The coalition government recently published its changes to
the National Curriculum. Aside from the fact that the new changes are way too
narrow, parochial and would return the educational system to the Victorian era,
they have provoked an ideological battle amongst writers, historians and other
academics.
Amongst historians, the battle lines are being drawn between
left and right-leaning historians. It is perhaps with great irony that Tory
government supporters have labelled their opponents Marxists. A recent headline
in the Daily Mail was entitled "I refuse to surrender to the Marxist
teachers hell-bent on destroying our schools: Education Secretary berates 'the
new enemies of promise' for opposing his plan".
The reason I say ironic is that for the last twenty years or so there has been
a concerted attempt to downplay and in some cases deny that Marxists or Marxism
has any role to play in the understanding of history. Certainly, in the area of English civil war historiography,
the attack on Marxism has been over the years heated, persistent and in some
cases aggressive. The purpose of this essay is not to trawl through the entire history
of these attacks except one of them caught my attention, Conrad Russell's essay
The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage".
The essay which was published in history today in 1990 was
more populist in style than academic. Russell's article was perhaps the most
open polemical attack on historical materialism and was published in what has become
a house organ for revisionist historians. His article was also one of many types
of articles in the field of history and politics that sought to cast doubt on historical
materialism and Marxism in general as a method of historical analysis.
One such article was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History
and the Last Man. In that article Fukuyama wrote: "All countries
undergoing economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another: they
must unify nationally on the basis of a centralized state, urbanize, replace
traditional forms of social organization like tribe, sect, and family with
economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for
the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increasingly
linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal
consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to
dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism."
As David Walsh noted "It is painful to read the
gloating stupidities that were churned out by Western academics in the wake of
the demise of the Soviet Union. Seemingly every journal devoted to politics,
current affairs or culture felt obliged to publish a special issue devoted to
the supposed rout of socialism. The word "End" or "Death"
or "Fall" or a synonym had to be included somewhere in the title."
Fukuyama's attack coincided with a systematic attack from
revisionist historians on Marxist historiography in the field of history. This
gained added momentum in the aftermath of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. His
article echoed a school of thought both inside and outside academia which saw
the end of the U.S.S.R as signifying the end of Marxism. Several academics wrongly
saw the collapse of Stalinism as the collapse of Marxism.
According to Conrad Russell, the English bourgeois
revolution was a mirage something illusory and unattainable or an incorrect
conception. Russell's conclusion was there was no revolution in the 1640s, and
for that matter, he does not fancy there being one in 1688 either. It should be
borne in mind that before Russell wrote his article, it was broadly accepted
that some kind of revolution had happened. Whether it was a puritan revolution
or a bourgeois revolution.
Russell's framework for answering the question was there a
revolution? Is a little ropey to say the least? Relying on Professor Alfred
Cobban "Four laws!" was hardly the most objective or for that matter,
scientific yardstick. Cobban like Russell was opposed to Marxism and held
similar views to Russell, albeit in a different area of study, Cobban wrote
extensively on the French revolution. Cobban did not believe it was a social
revolution.
According to Wikipedia "Cobban's views and works in the
macrocosm were to be the inspiration and birthplace of the historical school
now known as Revisionism. Along with George V. Taylor, Cobban vehemently
attacked the traditional Marxist conception of the past within Marx's
dialectic, particularly in his work The Social Interpretation of the French
Revolution. His resultant argument was that the revolution could not be seen as
a social revolution exacerbated by economic changes (specifically the development
of capitalism and by corollary, class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the
nobility). Rather, argued Cobban, the French Revolution should be seen as a
political revolution with social consequences".
Whether Cobban's work, the birthplace of a new form of Revisionism
is open to question. In some sense all historians are revisionists, but this
particular group of historians was united by their hostility to both Whig and
Marxist historiography. It is also strange that Russell, who was a very distinguished
historian, failed in his essay to produce any real detailed examination of Marx's
actual writings on the English bourgeois revolution. Although not prodigious
however he did write extensively on the rise of the bourgeoisie.
In his book, the Communist Manifesto. He notes "The
bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered
form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,
are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into the air all that is holy is profaned, and man is
at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and
his relations with his kind". Marx was familiar with people who denied
revolutions had taken place.
Russell had an annoying habit in this essay of lumping Whig
history together with Marxist. So much so that Russell believed that the Whig
version of the origins of the English Civil War was a dialectical one. It is
not in the realm of this essay to go into any detail suffice to say that
Russell did not know what he was talking about. I am not sure how much Marxist
literature he read, but it is not enough for such an eminent historian to make
such a flippant remark without really backing his argument up.
Russell who would have been fully conversant with the Whig
interpretation of history and he would have also been aware that Sir Herbert
Butterfield's slim volume of that name was, in fact, a polemic, directed at
economic determinism. In examining Russell's theories, it should be noted that he was
not the first to revise Marxist historiography. When this revision started in
Britain is open to much debate. I guess that it started with G.R Elton's High
Road to Civil War essay.
Elton's essay is a strange one. Having read it a few times,
one is struck by the paucity of his argument, which is odd because of the
tremendous influence it had on large numbers of revisionist historians. Elton's
essay was an expression of his conception of how to practice history. In the
essay, he opposes the conception that every historical event can be rationally
explained.
In 'The Practice of History', which was written in response
to E H Carr's 1961 book What is History? Elton commented "All assessment
of evidence must be the work of the intellect, of the reasoning faculty. The
historian cannot but work on the assumption that whatever happened is capable
of rational explanation and that evidence is the product of an act discoverable
by reason. And yet we all know that this is not quite true; that we act, react
and reflect on motives which have little to do with reason and under
influences--such as ill-health, a quarrel with people not involved in the
transaction, whim and lack of thought--that can but rarely appear in the evidence".
Elton's "empirical or thesis-free" method was
attractive to Russell, and he adopted some if not all, Elton's love of empirical
methodology. For me, Russell is a pivotal link between earlier revisionists
such as Elton and their more modern-day counterparts. Russell main argument is that Marxist historiography stood
or fell on the theory that the English Civil War was provoked by the rise of
the gentry/middle class. Which predicted the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Russell believed "the notion of the rising middle
classes is a fallacy" and "together with increasing doubt about the
rising middle classes, historians are showing increasing doubt about the
dialectical model, in which change comes about by the clash of opposites. This
model, as Marx generously admitted, is one we originally owe to Hegel, and its
survival has owed as much to Hegelian as to Marxist influence. The Whig version
of the origins of the English Civil War, for example, was a dialectical view,
and it has come in for heavy criticism in the past fifteen years"
.
Some things need to be said about the above quote. Firstly,
to be honest, you would be hard-pressed to find in Russell's writing when the
bourgeoisie did rise. Russell, in his
essay never really comes close to answering why before he wrote his essay that
it was generally accepted that a revolution of some kind did take place in the
1640s. This was accepted by serious historians for the better part of three
centuries
Even during the 17th century some of the more perceptive
writers saw that a revolution of some kind had taken place. Vernon F Snow wrote
an important essay outlining the use of the word revolution during the 17th
century. Snow says "One of the first writers-if, not the
first to apply the concept specifically to the English political upheaval was
Matthew Wren, the son of Dr Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely. Sometime after the
trial and execution of Charles I, this royalist wrote a treatise entitled Of
the Origin and Progress of the Revolution in England. 'The world is full', he
wrote, 'of both books and pamphlets, who have nothing to do but to teach their
readers these events; and the design of writing this was only summarily to
treat of the most general causes of those strange revolutions we have seen."
Russell is strangely silent on this varied historical usage
of the word revolution. His essay almost takes the form of a religious
exorcism. According to Russell "historians are showing increasing doubt
about the dialectical model. Who are these historians? What are they saying and
more importantly, what is their political?. When Russell ties the theory of a rising Middle Class or
bourgeoisie to the fate of the Marxist historians he is doing a disservice to
his profession. Strangely, Russell does not elaborate on the "Storm over
the Gentry" debate. Because if he did, he would have had to tackle what
leading Marxist historians such as Hill did say on the matter?
Russell mentions nothing in his article about Hill being
very wary of the debate over the rise or decline of the gentry. The debates
over the gentry which took place in the early 1950s were for Marxists far more
complex than just placing their entire historical faith on the rise of the middle
class. As Norah Carlin notes in her excellent essay "The
gentry were, in origin, simply the mass of the feudal landowning class in
England, where only the upper crust of this class had distinctive 'noble'
titles. Both Marx and Engels suggested that the development of commodity
production in agriculture in sixteenth-century England and the two-way social
mobility between the gentry and the bourgeoisie made the gentry natural allies
of the bourgeoisie in the revolution. Tawney's thesis went much further than
this. According to Tawney, the gentry were a revolutionary social class in
themselves: a distinct social class, fundamentally opposed to the old 'aristocratic'
ruling class; the revolution was made by and for them.
But it is in fact very hard to separate 'gentry' from 'aristocracy'
as distinct social classes. Their sources of wealth were the same – land, with
an admixture of trade and office-holding. 'Traditional' and 'commercial'
attitudes to wealth (which Tawney proposes as an essential difference between
the two) are found equally on both sides of the barrier of noble title. In
terms of power, noble and gentle landowners shared the ruling positions in
provincial society, both had access to positions at court, and they even (as
Lords and Commons, both in opposition to Charles I in 1640) shared Parliament.
Mobility between the two groups was very common, for a gentleman could easily
be made a lord (under James I, he could even directly buy the title), while a
lord's younger sons were automatically mere gentlemen. The gentry were, it
seems, born and bred members of the existing ruling class under the Stuart
monarchy.
The 'rise of the gentry' thus becomes a gaping trap for
Marxists into which perhaps only Perry Anderson of New Left Review has jumped
with both feet. For Anderson, the English Civil War was 'a "bourgeois
revolution" only by proxy', because it was made by a section of the ruling
class. [6] But if a bourgeois revolution can be made by proxy from above, can a
proletarian revolution? If a section of the ruling class could break the last
bonds of feudalism on behalf of the bourgeoisie, could not a section of the
bourgeoisie set up socialism on behalf of the working class?. The way out of
this situation lies in a re-examination of the actual role of the gentry in the
English Civil War – the very task at which the New Historians have been
beavering away in the belief that they were destroying Marxism.
Russell's original point was that Marxism stood or fell based
on a rising gentry. The "Storm over the gentry debate is probably one of
the most important in civil war historiography. The original debate was centred
on R H Tawney's thesis of a rising gentry later supported by Lawrence Stone who
in 1948, who was close to the historical positions of R.H. Tawney published in
the Economic History Review entitled "The Anatomy of the Elizabethan
Aristocracy". Tawney and Stone's arguments were countered by historians
Hugh Trevor Roper and later by J H Hexter.
It would be a mistake to describe both Tawney or Stone as
Marxists, and their positions regarding the gentry were not Marxist positions.
This is not to say that their work is not without great merit and should be
studied at great length. Although Stone himself did describe himself in the
early part of his career as being a young Marxist, his mistakes were the
product of incomplete assimilation of the Marxist method of Historical
Materialism. Stone had a major problem in that he never really understood the
difference between genuine Marxism and a crude form of economic determinism.
Stone himself soon moved away from any link with Marxist historiography, and in
his own words he became in 1987, "an old fashioned Whig".
Hill's positions on the debate are instructive. He was
critical of both sides and that the debate was more to do with the developing
Cold War anti-communism than merely a debate over civil war historiography.
Hill also called for further research into the economic positions of people on
both sides who took part in the war/revolution. Hill was also a good enough Marxist historian to understand
that the real target of the debate was not just Tawney or Stone or himself for
that matter but of Marxism itself.
The question is should Marx and his method
of investigating and explaining historical phenomena be held responsible for
the implementation of his method by subsequent historians Marxist or otherwise.
After all, if a patient dies on the operating table, should that lead to the
questioning and repudiation of the whole history of medical science?
To buttress his claim that the middle class did not rise at
this time or that there was a revolution, Russell leans on the ultra-conservative
historian J H Hexter. Hexter's article the Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor
England published in 1961. Russell's use of Hexter is natural to bolster his
argument but to use a rebuttal piece by K.G. Davies called The Mess of the
Middle Class in the same paragraph is a little weird.
I am all for historical balance, but this seems a little
strange. I could be wrong but Russell's choice of historians to defend his
charge gives the appearance that Russell did not give much thought to them.
They almost seem to be thrown in as an afterthought. He does not detail much
about their work, and most annoyingly no footnotes are used, making research
difficult.
Hexter's most important essay entitled "The Storm over
the Gentry" which Russell strangely ignores was published in a
mainstream magazine after it was turned down by several leading American
historical journals. Hexter's main criticism was that left-wing historians relied
too heavily on a social determinist argument.
Hexter who has been described as a Neo Whig and was as
William H Dray said "unabashedly, and often polemically Whiggish. For
Hexter, the English Civil War was to be seen as the defence of traditional
English liberties against an aggressive Crown. This position contrasted in the
1970s with the revisionist views of Conrad Russell and others who disputed both
the uniqueness of the English Civil War and its connection with ideas of
liberty. However, since the revisionists were also explicitly anti-Marxist,
their stance owed a great deal to Hexter's critiques. Russell, in particular,
echoed Hexter's emphasis on continuity in English political values, Hexter's
distinction between the Civil War and the subsequent revolution, and Hexter's
belief that contingencies better explained the coming of the war, while
rejecting Hexter's view that Parliament was acting out of a clear-cut sense of
constitutional obligation and embracing instead the view that religious
conflicts and practical problems in the composite monarchy were more decisive".
In Dray's essay, he attempts to try to define what is to be
a Whig historian. For instance, Hexter's fascination with constitutional
matters certainly would put him in the Whig camp. Russell went on "Another flaw in the model is that, in
its pure and original form, it does not recognize the power of ideas as an
independent variable. Ideas do not simply reflect the economic circumstances of
their thinkers. Where they do correlate with the economic circumstances of
their thinkers, they do so in a way so various that a much more flexible
instrument than that of class is needed to explain it. It might be possible to
construct an explanation of why Victorian poll books show weavers voting
Liberal, and butchers voting Conservative, but if so, it is an explanation
which would have more to do with industrial psychology than with class
conflict. In the English Civil War, people's allegiance normally correlates
with their religion, but their religion does not correlate with their social
background. Even in areas which were strongly of one persuasion, such as
Northampton, we find people like the man who was recommended for a job on the
ground that he was 'of Northampton, but I thank God not of that persuasion'.
There is no way the material can be explained unless by admitting the autonomy
of the mind".
Russell's divorce of ideas from their economic or material
base is common to most of the later revisionist historians. Hill disagreed with
Russell's downplaying of the link between ideas and their material basis. In
his book The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, he sought to use
the method of Marxism to understand the complex and dialectical relationship
between ideas and their origins.
In the introduction, he states "Marx himself did not
fall into the error of thinking that men's idea was merely a pale reflection of
their economic needs, with no history of their own: but some of his successors,
including many who would not call themselves Marxist, have been far more
economic-determinist than Marx. It seems that anybody of thought which plays a
major in History – Luther's, Rousseau's, Marx's own-takes on because it meets
the needs of a significant group in the society in which it comes into
prominence".
Another reason Russell believed that the revolution was a
mirage is his point that the gentry or bourgeois fought on both sides so,
therefore, how could you talk of a bourgeois revolution. He made the correct
point that the social origins of the civil war bourgeoisie were not clear cut
and that capitalists were on both sides. For him, the Civil War was nothing out
of the ordinary and was largely a series of breakdowns or mistakes from leading
players such as Charles Ist.
There have been varying degrees of success of how well
Marxist historians have applied historical materialism to the study of the
English revolution. The historian Robert Ashton in his essay The Civil War and
the Class Struggle outlined the pitfalls encountered by Marxists historians.
Ashton is correct in his analysis of the tensions between the king and growing
section of the bourgeoisie over several issues that went back over a few
decades at least.
Ashton does not subscribe to the revisionist argument that
just because there were bourgeois elements on both sides of the war that it
discounts the Marxist theory of a bourgeois revolution. Ashton points out that
this makes it harder for a clear cut analysis but does not rule out the possibility
of doing one.
For Ashton, the makeup of the 17th century was complex and
varied. In his article On Charles and the City of London contained in Essays in
the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England; he believes the
monarchy had the support of a small but significant section of the bourgeoisie
who stood to gain if Charles won the war. On parliaments, side stood varying
different sections of the bourgeoisie. While this scenario does make it
difficult to make generalizations, it does not as Russell believes make a
Marxist analysis null and void.
Having read enough of Hill, I am clear that he accepted that
there were gentlemen and landowners on the Parliamentary side in the Civil War
and small farmers and artisans on the Royalist side, i.e. different sections of
the bourgeoisie and Aristocracy. From his knowledge of early Soviet historians and his study
of the writings of Marx and Engels, he never assumed that this was a chemically
pure revolution. In fact, in his major writings, he makes the point that large
numbers of people fought and took sides outside of purely economic reasons.
According to Ann Talbot Hill was "sensitive enough to
his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of
diverse social backgrounds into the struggle against the king and well-grounded
enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and
archaic guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution
ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of
theory to explain what they were doing".
Russell rejected this analysis and reiterated that "historians
are showing increasing doubt about the dialectical model, in which change comes
about by the clash of opposites. This model, as Marx generously admitted, is
one we originally owe to Hegel, and its survival has owed as much to Hegelian
as to Marxist influence. The Whig version of the origins of the English Civil
War, for example, was a dialectical view, and it has come in for heavy
criticism in the past fifteen years".
Marx did indeed owe a debt to Hegel. Marxism was a
development on from Hegel's philosophy. Russell is correct that one of the
basic components of Marxism is the conception of the unity of opposites. Marx
took what was the best or materialist from Hegel and discarded his idealist
component.
Ilya Stavinsky explains this well "any development, in a
wide sense of this word, consists of the birth of the event, its development,
in the narrow sense of this word, and its death. So with time, the birth of the
event transforms into its opposition, the death of the event. Consequently,
birth and death are opposite meanings, and for this reason, they constitute a dialectical
contradiction.
The essence of the dialectical logic consists in the fact
that it describes the development of this contradiction, i.e. it shows the
transition of the event from one stage, the birth, to its opposite stage,
death. For this purpose, dialectical logic possesses by its system of category
and by its abstract laws. By using them, dialectical logic can grasp in detail
the process of any development independent of its character, whether it is a social
or natural event. Such categories are form, content, and essence, quality,
quantity, elementary form, particular form, universal form, and opposites, real
and formal contradiction and so on. Examples of laws: the transformation of
content into forms, the transformation of quantity into quality, unity of
opposites and so on".
Marx tied the study of history with the study of society
itself. If Russell had probed a little further in his research, he would
have found that the main writers and philosophers during the 17th century
attempted albeit gingerly to understand their revolution along those similar
lines. On this matter, Russell could have done no worse than
consulted several articles written by a number of the Soviet historians who
wrote on this matter. It would have perhaps given his arguments more objectivity.
One such writer Evgeny Pashukanis said "The
English Revolution of the seventeenth century gave birth to the basic
directions of bourgeois social thought, and forcibly advanced the scientific,
i.e. materialist, understanding of social phenomena. "It suffices to
mention such a work as Oceana – by the English writer Harrington, and which
appeared soon after the English Revolution of the seventeenth century – in
which changes in political structure are related to the changing distribution
of landed property. It suffices to mention the work of Barnave – one of the
architects of the great French Revolution – who in the same way sought
explanations of political struggle and the political order in property
relations. In studying bourgeois revolutions, French restorationist historians
– Guizot, Mineaux and Thierry – concluded that the leitmotif of these
revolutions was the class struggle between the third estate (i.e. the
bourgeoisie) and the privileged estates of feudalism and their monarch. This is
why Marx, in his well-known [15]letter to Weydemeyer, indicates that the theory
of the class struggle was known before him".
The war was a qualitative turning point. One cannot underestimate
the importance of an investigation into the growing capitalistic nature of
agriculture which is key to understand who fought and why they did. If it is correct to say that we are dealing with a class of
landowners who held sway before and after 1642 what was the material or
economic basis of this power and how did it reflect in the political
superstructure.
Another aspect of Marxist analysis that was attacked by
Russell and a whole host of subsequent revisionist historians has been the
development of the Base and superstructure argument. As Marx pointed out "In the social production of
their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and
independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a
definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum
total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.
"At a certain stage of their development, the material
productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of
production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the
property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of
development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic
foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly
transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be
made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and
the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it
out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of
himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own
consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather
from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between
the social productive forces and the relations of production.
No social order ever perishes before all the productive
forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations
of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence
have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always
sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more
closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the
material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process
of formation".
But no all historians rejected the base and superstructure
argument. Robert Ashton writing on the English Revolution makes an interesting
point on some historians while not being Marxist did use some use of Marxist
ideas. Ashton said "The idea of religious, political and constitutional
issues as an ideological superstructure based on foundations of material and
class interests has been influential far beyond the ranks of Marxist
historians. It has indeed been adopted, in part at least and with a radically
different emphasis, by some of their more formidable and determined opponents."
While to the casual observer of historical debate these
arguments could be viewed as Storm in a teapot what lay behind them was Russell's
systematic attack on any materialist approach to historical understanding,
smuggled in under the guise of a revaluation of the English revolution.
Speaking of Russell Jim Holstun described his work as a 'manifesto
for historical revisionism', Holstun makes the point that Russell sought
another way to explain the social changes that were taken place in the English
revolution that historians should concentrate on the upper yeomanry, the
middling sort of people who were rising according to Russell' not so much at
the expense of the gentry, as at the expense of smallholders and the labouring
poor'. Russell would often make the point that he not conversant with the term's
feudalism and capitalism.
Russell's essay is heavy on what was negative about Marxist
historiography but is extremely poor when it comes to an alternative thesis.
This negativity was picked up upon Mary Fullbrook who said "The negative
emphasis of much of revisionist work so far has quite understandably provoked
the sort of reaction quoted by John Morrill in the preface to the new edition
of his book, The Revolt of the Provinces: 'One colleague and friend wryly
accused me of "explaining why no civil war broke out in England in
1642"... '. But revisionists feel no great compulsion to develop a
comprehensive explanation since they consider that the object of explanation
has itself been misinterpreted: the English Revolution was not a
world-historically important event requiring a commensurate scale of
explanation, but rather represents, at least in origins, a somewhat bloody tiff
between a specific monarch and certain factions among his subjects."
To conclude, where does this debate over an essay written
over twenty years ago leave us? Whether Russell knew how much damage his and
other attacks on the Marxist historiography of the civil war would do is a moot
point. I believe he was acting very consciously when writing his essay and was
genuinely hostile to Marxism. While better writers than me have been able to
refute the main thrust of his arguments, this debate does not take place in a
vacuum and some consequences flow from his ideas.
There has been a definite shift away from studies that have
been commonly associated with Marxism or "history from below" to a more
right-wing "History from above" over the last 20 years.
As confirmed by this article in the New York Times "In
History Departments, It is Up With Capitalism. It goes on A spectre is haunting
university history departments: the spectre of capitalism. After decades of "history
from below," focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people
seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to
what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the
bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy".
What damage this shift away from Marxist historiography has
done would need a PhD thesis. One thing is clear that the paucity of research
into the economic changes taking place in the 17th century will badly limit our
knowledge of the English revolution. I am not saying that Russell is solely
responsible for the shift in academic circles both here and America. But his
essay did play a small part in creating this hostility to Marxism.
