the monarchy clashed with bourgeois interests. His crackdown on the Levellers was a response to the bourgeoisie’s fear of the lower classes' democratic aspirations, not tyranny. Meanwhile, his Irish conquest was driven by the need to seize land for capital accumulation, not cruelty. Cromwell is a key figure of the bourgeois revolution.

5. Ireland and the Colonial Foundations of Capitalism

No part of Cromwell’s legacy has been more distorted than his actions in Ireland. While some liberal historians like Fraser see the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford as tragic yet understandable parts of seventeenth-century brutal warfare, revisionists tend to diminish or relativise the violence, and nationalists often mythologise it. A Marxist perspective clarifies these distortions, showing that Cromwell’s Irish campaign was not an anomaly but a fundamental act of primitive accumulation.

The seizure of Irish land, the displacement of the Catholic peasantry, and the redistribution of property to English soldiers and settlers were crucial steps in forming a landless proletariat and a capitalist farming class. Ireland served as a testing ground for English capitalism. Cromwell’s campaign violence was driven not solely by religious fanaticism but by the inherent violence of capitalist development. The bourgeois revolution, especially in its colonial context, involved dismantling traditional property systems, expropriating peasants, and establishing a new legal and economic framework. The Irish case illustrates the global scope of the English Revolution, highlighting its links to colonial expansion, the Atlantic economy, and the creation of the world market.

6. The Restoration as the Consolidation of Bourgeois Power

The Restoration of 1660 is often seen as a failed revolution, with the monarchy returning and Cromwell’s legacy discarded. However, this view is mostly incorrect. The Restoration was more about strengthening existing gains than undoing them. The bourgeoisie had already secured key objectives: ending absolutism, asserting parliamentary dominance, protecting property rights, and establishing a legal system suitable for capitalism. The monarchy that came back in 1660 was not the same as Charles I's; it was a constitutional monarchy that served bourgeois interests.

Charles I's execution fundamentally changed the political scene. After 1649, no monarch felt truly secure on the throne. The Glorious Revolution of 1688—viewed by the bourgeoisie as their preferred revolution—was only feasible because the upheavals of the 1640s shattered the basis of absolutism. The Restoration served as the bourgeoisie’s strategy to secure the revolution's gains while limiting its radical democratic prospects.

7. The English Revolution and the Birth of the Modern State

The modern state—characterised by centralisation, bureaucracy, secularism, and a focus on capital interests—originated from the English Revolution. During this period, feudal privileges were abolished, taxation was streamlined, a standing army was established, and a legal system rooted in property rights was developed.

The Protectorate, often regarded as a failed experiment, was in fact the initial effort to establish a modern bourgeois state. Its constitutional documents—the Instrument of Government and the Humble Petition and Advice—are among the earliest attempts to formalise the political structure of capitalist society. Consequently, the English Revolution was not just a political event but also a fundamental transformation of the state's structure.

Part III: The Levellers, the Democratic Surge, and the Bourgeoisie’s Fear of the Masses

1. The Levellers and the Revolutionary Left Wing of the English Revolution

No part of the English Revolution has been more deliberately misrepresented by bourgeois history than the role of the Levellers. Liberal scholars see them as merely a group of troublemakers; revisionists consider them an insignificant statistical blip; and Cromwell's biographers depict them as a bother he was compelled to contain. This misrepresentation is purposeful. The Levellers embody the democratic promise of the revolution—the idea that overthrowing absolutism could lead not only to property rule but also to political empowerment for the lower classes.

The Levellers were not just a fringe group but the earliest organised democratic movement in modern history. Their platform—outlined in The Agreement of the People, petitions from London radicals, and speeches by Army Agitators—called for: universal male suffrage, biennial Parliaments, legal equality, religious toleration, and the subjugation of political authority to popular consent. These demands were not mere idealistic dreams but reflected the real interests of artisans, small producers, and radicalised soldiers. The Levellers embodied the working-class foundation of the revolution—the social strata whose mobilisation enabled the overthrow of absolutism.

The bourgeoisie could not accept this wave of democracy. The Levellers’ agenda threatened the core of capitalist property rights. Allowing everyone to vote would have strengthened the lower classes; legal equality would have challenged the privileges of property owners; and popular sovereignty could have destabilised the nascent bourgeois state. Therefore, the Levellers were seen as internal enemies of the bourgeois revolution—a force that needed to be suppressed after the monarchy was overthrown.

2. The Putney Debates: The Revolution Thinks Aloud

The Putney Debates of 1647 are among the most remarkable events in history. For the first time, ordinary soldiers—artisans, small farmers, and radical democrats—challenged the political leadership of a revolutionary army and sought a voice in shaping the nation's future. These debates vividly illustrate the class tensions of the revolution. On one side were the Levellers and the Army Agitators, advocating for political equality and popular sovereignty, while on the other were Cromwell and Henry Ireton, representing the interests of the propertied classes.

Ireton’s arguments exemplify classic bourgeois ideology. He argued that political power should be linked to property, claiming those without property lack a “permanent interest” in the nation, and warning that universal suffrage could destroy social order. These points—repeated by capitalists’ defenders over centuries—highlight the core contradiction of the bourgeois revolution: proclaiming universal rights while limiting political power to the propertied. The Putney Debates marked a turning point, when the revolution became self-aware—when the common people voiced their democratic hopes and the bourgeoisie expressed its fears.

3. The Suppression of the Levellers: The Bourgeoisie Turns Against the Masses

The repression of the Levellers in 1649 was not a mere anomaly but a natural result of the bourgeois revolution. After the monarchy was abolished and traditional structures were dismantled, the bourgeoisie no longer relied on the radicalised masses. The Levellers' calls for popular sovereignty, legal equality, and democratic responsibility challenged the stability of the emerging social order, conflicting with the interests of the property-owning classes.

Cromwell’s suppression of the Levellers— arresting their leaders, destroying their presses, and executing the Burford mutineers—was not a personal act of betrayal but a class-driven necessity. The bourgeoisie needed to crush the lower classes' democratic hopes to strengthen its power. The execution of the Burford mutineers— soldiers who fought for the revolution and now demanded their deserved rights— highlights a key moment in bourgeois history. It shows that while the bourgeois revolution was progressive in ending feudalism, it was also fundamentally reactionary in oppressing the masses. The Levellers were the first victims of the bourgeois counter-revolution.

4. The Diggers and the Limits of Agrarian Radicalism

If the Levellers were the democratic faction of the revolution, the Diggers embodied its agrarian-communist spirit. Under Gerrard Winstanley's leadership, the Diggers tried to farm shared land at St. George’s Hill, asserting that the earth belonged to everyone as a 'common treasury.' Their goals—eliminating private land ownership, promoting communal farming, and establishing an equal society—were remarkably progressive for their era.

The Diggers weren't proto-socialists in today's terms, but their movement reveals the revolution's hidden potential. The abolition of feudal property relations opened the door to a more radical change—one that could have challenged not just the monarchy but also the emerging capitalist system. The bourgeoisie could not accept this threat. The Diggers were suppressed as ruthlessly as the Levellers, with their communes destroyed, leaders arrested, and their movement suppressed. Their fate highlights the limits of the bourgeois revolution: it could dismantle feudalism but not establish a society of equality. It could mobilise masses but not empower them, proclaim universal rights but fail to realise them.

5. The New Model Army as a Revolutionary Organism

The New Model Army was the most sophisticated political institution of the seventeenth century. It stood out as the first modern army — disciplined, centralised, and ideologically united — and also marked the inaugural mass political organisation in world history. Its soldiers engaged in political debates, elected leaders, and expressed a democratic agenda.

The Army served as the revolutionary force of the seventeenth century, overthrowing the monarchy, defeating royalist armies, and enforcing Parliament's will. However, it also reflected the revolution’s internal conflict, pitting bourgeois leaders against radicalised common people. Thus, it functioned both as a tool of bourgeois dominance and as a means for democratic hopes. The suppression of the Levellers marked the point at which the Army shifted from a revolutionary entity to an instrument of the bourgeois state.

6. The Bourgeois Revolution and the Dialectic of Liberation and Suppression

The English Revolution exposes the core dialectic of the bourgeois revolution: it starts by freeing society from feudalism and mobilising the masses to overthrow the old order. However, once the bourgeoisie secures its interests, it suppresses those same masses. This pattern is not unique to England but is seen in every bourgeois revolution: the suppression of the sans-culottes during the French Revolution, the betrayal of radical democrats in the American Revolution, the crushing of the Paris Commune by the French bourgeoisie, and the repression of Chartism in the nineteenth century. The bourgeoisie acts as a revolutionary class only against feudalism; once it establishes its power, it becomes a reactionary force. The English Revolution is the earliest and clearest example of this recurring pattern.

7. The Levellers and the Contemporary Working Class

The political lessons from the Levellers extend beyond the seventeenth century and directly relate to today's working-class struggles. The Levellers were the first to try to develop a democratic agenda independent of the ruling class. Their suppression shows the limitations of bourgeois democracy and highlights the need for a separate political movement for the working class.

The Levellers’ focus on popular sovereignty, legal equality, and democratic accountability is still pertinent today. Their struggle highlights a core contradiction in capitalist society: the clash between the democratic hopes of the people and the economic goals of the ruling elite. The working class should learn from the Levellers—not by copying their policies, but by understanding how ruling classes historically ascend, strengthen, and silence the masses.

Part IV: The Legal Form, the Modern State, and the International Logic of the Bourgeois Revolution

1. The Bourgeois Revolution and the Emergence of the Legal Subject

The English Revolution not only dismantled feudal political institutions but also fundamentally changed the nature of law itself. This shift cannot be fully grasped through liberal constitutionalism, which views law as a neutral structure for politics. Instead, it is best understood via the Marxist theory of the legal form, as elaborated by Evgeny Pashukanis.

Pashukanis showed that the legal subject—abstract, equal, and formally free—represents the juridical expression of the commodity form. The rise of capitalist production relations necessitates a legal system where individuals interact as holders of rights, obligations, and property. Consequently, the law of the bourgeois state is not merely an ideological superstructure imposed from above, but a fundamental expression of capitalism's social relations.

The English Revolution marked the first time this legal form appeared in its early stages. The abolition of feudal privileges, the restructuring of taxation, the codification of property rights, and the development of contract law all reflected new social relations forming beneath political conflicts. Although often seen as technical or administrative, the legal reforms during the revolutionary era actually laid the juridical groundwork for capitalist society.

2. The Instrument of Government and the First Bourgeois Constitution

The Instrument of Government (1653), which served as the constitution for Cromwell’s Protectorate, is one of the most overlooked documents in world history. Liberal historians view it as a failed experiment, revisionists see it as an authoritarian imposition, and constitutional scholars often ignore it completely.

A Marxist perspective highlights its significance: the Instrument of Government was the world's first written bourgeois constitution. Its main features—such as a centralised executive, a standing army, regular Parliaments, and a legal system based on property—mark the earliest effort to formalise the political structure of capitalist society. The Instrument was not an idealistic plan but a practical measure for a class that seized power through revolution and sought to stabilise its dominance. The Protectorate represented the first modern state: a centralised, bureaucratic, secular system designed to serve capital's interests. It laid the foundation for the bourgeois state, which later appeared in the Dutch Republic, the United States, and revolutionary France.

3. The Humble Petition and Advice: The Bourgeoisie Seeks Stability

The Humble Petition and Advice (1657), which proposed offering Cromwell the crown, exposes the internal contradictions of the bourgeois revolution. While the bourgeoisie had toppled the monarchy, they now aimed to reinstate a modified form of it to secure the stability of the new social order.

This seeming paradox is not a contradiction of principle but reflects class necessity. The bourgeoisie needs a state strong enough to safeguard property, enforce contracts, and control the masses, yet weak enough to prevent the return of absolutism. Cromwell's proposed constitutional monarchy aimed to establish a political system that could balance these conflicting requirements.

Cromwell’s rejection of the crown—often idealised as a sign of republican virtue—actually acknowledged that the monarchy, even in a transformed state, conflicted with the revolutionary roots of the new government. The bourgeoisie would eventually reconcile this in 1688 with William of Orange’s rise to the throne under Parliamentary conditions. However, during the 1650s, the revolutionary wounds were still raw, and the contradictions too pronounced, making such a compromise impossible at that time.

4. The International Dimension: England, the Dutch Republic, and the World Market

The English Revolution should be viewed in conjunction with the Dutch Republic, which was the leading capitalist society of the seventeenth century. The Dutch pioneered financial capitalism, maritime trade, and global markets. Their political system — republican, commercial, and oligarchic — embodied the most advanced form of bourgeois governance in Europe.

England’s conflict with the Dutch during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) was more than a fight for naval dominance; it was a clash between two models of capitalist development. The Navigation Acts, the growth of the English navy, and the proactive pursuit of colonial trade reflected England’s efforts to access the global market, which the Dutch then controlled. The English Revolution was not just a domestic upheaval but also part of the broader global contest for capitalist supremacy. England's emergence as a world power—culminating in the 18th-century British Empire—was rooted in the revolutionary changes of the 1640s and 1650s.

5. Primitive Accumulation and the Colonial Foundations of Capitalism

Marx’s idea of primitive accumulation — involving the violent seizure of peasant land, the destruction of communal ownership, and the formation of a landless working class — is crucial to understanding the English Revolution. It accelerated long-standing processes such as enclosure, the shift to monetised rents, the commodification of labour, and the growth of colonial exploitation.

Cromwell’s Irish campaign marked a pivotal point in this history. The seizure of Irish land, the removal of Catholic peasants, and the redistribution of land to English soldiers and settlers were driven more by economic motives than military needs. The violence enacted during the 1650s colonial efforts established the groundwork for Ireland's transition to capitalism and strengthened English influence across the Atlantic.

The English Revolution was both a domestic and colonial event, with internal changes closely linked to external expansion. The bourgeoisie that arose from the revolution became not only a national class but also a global player, focused on the world market and reliant on colonial exploitation.

6. The Restoration and the Completion of the Bourgeois Revolution

The 1660 Restoration is often perceived as a failure of the revolution, marked by the monarchy's return and the rejection of Cromwell’s legacy. Yet, this perspective is fundamentally mistaken. The Restoration was not a defeat but a culmination. The bourgeoisie had achieved its primary objectives: dismantling absolutism, establishing parliamentary dominance, securing property rights, and developing a legal framework suited to capitalism. The restored monarchy in 1660 was not Charles I's original monarchy but a constitutional one aligned with bourgeois interests. The execution of Charles I permanently altered the political landscape, as no monarch post-1649 could feel secure on the throne. The 1688 Glorious Revolution, favored by the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary act, only occurred because the revolutionary upheavals of the 1640s had weakened absolutist foundations. Consequently, the Restoration signified the bourgeois consolidation of the revolution's achievements.

7. The English Revolution and the Birth of the Modern World

The English Revolution marked the first successful bourgeois revolution in history. It abolished feudalism, affirmed the authority of Parliament, developed the legal and political structures of capitalist society, and set the stage for England’s emergence as a global power.

Its importance cannot be overstated. The modern era—characterized by capitalist economies, constitutional governments, and a global market—originated from the revolutionary upheavals of the seventeenth century. When liberal and revisionist historians distort the history of the English Revolution, they do more than make an academic mistake; they engage in a political act. This distortion aims to hide the revolutionary roots of the modern world and to dismiss the potential for revolutionary change today.

Part V: The Crisis of Bourgeois Historiography and the Contemporary Relevance of the English Revolution

1. The Bourgeoisie’s Flight From Its Own Origins

The misrepresentation of the English Revolution is not just a scholarly mistake but reflects a deeper crisis in bourgeois historical awareness. A dominant class that believes in its revolutionary purpose embraces its origins, while a declining ruling class rejects them.

In the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie maintained a sense of historical legitimacy. It celebrated Cromwell as a heroic figure who destroyed tyranny, saw Parliament as the symbol of liberty, and regarded the revolution as the basis of modern civilization. Macaulay’s *History of England* exemplifies this confidence: a triumphant narrative portraying the bourgeoisie as the rightful successors of progress.

However, as capitalism moved into its imperialist stage—characterized by international competition, colonial control, and the rise of the working class as a distinct political entity—the bourgeoisie started distancing itself from its revolutionary roots. The brutality of its beginnings was now considered shameful; the democratic hopes of the masses posed a threat; and the memory of revolution was seen as a danger.

By the late twentieth century, views had shifted to outright denial. Revisionist scholars—Morrill, Kishlansky, and their followers—claim the English Revolution was not a true revolution. They characterize it as a “war of religion,” a “crisis of authority,” or a “series of misunderstandings." According to them, class conflict disappears, mass mobilization fails to materialize, the Levellers are just a statistical anomaly, and Cromwell is depicted as a devout soldier caught in circumstances beyond his control. This historiographical counter-revolution reflects the political needs of a ruling class afraid of revolutionary resurgence. To deny the English Revolution is to deny the possibility of revolution today.

2. The Postmodern Assault on Historical Truth

The crisis in bourgeois historiography worsens with the rise of postmodernism, which rejects the idea of objective historical truth. According to postmodernism, history isn't about studying actual events but about interpreting texts; it's not about analyzing social forces but deconstructing narratives; and it's not about reconstructing the past but revealing linguistic structures.

This epistemological nihilism benefits the interests of the ruling class. Without objective truth, there is no definitive history of class struggle. If all narratives hold equal validity, then the revolutionary view of the English Revolution is just one among many "discourses." If the past cannot be known, then the future remains unchangeable.

Postmodernism reflects a bourgeoisie struggling with its own legitimacy, embodying a ruling class that no longer believes in progress, distrusts its institutions, and no longer views itself as guiding historical development. In response to this intellectual decline, Marxism emphasizes that history results from concrete social forces, that revolutions are objective occurrences, and that past events can be understood scientifically through class analysis.

3. The English Revolution and the Crisis of the Modern State

The modern state—characterized by centralization, bureaucracy, secularism, and a focus on capital—originated during the English Revolution. This period saw the abolition of feudal rights, reforms in taxation, the establishment of a standing army, and the development of a legal system rooted in property rights.

However, the modern state is facing a crisis. The institutions established by the bourgeois revolution—such as Parliaments, constitutions, legal systems, and representative bodies—are becoming less capable of handling the tensions of global capitalism. The growing wealth gap, diminishing democratic rights, increasing militarization, and the emergence of authoritarian rule expose the limitations of the political structures developed in the seventeenth century.

The crisis faced by the modern state is essentially the crisis of the bourgeois revolution. The political structures established by the bourgeoisie can no longer hold back the social forces unleashed by global capitalism. The contradictions that fueled the English Revolution—such as those between traditional and modern property, the masses and the ruling class, and societal needs versus elite interests—are reemerging worldwide today.

4. The Lessons of the English Revolution for the Contemporary Working Class

The English Revolution offers crucial lessons for today's working class, illustrating that no ruling class will willingly surrender power. The monarchy didn't fall due to persuasive arguments or constitutional constraints; it was overthrown by a revolutionary movement that mobilised the masses and dismantled the old regime's institutions. Additionally, it emphasises the vital role of the masses in shaping history. Groups like the Levellers, the Army Agitators, and the radicalised soldiers of the New Model Army were active participants rather than passive observers.

Their demands for democracy, equality, and popular sovereignty fueled the revolution. Third, it underscores the limitations of bourgeois democracy. The bourgeoisie rallied the masses to overthrow feudalism but later suppressed them to safeguard their own interests. The suppression of the Levellers, the dismantling of the Diggers, and the strengthening of the Protectorate reveal the fundamental contradiction of the bourgeois revolution: it claims to defend universal rights while restricting political power to property owners. Fourth, it emphasizes the importance of an independent political movement for the working class. The Levellers were defeated not because their program was unrealistic, but because they lacked an independent organizational base capable of challenging the bourgeoisie. Their defeat illustrates the need for a revolutionary party that can unite the masses and lead the struggle for power.

5. Conclusion: The English Revolution and the Future of Humanity

The English Revolution marked the first major bourgeois revolution in history. It dismantled feudal structures, established the modern state, and laid the groundwork for capitalist society. Its importance is immense. The modern world — characterized by a capitalist economy, constitutional governments, and a global marketplace — originated from the upheavals of the seventeenth century. However, the bourgeois revolution is now reaching its limits. The political systems it created face crisis; the social relations it fostered are no longer sustainable; and the contradictions it introduced pose a threat to humanity's future.

The working class has yet to finish the historical journey started in the seventeenth century. The initial phase was the dismantling of feudalism; the subsequent phase is the overthrow of capitalism. The English Revolution shows both what bourgeois transformation can achieve and its boundaries. It proves that masses are the agents of history, that revolutions are essential, and that the future does not lie with the ruling class but with those fighting to change society.

The task of the present is to carry forward the revolutionary legacy of the past — not by returning to the Levellers’ programme or the institutions of the Protectorate, but by building a global working-class movement capable of resolving capitalism’s contradictions and creating a new world based on equality, democracy, and human liberation.

H.N. Brailsford's The Levellers and the English Revolution, edited and prepared by Christopher Hill. 1961 Spokesman Publications

H.N. Brailsford's The Levellers and the English Revolution, published posthumously in 1961 and edited by Christopher Hill, stands as one of the most significant radical narratives of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution. It is valuable not only for what it uncovers about one of history's major revolutionary upheavals, but also for the insights into its political and theoretical boundaries, which shed light on the tradition it originates from.

Henry Noel Brailsford was among the most talented socialist journalists and writers in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. He was linked to the Independent Labour Party, a strand of ethical, Nonconformist socialism that positioned itself to the left of the Labour Party's main faction but remained politically allied with it. Brailsford wrote extensively on topics like foreign affairs, imperialism, and international politics. His major work on the seventeenth century, The Levellers and the English Revolution, was left incomplete upon his death and was published posthumously in 1961, edited by Christopher Hill.

Brailsford engaged with the Levellers with sincere empathy and thorough scholarship. He restored the coherence and importance of their political agenda, the Agreements of the People, which calls for manhood suffrage, the abolition of tithes and excise, religious toleration, and legal equality, and positioned them as the most advanced democratic movement produced by the English Revolution. His respectful treatment of figures such as John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn as serious political thinkers, rather than merely eccentric sectarians, marked a significant contribution. Brailsford demonstrated that the Levellers were not just agitators but were working to establish a constitutional basis for a democratic republic, an effort with few global precedents at the time.

Hill edited Brailsford's posthumous volume on the Levellers, creating an apt collaboration as his research complemented and expanded Brailsford's focus on the radical plebeians of the revolution. A prominent figure in 20th-century Marxist historiography of the English Revolution, Hill's work was thoroughly reviewed by Ann Talbot of the WSWS, who emphasised its complexities following Hill's death in 2003. His ideas were influenced by the Marxist Historians Group of the Communist Party, which included renowned scholars such as E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm.

His main contribution was challenging the dominant Whig interpretation of British history, which presents a comforting myth symbolised by the Trevelyan family's country houses, owned by the National Trust, and suggests that Britain experienced a uniquely peaceful and gradual political development without revolutionary upheaval. Hill contended that the events of the 1640s were a true bourgeois revolution, with one ruling class overthrowing another, driven by the mass population whose awareness was significantly changed. As Talbot points out, "these achievements were considerable at the time and remain relevant today, especially as historians increasingly dismiss any serious economic or social analysis."

Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972) examines, more deeply than Brailsford, the radical groups such as the Diggers, Ranters, and early Quakers—highlighting how these marginalised factions advanced social change that the propertied classes leading the revolution could never permit. However, Hill's perspective was heavily influenced by the Stalinist politics in which he was educated. As Talbot points out, the Communist Party promoted a "People's History" that maintained a primarily national outlook aligned with the Popular Front, thereby subordinating the working class to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces. This resulted in a key limitation: Hill never placed the English Revolution within its broader international context, nor did he examine how the ideas of English revolutionaries connected to continental Enlightenment thought. He also retained a romantic attachment to specifically English radical traditions. His later interest in radical sects during the Restoration period, long after their revolutionary importance had faded, reflects this nationalism's desire to portray a continuous English revolutionary tradition rather than explore how revolutionary ideas spread and evolved across national borders.

Hill notably avoided the twentieth century almost completely. As Talbot observes, among the Marxist Historians Group, Hill focused on the seventeenth century, Thompson on the eighteenth, Hobsbawm on the nineteenth, and Hilton on the Middle Ages, none of whom specialised in their own era. This was intentional. In recent history, Stalinist politics exerted too direct a control; engaging honestly would have led to conflicts with the bureaucracy. Hill's sole engagement with the twentieth century, a 1947 study of Lenin, is marked by repeated dismissals of Trotsky as a "Westernising theoretician", a point Talbot rightly criticises as his weakest and most politically dishonest aspect. He could not fully pursue his true Marxist instincts where the bureaucratic line was drawn.

Trotsky's 1925 work, 'Where Is Britain Going?', surprisingly predicted many of Hill's key insights about the English Revolution. It emphasised two major revolutionary traditions in British history, the revolution of Cromwell and Chartism, which Whig gradualism tends to overlook. Trotsky saw Cromwell as a revolutionary bourgeois leader who suppressed the Levellers when they threatened to go beyond the limits of capitalist property.

Whether Hill independently drew these conclusions from Marx and Engels or was subtly influenced by Trotsky without acknowledgement, his most important historical work aligns with them. The tragedy is that his political background prevented him from realising that the essential lessons of the English Revolution, namely, that the bourgeoisie betrays democratic goals whenever property is at risk and that only the working class can finish the democratic tasks left incomplete by the bourgeois revolution, are highly relevant to the twentieth-century challenges faced by Hill and his generation.

Hill and Brailsford

Although they came from different political backgrounds, both aimed to rekindle the revolutionary-democratic spirit of the seventeenth-century English Revolution, challenging a conservative and complacent mainstream history. Brailsford was driven by an ethical socialist's moral commitment to the oppressed, while Hill applied the Marxist analysis of class structures. Collectively, their work exemplifies the pinnacle of the British left-wing historical tradition focused on this era.

Their shared limitations are also instructive. Both remained confined within a nationally bounded framework and did not fully explore the global implications of the English Revolution, such as its role in the Atlantic world, its links to the Dutch Republic, or the ideas that would later influence the American and French Revolutions a century afterwards. Moreover, for political rather than purely intellectual reasons, neither could apply the lessons of seventeenth-century revolutionary history to the revolutionary challenges of their own time. Trotskyism, however, broadens this horizon in a way neither the ILP nor the Stalinist tradition allowed.

The Levellers and the English Revolution

Brailsford's book focuses on the Levellers, a radical democratic group that emerged from the New Model Army and London's artisan and petty-bourgeois classes during the revolutionary upheavals of the 1640s. Led by John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, the Levellers produced important documents, especially the Agreement of the People, which advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the abolition of monopolies and tithes. Their efforts broadened the scope of the English Revolution towards its most leftist and democratic ideals.

Brailsford's account is a passionate and richly detailed narrative that takes these men and their ideas seriously as historical actors, not merely background colour to the drama of Cromwell and Parliament. In this sense, the book is a real contribution to understanding the social depth of the revolution. Brailsford's socialism was rooted in the parliamentary, Fabian, and ethical-socialist traditions of British labourism. He never broke from the framework of reformism, the perspective that capitalism could be gradually transformed from within through parliamentary pressure, trade union organisation, and moral persuasion of the ruling class.

Trotsky's analysis of the British labour movement, set out in Where Is Britain Going? (1925) was a direct critique of this entire tradition: Trotsky argued that the ILP and the labour bureaucracy were incapable of leading the working class to power precisely because they refused to make the political break with bourgeois institutions.

Brailsford's approach is limited by the tradition he comes from. As an ethical socialist and ILP liberal, he admired the Levellers mainly for their constitutional and democratic demands, viewing them as early forerunners of liberal democracy rather than fully understanding the class dynamics behind their position. He focused on the moral strength of their arguments rather than on the social forces that enabled or hindered them. While he recognised that Cromwell and the Grandees suppressed the Levellers, he did not fully analyse why the bourgeois revolutionary leadership felt compelled to do so. This gap is not a personal shortcoming but a reflection of the ethical socialist tradition's tendency to moralise history rather than examine its material basis.

John Rees and the English Revolution

John Rees is arguably the most influential and skilled historian to employ a Marxist historiographical approach to analyse the English bourgeois revolution. His work highlights the strengths of Hill and Brailsford but also points to their political shortcomings. Rees, a longtime member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and co-founder of Counterfire, authored key works such as "The Algebra of Revolution" (1998) and notably "The Leveller Revolution" (2016), which explores themes similar to Brailsford’s. He provides an earnest scholarly view of the English Revolution from a leftist perspective. Nonetheless, from a Marxist/Trotskyist standpoint, both Rees and Counterfire operate as a pseudo-left, projecting a radical front while subordinating working-class political independence to broad front tactics, such as Coalitions like Stop the War, which link workers with bourgeois-liberal and establishment forces. Rees has played a key role in this strategic orientation.

As a result, despite his competent historical scholarship, Rees's political actions often undermine the very lessons of the English Revolution, such as the idea that the bourgeoisie betrays its revolution when the plebeian masses push beyond property boundaries, and that the working class needs its own independent political leadership. Brailsford deserves better than to be pressed into service as a respectable ancestor for Counterfire's brand of left reformism. He was a serious socialist grappling with real questions. The tragedy is that the tradition he inhabited, sincere in its individual representatives, was organically incapable of providing the revolutionary leadership the working class required.

The Levellers and the struggle for Socialism Today

The Levellers' experience offers deep lessons for today's working class. The key lesson is that, regardless of how radical the democratic demands are during a revolutionary crisis, they cannot be achieved unless the working class or its equivalent seizes political power directly. While the Levellers controlled the army and had street support, they lacked a party and a clear program to challenge the bourgeoisie for state control as a unified class; they merely pressured it. Cromwell understood this dynamic, which allowed him to outmanoeuvre and ultimately dismantle them.

Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, summarised the main lesson from the entire bourgeois revolutionary period: the ideological forms through which class interests manifested such as Puritanism, natural rights theory, and millenarianism were merely the historical guise in which emerging class forces presented themselves The Levellers, by demanding "freeborn rights," articulated the revolutionary democratic aspirations of the emerging plebeian classes in a language accessible to them.

The Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, went even further, explicitly communalistic in their demands, occupying common land and arguing that true freedom required the abolition of property itself. Brailsford's book touches on this dimension, though Winstanley is not its central focus. From a Marxist standpoint, the Diggers represent the most historically prescient current of the English Revolution, expressing in embryonic and utopian form the communist impulse that would only find its scientific foundation two centuries later with Marx and Engels. In this respect, readers would do well to examine John Gurney's work on the diggers and Winstanley.

'The Levellers and the English Revolution' is Brailsford's most significant work historically, showcasing both his strengths and limitations. His strengths are notable: he vividly portrayed the Levellers as historical figures, reconstructed the Putney Debates with remarkable clarity, and took their radical democratic agenda seriously at a time when mainstream historiography overlooked them. On the other hand, his limitations are also evident: his framework was rooted in a liberal-democratic lineage, viewing the Levellers as precursors to parliamentary reform, rather than employing a rigorous Marxist analysis of the class forces that drove and limited the English bourgeois revolution.

The Levellers and the English Revolution is a crucial and accessible book about a highly intense yet often overlooked phase in the history of class struggle. Brailsford's work should be read alongside Trotsky's Where Is Britain Going?, Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down* and God's Englishman, as well as Engels's analysis of bourgeois revolutions in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It shows that major revolutionary upheavals often produce unforeseen forces, and their success hinges on political leadership capable of completing the revolution. This remains a vital lesson for the working class in today’s revolutionary movements.

A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509-1688 by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Neal Wood, New York University Press, 1997

"...The tongue of man is a trumpet of warre, and sedition." —

Thomas Hobbes De Cive, v. 5

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

John Locke

“Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity...Peace is their ruin,...by war they are enriched...Peace is their war, peace is their poverty”

―Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

The discerning reader will recognise that this website is named after Meiksins-Wood's notable book, 'A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688' (1997), co-authored by Ellen Meiksins Wood and her husband Neal Wood. I received the book from my friend Tony Hyland, and its title seemed apt for a site created to share my interest in the English bourgeois revolution. Given that the website has been around for over eighteen years, a review of this book has long been overdue.

It is, without a doubt, an important work in the history of political thought. The book shows how modern political theory, from Thomas More to Hobbes and Locke, emerged as both a response to and an ideological expression of the rise of capitalism in England. Its central claim is that modern political philosophy was shaped not in an abstract world of ideas, but in the real social conflicts produced by agrarian capitalism, enclosure, and the dispossession of the peasantry.

The Woods carefully chose the title A Trumpet of Sedition because it evokes the radical political pamphlet culture of 17th-century England, the era of the Levellers, Diggers, and other popular movements that emerged during the English Civil War. This phrase, originating from the polemical language of that era, was used to describe writings that defied established authority. The Woods use it ironically and provocatively: their book explores how the political theory of that period could both justify the growing capitalist system (as in Hobbes and Locke) and oppose it (as in radical democratic movements later repressed).

Wood's approach marks a genuine advance on idealist histories of political thought, which treat Hobbes or Locke as merely responding to ideas rather than to material social conditions. Her insistence that political theory must be understood in relation to the class struggles and property relations of its time is fundamentally Marxist in method, even if Wood herself worked within the framework of "Political Marxism" associated with Robert Brenner rather than the classical Trotskyist tradition.

The Woods and the Historiographical Debate

Lawrence Stone once characterised writing about the English Revolution as navigating a 'battleground heavily contested, filled with mines, booby-traps, and ambushes manned by fierce scholars ready to fight every inch.” Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood entered a historiographical landscape already shaped by Christopher Hill, the influential Marxist historian of the period. As Ann Talbot's obituary of Hill notes, his achievements were twofold: he identified the mid-17th-century crisis as a true bourgeois revolution that replaced one class's dominance with another, and he highlighted the vital role of the masses in revolutions, stressing that a change in consciousness among the people is essential for revolution. His works, The World Turned Upside Down, God's Englishman, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution*, and Milton and the English Revolution presented a materialist view that influenced a whole generation's understanding of the era.[1]

The Woods built upon this tradition but added a unique theoretical focus. Their framework, "Political Marxism," linked to historian Robert Brenner, argues that capitalism began specifically with English agrarian property relations—particularly the competitive dynamic between landlords and tenant farmers that arose from the way feudalism broke down in England, unlike in France or other countries. As a result, the Woods emphasised the connection between property relations and political ideas.

Political Marxism shows significant shortcomings. Although Ellen Meiksins Wood was a thorough theorist of capitalism and its historical evolution, Political Marxism as a movement lacks a cohesive theory of revolutionary organisation, a clear strategy for capturing state power, and any link to the legacy of the Fourth International. It primarily developed and thrived in academic circles—through journals like New Left Review and Historical Materialism, whose social base is centred on left-wing intellectuals rather than the working class itself. This influences the questions it considers and, importantly, which questions it neglects. The crucial debates on revolutionary strategy—such as how workers can break free from trade union bureaucracies, the relationship between the working class and its leaders, and why the Russian Revolution failed are largely missing from Wood's work.

In A Trumpet of Sedition, it is shown that the great political thinkers from Thomas More (in 1516) through Hobbes and Locke were not just tackling abstract philosophical issues but were also engaging, sometimes secretly and sometimes openly, with the social upheavals caused by the rise of agrarian capitalism. The enclosure of common lands, the dispossession of peasants, and the commercialisation of agriculture were the material forces that led to the political crises of the 17th century and shaped the political ideas that sought to understand these changes.

Thomas More was another figure of profound ambiguity. His 1516 work, Utopia, is frequently regarded as the first depiction of a socialist community in English. However, Wood sees it not merely as a humanist fantasy but as a sharp critique of the dispossession driven by enclosure. More's well-known remark about sheep "devouring men" criticises primitive accumulation, a process that Marx later analysed in Capital as the violent severance of peasants from the land. Nonetheless, More was also rooted in the old order, a supporter of the Church. His utopian ideas lacked revolutionary potential; he could imagine an alternative society, but was unable to connect that vision to any class capable of enacting it.

Wood portrays Hobbes as more than just a defender of monarchy. She argues that his responses to social upheaval stemming from capitalism's rise and conflicts caused by agrarian change are central to understanding his support for a strong sovereign. This stance is seen as a reaction to class conflict and instability, not an abstract view of human nature. Wood challenges the common perspective among some liberal and postmodern scholars that Hobbes was merely a reactionary advocate of authoritarianism. Following Frederick Engels, she places Hobbes among the founders of modern materialism. In her view, Hobbes is positioned alongside Bacon and Locke in a philosophical tradition that, moving from England into the French Enlightenment, influenced the intellectual groundwork for the French Revolution and the development of dialectical and historical materialism.

Thomas Hobbes receives the most philosophically rich treatment. As Ann Talbot's article carefully establishes, “Hobbes played a vital role in the development of modern materialism and formed a link in a chain that passed from Britain to France that was, in turn, an organic part of the political developments that found expression in the French Revolution of 1789. Dialectical materialism and historical materialism would have been impossible without that earlier development. In his battle against the power of the Church, in his courageous stand for materialism at a time when the vagaries of fate favoured superstition, in his struggle to create a science of politics, and his insistence that no area of experience was not susceptible to scientific analysis, Hobbes was a man who transcended his times. But he was a man of his time and expressed the interests of his class and the experiences of the social layer to which he belonged.”[2]

According to the Woods, Hobbes's political theory illustrates the transitional phase of early capitalism: the bourgeoisie still required a strong state to ensure the conditions for economic growth, but its authority needed to be based on rational consent rather than divine right. As Talbot points out, "His conception of the state was, in that sense, a modern one rather than a feudal one." Importantly, Hobbes recognised Cromwell's Commonwealth as a legitimate sovereign once it demonstrated the ability to maintain order. This stance rendered him ineffective as a royalist propagandist and aligned with his materialist philosophy.

James Harrington, author of *Oceana* (1656), which the Woods also examine, is the thinker most clearly linking property to political power. He argues that how land is distributed shapes the government. This "agrarian law' idea is essentially a proto-materialist view of politics, reflecting the gentry class's awareness that had gained victory in the Civil War. They sought a theoretical justification for their political control.

John Locke faces the fiercest ideological critique in this analysis. While mainstream liberal thought regards Locke's *Two Treatises of Government* (1689) as a foundational theory of natural rights, individual freedom, and limited governance, The Woods challenge this view as a form of class mystification. Locke's property theory — that labour combined with nature grants rightful ownership — is not a universal principle but a tool used by the agrarian capitalist class. It endorses enclosure and dispossession by framing private property as a natural right that precedes political society. For Locke, the "consent of the governed" actually means the consent of property owners; those without property lack a genuine political voice. According to Locke, liberty is the liberty of those who already possess property.

Levellers, Diggers, and the "Trumpet of Sedition"

The book's title hints at the suppressed radical currents of the revolution within the bourgeois settlement. The Levellers, led by John Lilburne, advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the elimination of monopolies and tithes. Their 1647 Agreement of the People was a truly democratic constitutional proposal that challenged the limits of parliamentary gentry acceptance. Even more radical were the Diggers, or True Levellers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who believed that genuine freedom depended on the common ownership of land. Winstanley's writings, blending religious language with radical social ideas, are among the most notable documents of 17th-century political thought.

In 1649, Cromwell defeated the Levellers, and local landowners dismantled the Diggers' communes with government approval. The Restoration of 1660 further suppressed these movements. The 1688 'Glorious Revolution,' which placed William of Orange on the throne and endorsed Locke's political ideas as justification, marked the final strengthening of the bourgeois settlement: a palace revolution that safeguarded the propertied classes from both royal absolutism and radical popular movements.

This brings me nicely to the importance of Leon Trotsky’s intervention in the debate over the English bourgeois revolution. Trotsky, in his book Where Is Britain Going? (1925), pointed to "two revolutionary traditions in British history — that of Cromwell in the seventeenth century and later of Chartism. For Trotsky, leadership was decisive, and this is summed up in these words: " Different classes in different conditions and for different tasks find themselves compelled in particular and indeed, the most acute and critical, periods in their history, to vest an extraordinary power and authority in such of their leaders as can carry forward their fundamental interests most sharply and fully. When we speak of dictatorship, we must, in the first place, be clear as to what interests of what particular classes find their historical expression through the dictatorship. For one era, Oliver Cromwell; for another, Robespierre, expressed the historically progressive tendencies in the development of bourgeois society. William Pitt, likewise extremely close to a personal dictatorship, defended the interests of the monarchy, the privileged classes and the top bourgeoisie against a revolution of the petty bourgeoisie that found its highest expression in the dictatorship of Robespierre. The liberal vulgarians customarily say that they are against a dictatorship from the left just as much as from the right. However, in practice, they do not let slip any opportunity to support a dictatorship of the right. But for us, the question is whether one dictatorship moves society forward while another drags it back. Mussolini's dictatorship is a dictatorship of the prematurely decayed, impotent, thoroughly contaminated Italian bourgeoisie: it is a dictatorship with a broken nose. The 'dictatorship of Lenin' expresses the mighty pressure of the new historical class and its superhuman struggle against all the forces of the old society. If Lenin can be juxtaposed with anyone, then it is not with Napoleon, nor even with Mussolini, but with Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be said, with some justice, that Lenin is the proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a definition would at the same time be the highest compliment to the petty-bourgeois seventeenth-century Cromwell.[3]

The Wood’s Contribution and their Limits

The Woods make a meaningful and enduring contribution in A Trumpet of Sedition. Their focus on interpreting political ideas through property relations and class struggle is inherently Marxist. Highlighting how Lockean liberalism functions as a class-based ideology rather than a universal philosophy is especially important, as is their revival of the revolution's overlooked radical traditions.

However, the constraints of Political Marxism are also evident. Its tendency to limit capitalism's origins to English agrarian conditions results in a somewhat narrow analytical scope. More critically, this reflects the academic left tradition that Woods figures in the book excels in historical sociology and intellectual history but remains largely silent on revolutionary strategy and the role of political parties. The Levellers' defeat was due not merely to an insufficiently radical program but also to their lack of a clear theory of state power and an organisational structure capable of challenging it. Winstanley's concept of communal ownership was more radical than Lilburne's constitutionalism, yet neither offered a concrete strategy for seizing political power.

Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was created to address a key issue. In every bourgeois revolution, plebeian and working-class forces are mobilised but ultimately betrayed by the bourgeoisie, which fears social revolution more than the old regime. This lesson is both historical and strategic — the working class must struggle for political independence, led by its own party, aiming not for the completion of a bourgeois revolution but for socialist societal change. The Woods offer a detailed account of how the bourgeoisie in 17th-century England manipulated and later suppressed revolutionary masses. However, their framework lacks a political theory capable of preventing history from repeating itself.

A Trumpet of Sedition is a profound and essential work in materialist intellectual history, recommended for anyone exploring the ideological roots of capitalism. Wood's approach—placing political ideas within their class context—is genuinely Marxist and offers insightful analyses of figures like More, Harrington, Hobbes, and Locke. Its shortcomings are not in its analysis but in what it omits: the shift from merely understanding the world to actively transforming it, along with the programmatic and organisational issues that the Trotskyist movement has always emphasised as integral to any serious socialist politics.

[1] "These are the times ... this is the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[2] The ghost of Thomas Hobbes-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/hobb-m12.html

[3] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm

Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock, Apollo 14 Sept. 2023, 384 pages

“Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.”

Margaret Cavendish

“For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”

Thomas Hobbes

“Thus, Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the eighteenth century, despite all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.”

Frederick Engels- Dialectics of Nature

The first thing that emerges from Francesca Peacock's 2023 book is that Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Duchess of Newcastle, a staunch Royalist author and philosopher, was profoundly influenced by the English bourgeois revolution. Although hostile to the revolution and all it stood for, she utilised her unique intellectual voice to understand what was unfolding around her as the world turned upside down.

The English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s was not, as Whig historians preferred to imagine, a constitutional misunderstanding between king and Parliament. According to historian Christopher Hill, it was a genuine class revolution: the rising bourgeoisie, allied with sections of the gentry, overthrew the feudal monarchical order and cleared the ground for the development of capitalism in England. Hill, the greatest historian of this period, demonstrated that the execution of Charles I was not a ghastly mistake but "a complete break with the feudal past," of profound revolutionary significance. When the people put their king on trial and beheaded him, no subsequent monarch ever sat entirely comfortably on that throne again.

Although she lived over a century before Karl Marx, some left-leaning modern academics and writers who analyse her work through a semi-Marxist lens have even argued that there are strong parallels between her 17th-century natural philosophy and later theories of dialectical materialism. Specifically, her belief in a self-moving, intelligent, and interconnected material world renders her a "precursor" to Marxist dialectical materialism.

This has made Cavendish a genuinely fascinating figure of the 17th-century English bourgeois revolution. A prolific writer across genres (philosophy, poetry, drama, fiction, and early proto-science fiction with The Blazing World), she engaged seriously with the mechanist natural philosophy of her era, debating figures like Descartes, Hobbes, and van Helmont. She was one of the first women admitted to a meeting of the Royal Society. Her intellectual ambitions were remarkable for any person of her time.

The connection between Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes is well worth a look at. Both were central figures in 17th-century English intellectual life, and their relationship illuminates some of the deepest questions in the history of materialism.

Hobbes (1588–1679) was not, as some liberal and postmodern academics would have it, a reactionary ideologue of authoritarianism. He was, as Engels recognised, one of the founders of modern materialism, a thinker who, alongside Bacon and Locke, formed the philosophical chain that ran from England through the French Enlightenment, ultimately contributing to the intellectual conditions that made the French Revolution possible and, beyond it, to dialectical and historical materialism itself.

Hobbes’s connection with Cavendish was both direct and personal. Margaret Cavendish was the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, the very Cavendish family whose patronage sustained Hobbes for over seven decades. Margaret Cavendish lived at the centre of this intellectual world. During the Civil War and the Interregnum, the Cavendish household, in exile on the Continent, was a gathering point for Royalist émigrés and natural philosophers, and Hobbes was part of this milieu.

Her philosophical position puts her in an interesting relationship to Hobbes. Both were materialists but of significantly different kinds. Cavendish rejected the mechanistic materialism that Hobbes (and Descartes, whom she also engaged with critically) championed. Against the view that matter is inert and moved only by external mechanical force, Cavendish argued for a vitalist materialism: matter itself, she held, is active, self-moving, and possessed of something like perception or cognition at every level. She was also an outspoken critic of the experimental method championed by the Royal Society, arguing (in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666) that telescopes and microscopes distort rather than reveal nature. That reason applied to natural observation without a mechanical apparatus is more reliable.

This is where the contradictions of her class position become interesting. She was an aristocratic Royalist — her husband, William Cavendish, was a leading commander for Charles I, and the family spent years in exile during the Interregnum. Her intellectual freedom was inseparable from her class privilege. Her access to books, philosophical correspondence, and scientific circles was a product of her position at the apex of the aristocratic hierarchy, not a challenge to it. She was not, in any meaningful sense, a "revolutionary"; she was a defender of the old feudal-aristocratic order against the revolutionary bourgeoisie that was remaking England.

The bourgeois revolution she opposed was, at the same time, creating social ferment that was generating the Scientific Revolution, dismantling Aristotelian scholasticism, fostering a new interest in nature as a material reality governed by discoverable laws, and challenging religious authority. The very intellectual tools she used were being forged by the same historical process that had destroyed her family's wealth and power. She could not entirely escape the spirit of her age, even as she tried to reconstruct the aristocratic world that had been shattered.

As the Marxist writer David North so eloquently put it, “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 the 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. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.

Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether man couldn't change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.”[1]

Peacock’s first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, makes a valuable contribution by rescuing Cavendish from the obscurity imposed by earlier critics who had laid a considerable number of dead dogs on top of her reputation. However, it exemplifies a trend often found in modern cultural biography: the application of contemporary identity-political categories to historical figures. In this case, Cavendish is portrayed through the lens of modern preoccupations, with her eccentricity, gender nonconformity, prolific publication, and resistance to social expectations for women recast as attributes of a proto-feminist "revolutionary".

This approach reflects more the concerns of today's upper-middle-class academic culture than the realities of 17th-century England. While reading Peacock’s work critically can yield valuable insights into Cavendish's intellectual life, the reader needs to maintain a degree of scepticism regarding the "revolutionary" framing. Such a perspective tends to absorb a complex historical figure into present-day identity-political narratives, thereby oversimplifying the intricate class dynamics that characterised the English Revolution.

Cavendish is now celebrated as an early feminist icon. She was the first woman to participate in a Royal Society meeting, boldly published her work despite norms that expected women to stay hidden, and earned the nickname "Mad Madge" for her unconventional behaviour. This recuperation is not entirely wrong, but it is ideologically loaded in a specific way: it abstracts Cavendish's gender from her class. It presents her eccentricity as a kind of individual heroism.

She stands in this constellation as a paradox: a serious philosophical mind whose very creativity was unlocked by the same revolution she personally mourned. That paradox is not a biographical curiosity; it is a demonstration of the materialist conception of history itself: that the development of human thought is inseparable from the class conflicts that drive history forward.

[1] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html