Historians on the Levellers and the English Revolution 1642-1652

by Chris Thompson

I am afraid that it is not true to claim that there was a dearth of works on the Levellers before Christopher Hill and other members of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group began work to rescue them from historical oblivion or that this was the responsibility of Whig historians. S.R.Gardiner considered the Levellers’ influence in the period from 1647-1649 in some detail in Volume IV of his history of the English Civil War and in his biography of Oliver Cromwell: the first Agreement of the People, now known to be the product not of Leveller thinking but of a group of radicals around Henry Marten, appeared in 1889 in his Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution.

It was C.H.Firth who edited and published The Clarke Papers, which throw such light on relations between the leaders of the New Model Army, the Agitators and Levellers, between 1891 and 1901. Eduard Bernstein’s book, Cromwell and Communism; socialism and democracy in the great English Civil War was published in German in 1895 and in an English translation in 1930. G.P.Gooch’s work, The history of English democratic ideas in the 17th century, first appeared in 1898 and T.C.Pease’s book, The Leveller Movement; A Study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War, was published in 1916. Margaret James’s book, Social Problems and Policies during the Puritan Revolution 1640-1660, was published in 1930 as was J.W.Gough’s article, ‘The Agreements of the People’ in History in the following year. The truth is that there had been a significant amount of work done on the Levellers long before they attracted the attention of Christopher Hill or of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group.

It is true that there were Marxist historians of importance working in the pre- and post-Second World War periods. But, by the early-1970s, their influence was largely spent as far as the early modern period was concerned as was that of Lawrence Stone. Marxist influence had never been overwhelming or absolutely predominant even if it had attracted the support of, perhaps, a third of the specialists in this period. Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper and J.H.Hexter had seen to that. ‘Revisionism’ in the sense you use the term was born in the late-1960s and was itself defunct by the early-1990s.

To be a non-Marxist is not to be a ‘revisionist’. Personally, I prefer a situation in which a range of influences and trends shape the historiography of the period before, during and after the struggles of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. Critical attacks on Kishlansky, Morrill and Russell will not revive historical materialism of the kind advocated in the 1950s and 1960s. The Levellers were an interesting phenomenon and important for their ideas amidst the competing political and religious debates of the late-1640s but their support was relatively small and they were gone in the space of a very few years. Such a transient phenomenon deserves serious historical evaluation rather than hagiography.

Sir Michael Livesey (1614–c.1665): A Biographical Sketch

Sir Michael Livesey holds a unique and often confusing position in the political and military history of the English Civil War. Born in 1614 into a family gaining prominence in the English gentry, he exemplifies the complex relationship between local politics, religious beliefs, and the revolutionary movements that transformed mid-seventeenth-century England. Although he is later remembered as one of the most passionate of the king’s judges, his radical roots stem from a world far more complex than the clear-cut choices of the 1640s suggest.

Origins and Family Standing

A family influenced Livesey’s early life with a stable and growing social status. His grandfather was sheriff of Surrey, and his father established the Kentish branch of the Livesey family, embedding them in local society and politics. “The family soon became settled, so much so that they became essential community members.”

Their rise was solidified in 1627 when the Liveseys received a baronetcy, establishing their position within the county’s elite. This heritage highlights the surprising nature of Livesey’s later political path. ‘Considering the family’s high standing, it is somewhat puzzling that Michael Livesey was such a key figure for Parliament and also a radical independent.’

Early Political Activity and Puritan Zeal

By the late 1630s and early 1640s, Livesey was recognised for his strict Puritan views. As Jason Pearcy’s biography states, he supplied information “against recusants to the Long Parliament in November 1640.” His activism intensified in 1642, when he became a leading figure in the Kentish Petition of Grievances. This document sparked a strong parliamentary backlash and threatened the promoters with legal action.

Parliament’s declaration underscores the importance given to the petition: "Whosoever shall be found to further or to countenance this Petition… shall be held to be Disturbers of the peace of this Kingdom." Livesey’s involvement positioned him among the county’s most politically assertive individuals.

Civil War Service and Reputation

During the First Civil War, Livesey led a Kentish regiment and served as sheriff in 1643. His military career was characterised by both success and controversy. He was recognised for his strict tactics against Royalist troops. Still, his soldiers were often criticised for misconduct and looting, leading to warnings that he needed to control them "to prevent further alienation of the community."

Despite these tensions, Livesey’s political stance became more radical over time. He aligned with the Independent faction, which strongly advocated religious freedom, political reform, and, eventually, the abolition of the monarchy. His regiment supported Pride’s Purge in December 1648, an event that removed moderate members from the House of Commons and set the stage for the king’s trial.

Regicide

Livesey’s most lasting historical significance is his role as a regicide. Trusted by Cromwell and the military leadership, he served on the High Court of Justice and attended every session of Charles I’s trial. His signature ranks fifth on the death warrant. His passionate involvement is vividly described as: "He was so eager that he was almost waiting with a quill in his hand, dripping with ink." This depiction, both somewhat humorous and unsettling, captures the fervour with which Livesey embraced the revolutionary moment.

Motives and Historical Debate

Livesey left no diary and wrote little, making his personal motivations difficult to reconstruct. Historians have long debated why members of the gentry — men like Livesey — chose the parliamentary and even radical cause. Conrad Russell famously argued that long‑term structural causes cannot explain gentry radicalism, suggesting instead that Charles I’s frustrations were easier to understand than the gentry’s revolutionary impulses.

Russell states, “It is certainly easier to understand why sheer frustration might have driven Charles to fight… than… why the English gentry might have wanted to make a revolution.” In contrast, Marxist historians like Christopher Hill highlight the rise of new class forces and ideological movements.

Ann Talbot characterises Hill’s approach as identifying how social currents brought together people from diverse backgrounds to oppose the king. In contrast, localist historians like Alan Everitt and John Morrill offer a different perspective, highlighting that regional concerns—such as local grievances, religious conflicts, and county politics—had a greater impact on gentry actions than broad national ideologies. Morrill’s book, 'Revolt of the Provinces,' is a key work representing this view.

Conclusion

Sir Michael Livesey’s life exemplifies the contradictions of the English Revolution. A man of established gentry background, he became one of the most radical Independents and a willing participant in the king’s execution. His actions cannot be reduced to personal temperament or simple ideological commitment. Instead, they reflect the complex pressures of local politics, Puritan religious fervour, emerging class realignments, and the broader revolutionary crisis of the 1640s.

Marx's closing quote aptly summarises Livesey’s importance: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please…” Livesey was decisive and often passionate, yet he always operated within a rapidly changing world. His life vividly demonstrates how individuals can navigate — and sometimes even hasten — revolutionary forces.

 

Alison Plowden’s In a Free Republic: Life in Cromwell’s England (2006)

Alison Plowden’s In a Free Republic offers a social history of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, depicting daily life from the execution of Charles I in 1649 to the monarchy's restoration in 1660. As a prolific popular historian of Tudor and Stuart courts, Plowden approaches the era with the same narrative style that characterised her earlier works on Elizabeth I and the domestic intrigues of the sixteenth century. The book is engaging, well-crafted, and filled with anecdotal details. However, it ultimately does not fully capture the English Revolution as a true revolution.

The English Revolution was the first major bourgeois revolution and a pivotal turning point in world history. It overthrew the feudal state, dismantled absolutism, and paved the way for capitalist growth. The conflict involved the emerging bourgeoisie and parts of the gentry fighting against the monarchy, the old aristocracy, and remaining feudal social structures. Additionally, it was a moment when propertyless groups—the soldiers of the New Model Army, the Levellers, and the Diggers—tried to extend the revolution beyond what the propertied classes found acceptable.

While Plowden’s book is charming, it cannot fundamentally explore these questions. It functions more as popular antiquarianism than for historical analysis, providing descriptions of Puritan dress, household customs, religious fears, and the theatre closures. However, it fails to address the core fact of the era: a king was tried and executed by representatives of a new social class. The revolution remains hidden behind its decorative elements.

The Ideological Work of the Title

Plowden’s title, 'In a Free Republic,' is quite telling. Cromwell’s England was considered 'free” only within a narrow, class-based context, where the bourgeoisie had freed itself from absolutist restrictions. It was not a true democracy. The voting rights remained limited to property owners. Parliament was often purged when it did not align with Cromwell’s class interests.

The Levellers, advocating for universal male suffrage, legal equality, and the end of oligarchic control, faced imprisonment, silencing, and even execution. Cromwell’s military campaign in Ireland was a colonial terror that left a permanent scar on history. Describing this society as a “free republic” without addressing the contradiction echoes the ideological mystifications of both the seventeenth-century ruling class and the present day.

The Limits of Popular History

Plowden's approach aligns with British popular history, characterised by storytelling, anecdotes, and a focus on personalities. While this style offers clarity, accessibility, and rich human detail, it inherently lacks the capacity for deeper analysis of class forces, modes of production, ideological struggles, or the political economy of revolution.

Trotsky’s critique of Whig historiography is directly relevant. Popular history tends to oversimplify social struggles by shifting focus from class conflicts to individual stories. The English Revolution is often portrayed merely as a setting for narratives about Puritan families, fashions, food, and customs.

A social history of “life in Cromwell’s England” risks becoming a mere idyllic scene unless it engages with the period's revolutionary essence. Plowden’s approach falls short in examining: The New Model Army as a political entity, not just a military force; The Putney Debates, where ordinary soldiers debated sovereignty and equality; The Levellers, advocating for universal male suffrage and legal equality; The Diggers, challenging private property; Cromwell’s class-based purges; and the Irish campaign, seen not as an anomaly but as a key act of bourgeois consolidation. These events are central to the English Revolution. Without acknowledging them, the era risks being reduced to a costume drama.

Plowden and the Revisionist Turn

Modern academic historiography has moved away from Christopher Hill’s Marxist approach, now claiming: there was no rising bourgeoisie; the revolution was not truly revolutionary; class was not the key factor; and Cromwell was a conservative defending traditional liberties. This reinterpretation is not apolitical; it aligns with the ideological interests of current capitalism, which promotes the view that revolutions are impossible, class struggle is illusory, and ordinary people cannot intentionally change society. Plowden is not a revisionist scholar, but her method aligns with this trend by default. A narrative of daily life without class analysis becomes a soft form of revisionism: the revolution is present only as décor.

Plowden, Hill, Russell, and Morrill on Cromwell’s England

Alison Plowden’s In a Free Republic: Life in Cromwell’s England (2006) occupies an ambiguous position within the historiography of the English Revolution. It is not a work of academic scholarship, nor does it pretend to be. It belongs to the genre of British popular history—narrative, anecdotal, personality‑driven, focused on domestic life and social texture. However, because it treats the decade of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, it inevitably enters a field shaped by profound historiographical conflict.

To grasp Plowden’s book, it is essential to place it within the context of the three main interpretive schools of the past fifty years: Christopher Hill’s Marxist perspective, Conrad Russell’s revisionist rebuttal, and John Morrill’s post-revisionist synthesis. While Plowden does not directly address these scholars, her omissions, focus areas, and storytelling decisions subtly reflect her implicit alignment and the ideological implications of her approach.

Christopher Hill: Revolution as Class Struggle

Christopher Hill (1912–2003), the leading Marxist historian of the English Revolution, stands in stark contrast to Plowden’s approach. Hill’s work—The Century of Revolution, God’s Englishman, The World Turned Upside Down—insists that the mid-seventeenth-century crisis was a bourgeois revolution, driven by conflicts between the rising bourgeoisie and sections of the gentry; the monarchy and the feudal aristocracy; and the propertyless masses who sought to push the revolution further.

Hill’s method is structural, dialectical, and materialist. He treats the New Model Army as a political force, the Levellers and Diggers as expressions of class consciousness, and Cromwell as the representative of a class whose interests determined the limits of the revolution.

Hill’s key insight—that Charles I's execution was a deliberate revolutionary act—falls outside Plowden’s perspective. In a Free Republic, the trial and execution seem like background events rather than the pivotal moment that established the republic she discusses daily. Hill would argue that discussing “life in Cromwell’s England” requires explaining why Cromwell’s England existed.

Plowden’s book is thus not merely incomplete; it is methodologically incompatible with Hill’s project. Where Hill sees class struggle, Plowden sees atmosphere. Where Hill sees revolution, Plowden sees period colour. Where Hill foregrounds the masses, Plowden foregrounds domestic detail. Hill’s absence from her narrative is itself a historiographical statement.

Conrad Russell: The Revisionist Counter‑Revolution

Conrad Russell (1937–2004), a prominent revisionist historian, embodies the intellectual resistance to Hill’s ideas. In works such as The Causes of the English Civil War and Parliamentary History, he contends that there was no rising bourgeoisie, that class was not the decisive factor, that the Civil War resulted from short-term political mismanagement, and that the revolution was not truly revolutionary. Russell’s approach is intentionally anti-Marxist; he dismisses structural explanations, rejects the notion of coherent class interests, and views the conflict as a political crisis of the state rather than a societal one. His work relies heavily on empirical research, but that empiricism is used to undermine the era's revolutionary significance.

Plowden’s book aligns implicitly with Russell’s revisionism—not because she adopts his arguments, but because her method produces the same effect. By focusing on daily life, customs, and personalities, she reproduces the revisionist tendency to treat the Commonwealth as an aberration, a curious interlude rather than a decisive transformation. The revolution becomes a backdrop, not a subject.

Russell would likely have approved of Plowden’s approach to the Levellers, Diggers, and New Model Army as not being political groups with clear social agendas. He would have supported her avoidance of class analysis. Additionally, he would have appreciated her portrayal of Cromwell as a multifaceted figure rather than solely as a class representative. While Plowden’s book is not revisionist in its scholarship, its tone and approach have a revisionist effect, making the revolution seem more familiar and domesticated.

John Morrill: Post‑Revisionism and the “War of Religion”

John Morrill (b. 1946), a leading post-revisionist historian, seeks to integrate Hill and Russell by shifting the interpretive focus. He contends that the English Revolution was not primarily a class struggle or a constitutional crisis, but a war of religion. Morrill views the revolution as a conflict over differing visions of godly reformation, portraying the New Model Army as a Puritan institution, Cromwell as a providentialist warrior, and the Levellers as political radicals driven by religious beliefs. While acknowledging the period's revolutionary nature, Morrill shifts the primary driving force from class to religion. Plowden’s book also emphasises religion, but with less analytical depth—her Puritans are moralistic and socially restrictive but not political, her Cromwell is devout but not ideologically shaped by religion, and her republic is godly but not revolutionary.

Where Morrill sees religion as a structuring force, Plowden sees it as cultural texture. She adopts the surface of Morrill’s argument while omitting its substance.

Plowden’s Position: Pastoralisation of Revolution

Placed alongside Hill, Russell, and Morrill, Plowden’s historiographical stance becomes evident: she avoids class analysis, as Russell does, emphasises religion only as an atmosphere, as Morrill does, and lacks Hill’s revolutionary framework. Her book does not challenge historiographical debates; instead, it retreats from them, presenting a vision of a republic without revolution, a society without class struggle, and a decade devoid of dialectic. This approach is politically charged, as it idealises revolution within domestic life, thereby supporting the ideological needs of contemporary capitalism. It dismisses the idea that ordinary people can consciously change society, denies that revolutions have causes, agents, and outcomes, and suggests that history is not driven by class struggle. Overall, Plowden’s work reflects a broader cultural move toward depoliticising the past.

The Continuing Relevance of the English Revolution

The English Revolution remains one of the most consequential events in world history. It was the first of the great bourgeois revolutions that cleared the ground for capitalist development. Its contradictions—above all, the conflict between the property‑owning classes who made the revolution and the propertyless masses who wanted to carry it further—prefigure the struggles of every subsequent revolution, including the socialist revolution that the working class must still make.

Plowden’s book, for all its merits as a work of popular history, cannot illuminate these questions. It offers the reader a republic without revolution, a society without class struggle, a decade without its dialectic. It is a portrait of Cromwell’s England in which Cromwell’s revolution has been politely removed.

For readers seeking to understand the English Revolution as a world‑historical event, Plowden’s book must be read critically—and supplemented by works that grasp the period in its full social and political depth.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• The Putney Debates, ed. Michael Mendle (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652).
• John Lilburne, England’s New Chains Discovered (1649).
• The Trial of Charles I, ed. J. G. Muddiman (Everyman, 1928).
• Oliver Cromwell, Letters and Speeches, ed. Thomas Carlyle (1845).

Marxist and Socialist Historiography

• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Penguin, 1972).
• Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (Routledge, 1961).
• Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Penguin, 1970).
• Ann Talbot, “Christopher Hill and the Socialist Tradition,” World Socialist Web Site (2003).
• Leon Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? (1925).
• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
• Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (1850).

Revisionist and Post‑Revisionist Historiography

• Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990).
• John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces (Longman, 1976).
• Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed (Penguin, 1996).
• Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002). 

Popular History

• Alison Plowden, In a Free Republic: Life in Cromwell’s England (Sutton Publishing, 2006).
• Alison Plowden, The Young Elizabeth (1971).
• Alison Plowden, Marriage With My Kingdom (1977).

 

Christopher Thompson on: Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (Routledge Keegan Paul. 1972)

(This is a reply to my original post on Lawrence Stone’s The Cause of the English Revolution. I am not sure whether I am going to reply to it. Needless to say I do not agree with some his remarks although some clarification might be in order. I would welcome any other comments from my readers. Please do not be shy. All posts within reason will be published)

The publication of this work in 1972 offered sixth-form pupils and first-year undergraduates a useful overview of the origins and causes of the English Revolution from the other side of the Atlantic. Since his move to Princeton in 1963, Stone had become increasingly interested in the work of anthropologists and political scientists just as he had been in the 1940s in that of economic historians and in the light, that such work might throw on long-standing historical problems.

Whatever subscription he had once paid to the influence of Marx and Tawney had long since gone by the time in the late-1950s and early-1960s that he composed The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Stone was certainly never a Marxist in the sense that Christopher Hill was. His early teaching at Princeton was, in any case, devoted, as the festschrift in his honour shows, to a survey course on the evolution of English society between c.1500 and c.1700. Stone certainly liked being at the centre of academic attention and of controversy, hence his production of works like this although it was also true to say that he had, by the early-1970s, become cut off from the main currents of academic research in England.

The origins of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s dislike of Stone did not lie in the latter storming out of a revision class at Christ Church College in Oxford. In fact, the quarrel over the gentry arose from Hugh Trevor-Roper lending his transcripts on aristocratic indebtedness from the Recognizances for Debt then held in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. Stone used this material without Trevor-Roper’s permission and with the most misleading of indications as to how he had acquired it in his 1948 article in The Economic History Review.

Furthermore, because he had not understood the technicalities of this source, Stone had assigned to the late-Tudor peers levels of debt twice their real size. Trevor-Roper was perfectly entitled to criticise Stone’s work and, indeed, that of Tawney whose stature as an historian was considerably higher in 1950 than that of Stone but whose analytical errors were, as J.P.Cooper shortly thereafter pointed out, even more serious

The controversy probably stimulated more interesting research into English history in the seventeenth-century than any before or possibly since. Hugh Trevor-Roper was a friend of Jack Hexter until the publication of Hexter’s essay, Storm over the Gentry, in Encounter in May, 1958. For several years thereafter, their friendship was in abeyance. Politically, they were very different indeed, as anyone who knew them both would understand. There is no significance in the funding of that magazine for their historiographical positions.

The problem with Stone’s 1972 work was not just its use of sociological jargon like ‘multiple dysfunction’, ‘preconditions’, ‘precipitants’ and ‘triggers’ but also its antiquated analytical framework, its assumption that very long-term factors were at work, that the loss of landed possessions by the Crown and Church and, as he erroneously believed, the peerage made Revolution inevitable as the apparatus of Stuart rule failed to cope with the rise of the gentry, the spread of Puritanism, and the decline in the prestige of the Crown and Court and the Laudian church. Stone held that the political and religious history of the pre-Civil War period had already been written by S.R.Gardiner and C.H.Firth and fundamentally needed no emendation. He was profoundly wrong as Nicholas Tyacke and others were already demonstrating.

Stone’s work on the origins and causes of the English Revolution was dated by the time it appeared in 1972. It belonged essentially to the 1950s and early-1960s. No amount of sociological dressing could make it fashionable again.

By then, Trevor-Roper had written and published his ground-breaking essay on the Union of the Crowns. It was to the hypotheses about the significance of ‘multiple kingdoms’ that the future in 1972 belonged.

A Marxist Assessment of Gerrard Winstanley’s A Common Treasury: (Revised and Expanded) Verso 2011

Winstanley Between History and Ideology

The 2011 Verso edition of A Common Treasury, introduced by Tony Benn, compiles Gerrard Winstanley's writings—arguably the most radical figure of the English Revolution. It calls for serious critical reflection, not only because of Winstanley’s historical importance but also because Benn’s admiration for him exposes the political decline of Labour reformism. When parliamentary socialists adopt revolutionary figures, it is never a neutral act; it is an ideological move aimed at domestically shaping the past to meet current needs. To truly grasp Winstanley, one must place him within the class struggles of the 1640s; to understand Benn, one must see him in the context of post-war Labour's class compromises.

Winstanley and the Diggers: Revolution from Below

Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676) was the leader and thinker behind the Diggers, also known as the True Levellers. In 1649, the same year King Charles I was executed, they began to occupy and farm common land at St George’s Hill in Surrey. Their assertion that the earth was “a common treasury for all” was more than poetic; it was a revolutionary idea. “They declared that the earth was ‘a common treasury for all,’ rejecting private property in land as the root of all social evil.”

Winstanley’s pamphlets — including The New Law of Righteousness and The Law of Freedom in a Platform — outlined a vision of a society free from buying and selling, landlords, lawyers, masters, and servants. This was not mere philosophical reflection but a practical response to the ongoing revolution. The Diggers arose from the common people during the Civil War. While Cromwell and the leaders of the New Model Army aimed to establish the political framework for capitalist growth, the Diggers sought to expand the revolution beyond its bourgeois limitations.

They embodied the most progressive expression of popular awareness in the 1640s, a consciousness shaped by war, upheaval, and the decline of traditional authority. The decline of traditional authority was inevitable. They faced brutal suppression: settlements were razed, leaders were beaten, and cattle were slaughtered. Cromwell, a fierce enforcer of bourgeois class interests, had little regard for the Diggers, just as he did for the Levellers, whose leaders he had executed. This marked the end of a revolutionary era.

Winstanley’s Place in the Pre‑History of Socialism

Winstanley holds a unique place in the early history of socialist ideas. Christopher Hill, who did more than any other scholar to bring Winstanley out of obscurity, recognised that revolutions are driven by crowds whose awareness must evolve. Winstanley's work exemplifies this profound transformation.

However, accuracy in history is crucial. Winstanley was not a socialist in the modern sense; his communism was utopian rather than scientific. His arguments relied on biblical prophecy and mystical pantheism—Reason as God and the “rising of Christ in sons and daughters.” He urged Cromwell and the propertied classes to see the truth rather than organise the oppressed as a political force to seize power.

As Engels explained in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, utopian socialists could vividly describe the harms of class society with moral clarity but lacked awareness of the material force needed to eliminate these ills. The proletariat—the class destined to abolish all classes—was not present in mid-17th-century England. Winstanley could only appeal to the righteous, while Cromwell’s response was to ignore him when possible and suppress him when necessary. This is not a moral failure but an inherent limitation, as Winstanley’s vision was unattainable at the time because the class capable of implementing it had not yet emerged.

Tony Benn’s Appropriation: Radicalism Made Safe

This passage reveals Benn’s political stance. Benn, who passed away in 2014 and was a lifelong Labour Party member—by then an instrument of big business—spent his career opposing Winstanley's principles. Winstanley challenged the political establishment and fostered an independent movement of the dispossessed. Benn served 49 years in Parliament and, as recently as 2013, stated: “I don’t believe in the idea that you can build a new socialist party … There is a radical element, and that element ought to be able to live within the Labour Party.”

This is a significant statement, reflecting Benn’s overall political stance: the containment of working-class resistance within the boundaries of bourgeois parliamentarism. "Benn’s entire political life was devoted to channelling working-class opposition back into the safe confines of bourgeois parliamentarism." During the Winter of Discontent in 1978–79, Benn served as a cabinet minister responsible for declaring a State of Emergency against striking workers. In his diary, he admitted: "I am just being sucked into this terrible military operation to hold the working class back.”And then he did it anyway.

Benn’s adoption of Winstanley exemplifies political appropriation, turning a revolutionary leader who pioneered an independent movement of the dispossessed into a romantic figure for Labourism—a century-long tradition of silencing working-class independence. This act domesticates Winstanley, rendering him acceptable for the drawing room, Fabian pamphlet, or Verso catalogue.

The Historical Lesson: What Connects Winstanley to Scientific Socialism

What truly matters in Winstanley's thought isn't his idealistic plan for a communist commonwealth—which couldn't have succeeded given 17th-century circumstances—but his insight that private property in the means of life is the root of exploitation, and that the exploited need to organise independently of their rulers. This idea links the Diggers of 1649 to the revolutionary workers’ movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.

However, it's important to recognise that Winstanley's approach is fundamentally different from scientific socialism, and these differences shouldn't be overlooked. Winstanley’s shortcomings stemmed from the limitations of his time—the working class was not yet able to form itself as a political force capable of driving socialist change. Today, that situation has changed. The working class now makes up the vast majority of the global population. The main barrier to socialism is no longer the underdevelopment of material conditions but the lack of revolutionary leadership within the working class. The International Committee of the Fourth International is actively working to develop such leadership.

Against the Politics of Historical Comfort

Benn’s portrayal of Winstanley is more than just a historical recount; it functions as a political distraction. It implies that the radical tradition could be revived within Labourism, achieving the “common treasury” through incremental parliamentary reforms. However, this is not enough. The working class requires its own party, rooted in the Fourth International’s programme, to realise what Winstanley only envisioned: the expropriation of the expropriators and the creation of a society driven by human need rather than private profit.

Winstanley’s writings remain impactful not because they provide a detailed plan for socialism, but because they embody the early idea that liberation must originate from beneath — through the self-organisation of the oppressed. Honouring Winstanley does not mean romanticising him or using him to support Labourism, but rather recognising his historical limits and advancing his struggle on a more developed, scientific basis.

 

Historians and the passing of time

From Christopher Thompson

I ought to begin by saying that I have become increasingly fond of Keith Livesey's blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. He and I do not agree on the origins and causes, the course and significance and the consequences of the struggles in the British Isles (or the Civil Wars or Revolution) of the 1640s and 1650s. I believe that the existence of differing views is a good thing because it stimulates debate and new research. He is attached to the views of figures like Christopher Hill and Brian Manning, both Marxists and both figures from my youth. Their approaches were superseded with the rise of the mis-named 'revisionism' of the mid-1970s.

Christopher Hill ceased to shape the course of historiographical debates at that time: it is doubtful whether Brian Manning, whose views had been formed in the early-1950s and which changed remarkably little, ever had. 

This process - of once fashionable views going out of fashion - happens to everyone. It happened about twenty years ago to Conrad Russell. He no longer shapes historiographical debates about these events. So, I hope Keith Livesey will forgive me when I say that there is no group of revisionists controlling academic or any other forms of discussion about the 1640s and 1650s in these islands. The debate has moved on: Christopher Hill like Conrad Russell is 'old hat'. Historians now wear different headgear and will change it again in the future.

My Reply

I would like to return the compliment made by Christopher Thompson on my blog and take up briefly a few of his points. I enjoy his blog. It is the first blog I read and contains extremely valuable information and insight into Early Modern England. As he has mentioned above we do not see eye to eye on the origins and causes of the English Revolution but that is life. If everybody agreed on everything History would be a very boring subject.

In fact I am of the opinion that through understanding contending views of the civil war we get a closer approximation as to its complexities. Christopher is of course right when he says that different generations throw up different types of historians and for that matter different types or schools of history. Perhaps I am wrong to say that the revisionist historians control current historiography. Control is too strong a word but they certainly do dominate. But I will allow a concession to Christopher and admit that I need to carry out a far more accurate analysis of their historiography and politics. If the new group of historians have moved beyond the term revisionists then what are they proposing and can a common theme be detected amongst them. The next few months will show.

Making the Radicals Safe: Bradstock’s Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England and the Revisionist Retreat from Revolution

Andrew Bradstock's _Radical Religion in Cromwell's England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth_ comes at a time when the historiography of the English Revolution has been increasingly stripped of its revolutionary elements. Since Christopher Hill's passing, academic narratives have shifted towards a revisionist view that dismisses the rise of the bourgeoisie, portrays the Civil War as an avoidable elite quarrel, and denies it as a true revolution. Simon Schama's claim of being a "born-again Whig" exemplifies this ideological retreat, highlighting the current trend away from revolutionary interpretations.

Bradstock's book is influenced—indeed limited—by this climate. Although it claims to be a "concise history," it functions more as a theological overview of radical Protestant sectarianism. Its interpretive approach mirrors the modern attempt to depoliticise the English Revolution and portray its commoner movements as harmless in the eyes of the current ruling class.

The Theological Frame: A Category Error

Bradstock, a trained theologian, naturally approaches 'Radical Religion in Cromwell's England' with his scholarly discipline. His previous book, 'Faith in the Revolution,' presented his view of the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, and early Quakers as a recoverable tradition of radical Christian witness. In this new work, that perspective is not just evident—it forms the core of his analysis.

The issue is not that religion had no part in the English Revolution. As Engels noted in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 17th-century bourgeoisie used religious language in their revolutionary efforts because a secular political language had not yet emerged. Calvinism supported the idea that the accumulation of wealth and the challenge to the feudal hierarchy were justified.

Bradstock challenges the usual view by reversing the relationship. Instead of seeing religious language as a medium for expressing class forces, he considers theology the core of the radical movements themselves. The Levellers are portrayed as radical Protestants; the Diggers as Christian communitarians; the Fifth Monarchists as millenarian dissenters. Their class content becomes obscured behind doctrinal analysis.

The Plebeian Wing of a Bourgeois Revolution

The radical sects Bradstock chronicles were not theological curiosities. They were the plebeian wing of the bourgeois revolution, representing the rural poor, the dispossessed, and the lower‑middle strata who sought to push the revolution beyond the limits acceptable to the grandees around Cromwell.

Bradstock's theological framework fails to account for several historical events: Cromwell's suppression of the Levellers at Burford in 1649, which was driven by bourgeoisie counter-revolution rather than religious doctrine; the Diggers' occupation of St George's Hill, which was more a protest against enclosure and primitive accumulation—key aspects of early capitalist development—than a utopian Christian project; and Winstanley's shift from a mystical visionary to a critic of property, which only makes sense when viewing class dynamics as central.

By viewing these movements as chapters in Christian dissent, Bradstock hides the revolutionary ambitions of the petty bourgeoisie and rural poor. His "concise history" is brief because it leaves out the crucial element: the class struggle.

The Political Function of Revisionism

The revisionist view of the English Revolution's collapse isn't just an academic curiosity; it's a political tool today. By claiming Britain never underwent a bourgeois revolution, the ruling class sustains the myth that the country's history is marked by gradual reforms, compromise, and constitutional stability. As a result, Marxism appears as an outsider, disconnected from English history.

Hill's work significantly challenged this mythology. However, "Radical Religion in Cromwell's England," despite its narrative strengths, does not advance that challenge. Instead, it depoliticises the radical sects, portraying them as a safe, sanitised religious heritage, which ultimately renders them acceptable to the very establishment they once challenged. The subtitle—"A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth"—reveals this approach. Here, "concision" is not a virtue but a limitation, as it narrows the focus and omits class dynamics that are essential to understanding the radical sects.

Conclusion

Bradstock provides a clear and organised overview of seventeenth-century radical religion. However, it is the religious perspective that makes the book politically ineffective. At a time when the ruling elite aims to erase revolutionary history from Britain, Radical Religion in Cromwell's England—despite its sincerity—tends to mask the class forces behind the English Revolution and to diminish its radical impact. A truly historical perspective must start where Bradstock leaves off: recognising that groups such as the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and Fifth Monarchists were not just religious dissenters but the working-class leaders of a bourgeois revolution whose lessons remain highly relevant today.

 

Barry Coward’s Oliver Cromwell: A Revisionist Evacuation of History

Barry Coward’s Oliver Cromwell (1991), released at the peak of revisionist influence in British scholarship, exemplifies a systematic tendency to diminish the driving forces of history. The biography emphasises moderation, balance, and empirical rigour, but these qualities conceal a deeper political and methodological conservatism. Coward portrays Cromwell as a man shaped by circumstances rather than class, a figure overseeing revolutionary events without fully understanding or embodying their revolutionary significance. Consequently, the narrative remains factually accurate yet lacks any true engagement with the historical revolutionary content.

Coward’s framing clarifies this point. His main argument is that Cromwell was not a revolutionary in any deliberate or systematic way. The biography supports this perspective by portraying Cromwell’s actions as pragmatic responses to immediate pressures: the king’s obstinacy, the army’s demands, and the disintegration of parliamentary alliances. His serious religious beliefs are the primary explanation. Providence substitutes for political strategy; conscience replaces class conflict. This approach is not merely interpretive but is central to revisionist understanding.

The Revisionist Method: Contingency as Ideology

Revisionism emerged in the 1970s as a deliberate rejection of the Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution, which viewed it as a bourgeois revolution involving a fundamental shift in property, state, and ideology. Scholars like Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and their followers argued that the Civil War was not a true revolution, but rather a tragic clash caused by misunderstandings, religious fears, and constitutional concerns. Coward’s biography offers a gentler version of this view but stays closely aligned with its main ideas.

The revisionist approach is based on three main principles: first, rejecting the idea of long-term social causes, viewing tensions such as those between Crown and gentry, landlord and tenant, or capitalist agriculture and feudal remnants as outdated or insignificant. Second, simplifying class to mere factions, with Parliament seen as a gathering of personalities and interest groups rather than a reflection of a rising social order. Third, emphasising contingency, suggesting that events happen simply because they happen and decisions are made because they are; thus, history is seen as a series of accidents.

Coward’s Cromwell exemplifies this worldview: he is devout, adaptable, courageous, and often conflicted—yet never placed within a specific historical context. He takes action, but these actions lack social significance. He leads, but not on behalf of any particular class. His destruction of the monarchy occurs only because Charles I leaves him with no other choice. This is not an analysis; it is a rejection of analysis.

Cromwell Without Revolution: A Hollow Centre

Coward’s biography is most compelling in its factual aspects, where revisionism poses minimal risk. His descriptions of the Protectorate’s constitutional experiments are clear, his portrayal of Cromwell’s military career is proficient, and his treatment of providentialism is respectful and earnest. As noted, “He presents Cromwell as a figure of genuine complexity: capable of both extraordinary political courage and brutal repression.” However, complexity without explaining causes leads only to confusion.

Coward’s narrative omits the English Revolution. The Levellers and Diggers—who advocated for popular sovereignty, broader voting rights, and communal land—are pushed to the sidelines. The New Model Army, historically the most politically aware military in England, is portrayed as a professional fighting force instead of a class-based tool. The Irish campaign, where Cromwell’s forces massacred thousands at Drogheda and Wexford, is seen as a tragic mistake rather than as colonial violence by a rising bourgeois state. Coward’s portrayal of Cromwell reflects his era, but the revolutionary spirit of that period has been largely erased.

Hill vs Coward: Two Histories, Two Worlds

The contrast with Christopher Hill is clear. Hill’s book, ‘God’s Englishman’ (1970), remains the most insightful Marxist analysis of Cromwell because it recognises the dialectical unity of ideology and class. Cromwell’s view of providence is not a personal obsession but the ideological framework through which the bourgeoisie interpreted its historical role. His purges of Parliament were not merely personal outbursts but deliberate class actions. Similarly, his suppression of the Levellers was not an inconsistency but a necessary step, as the revolution had reached the limits tolerable to property interests.

Coward dismisses all of this. His depiction of Cromwell is not that of a revolutionary leader but an accidental figure. Cromwell is shaped by events rather than shaping them. This approach isn't just a different interpretation—it abandons interpretation entirely. It shifts focus from structure to personality, from class to conscience, and from revolution to improvisation. Hill describes why the English state changed, while Coward explores Cromwell's personal feelings about these changes.

The Political Moment: 1991 and the Ideological Offensive

Coward’s biography was published in 1991, a year that marked the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This timing is notable because many scholars saw the collapse of Stalinism as proof that Marxism had been invalidated historically. As revisionist ideas gained influence, they became the prevailing view. Scepticism and even hostility toward the concept of revolution increased. To deny that the English Civil War was a bourgeois revolution was, in effect, to deny the legitimacy of revolution as a whole. "It was the product of an intellectual climate in which the very concept of revolution was under sustained assault.”

Coward is not a polemicist; he is a meticulous scholar. However, his biography is influenced by this atmosphere. His moderation reflects his political stance, and his caution reveals an ideological perspective. His reluctance to interpret acts as an interpretation itself suggests that history lacks driving forces, class lacks agency, and revolution lacks significance.

Conclusion: A Useful Book, and a Useless One

Coward’s Oliver Cromwell provides a solid factual overview suitable for students. However, it doesn't serve as a guide to the English Revolution. It doesn't explain why the monarchy collapsed, how the state was transformed, or why the 1640s stand out as one of history’s major revolutionary upheavals. To understand these aspects, one must look to Hill—and beyond Hill, to the Marxist approach, which uniquely captures the dialectic of ideology, class, and historical necessity. Coward presents Cromwell as a person. Hill presents Cromwell as a historical actor. Only the latter represents Cromwell as he truly was.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Cromwell, Oliver. Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Edited by W.C. Abbott. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47.
• Gardiner, Samuel Rawson. History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649. London: Longmans, Green, 1886–91.
• The Clarke Papers. Edited by C.H. Firth. 4 vols. London: Camden Society, 1891–1901.
• The Putney Debates, 1647. Edited by Michael Mendle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Marxist Historiography & Social Interpretation

• Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1970.
• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
• Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940.
• Hill, Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958.
• Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Nelson, 1961.
• Brenner, Robert. “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.” Past & Present 97 (1982): 16–113.
• Dobb, Maurice. Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1946.
• Morton, A.L. A People’s History of England. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1938.
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. London: Heinemann, 1976.
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution, 1640–1660. London: Bookmarks, 1999.
• Manning, Brian. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in England, 1658–1660. London: Bookmarks, 2003.

Revisionist Historiography

• Coward, Barry. Oliver Cromwell. London: Longman, 1991.
• Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714. London: Longman, 1980.
• Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Russell, Conrad. Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1603–1660. London: Hambledon Press, 1981.
• Morrill, John. Revolt of the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976.
• Morrill, John. “The Religious Context of the English Civil War.” Like the English Revolution, edited by Morrill. London: Longman, 1993.
• Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
• Hexter, J.H. The Reign of King Pym. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941.

General Scholarship on Cromwell and the English Revolution

• Durston, Christopher. Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government During the English Revolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2001.
• Durston, Christopher, and Judith Maltby, eds. Religion in Revolutionary England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
• Gentles, Ian. The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• Gentles, Ian. Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
• Hughes, Ann. The Causes of the English Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1991.
• Hughes, Ann. Gangrene and the Struggle for the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Reid, John G. Cromwell and Scotland: Conquest and Religion, 1650–1660. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
• Lenihan, Pádraig. Consolidating Conquest: Ireland 1603–1727. London: Routledge, 2014.

Contextual Works: Ideology, Revolution, and Historiography

• Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso, 1974.
• Anderson, Perry. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso, 1974.
• Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz, 1963.
• Kaye, Harvey J. The British Marxist Historians. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984.
• Hill, Christopher, et al. The Communist Party Historians’ Group: Its Work and Legacy. Various essays.
• Talbot, Ann. “Christopher Hill and the Socialist Tradition.” World Socialist Web Site, 2003.
• North, David. The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century. Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2014.
• Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962.

Works on Historiographical Method

• Carr, E.H. What Is History? London: Macmillan, 1961.
• Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852.
• Marx, Karl. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1859.
• Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution. 1930–32.
• Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953.

 

Conrad Russell and a case of suppressio veri?

( This is reprinted from Christopher Thompson’s blog by kind permission. His blog can be found at http://earlymodernhistory1.blogspot.com/

I first met Conrad Russell when I became a Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research in the autumn of 1968. He was engaging company with a dry sense of humour and a wide knowledge of arcane references. We became friends and remained in touch in the early-1970s. The intellectual parting of our ways came in the mid-1970s with the publication of his works on Parliamentary history between 1604 and 1629, on the foreign policy debates in the House of Commons in November, 1621 and the publications in 1979 of his book on English Parliaments between 1621 and 1629. I regarded these as unsound, highly inaccurate and misleading. I still do. To the surprise of many of my friends, I was not and never have been a follower of Russell.

Perhaps, I may be allowed to illustrate this with one example amongst hundreds. In July, 1974, I heard his paper on anti-Spanish sentiment between 1621 and 1624 at the Sheffield Conference on Sir Thomas Wentworth's career. It was subsequently published in The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford 1621-1641, edited by J.F.Merritt (Cambridge University Press 1996, Pp.47-62.

Wentworth's speeches in the House of Commons on 26th, 27th and 28th November naturally attracted his attention. Russell rightly pointed out (ibid., p.56) that, on 26th November, Wentworth argued that the issue of supply to assist King James to support English forces in the Palatinate and, perhaps, for a wider war should be put off until the following Saturday and, before then, for the House to prepare for the end of the session, presumably by passing Bills.

He went on to claim that Wentworth had not detected any demand for war in his constituency of Yorkshire. When he turned to the debate in the lower House on 27th November, Russell argued that the "first shadow was again cast by Sir Thomas Wentworth, calling for a return to bills .... Wentworth's interventions now pass the test for 'enemy action'. (ibid., p.56) On the28th, Wentworth stated that he would not give his voice for a subsidy if he did not believe there was going to be a session (ibid., Pp.57-58) It was on the basis of these speeches that Russell argued Wentworth could be accounted an opponent of war in the autumn of 1621.

Russell was certainly right to point out that Sir Thomas Wentworth argued on 26th November for a discussion of supply to be deferred until the following Saturday and, in the meantime, for the House of Commons to concentrate upon the passage of Bills and preparations for the end of the session.

What he entirely failed to mention - other than in a passing reference to a demand on Wentworth’s part on the following day for a return to Bills - was Sir Thomas’s speech on 27th November. For that claim, he cited two sources, the 'X' diary and Sir Thomas Barrington's diary (ibid., p.56 n.19) both reproduced in the edition of the Commons' Debates for 1621 edited by Notestein, Relf and Simpson. The ‘X’ diary began its report by recording Wentworth as arguing in favour of “a covenant between the King and his seed and us and our seed. First, for a present supply. Secondly to a future war of the King’s part.”

 In return, Wentworth wanted an end to the session and Bills to pass into law: he was willing to “answer the King’s desire to give a sufficient sum before Christmas for supply … [and advocated] that we would declare that we would be ready to lay down our lives and estates at his feet.” Sir Thomas Barrington’s account was equally clear on Wentworth’s desire to preserve amity with the King; James had asked for supply to maintain an army in the Palatinate and to sustain a future war; Wentworth, therefore, sought an end to the present session and a new one in February whilst pledging to “answer the King’s first proposition for the Palatinate, to give before Christmas” and to “declare our selves that we will be ready to laye downe our lives and fortunes when the King shall make a warr.”

These were the two sources Russell cited for his claim that Wentworth was calling for a return to Bills and that his successive interventions on 26th and 27th November “pass the test for ‘enemy action’.” The Commons’ Journal reported the end of Wentworth’s speech as advising the House “1. To give a present Supply for the Army in the Palatinate. 2ly, A Request to the King, by some of the Privy Council, for an End of a Session before Christmas. 3ly, The Proportion of the present Supply, and the manner, as may add most Reputation to his Majesty’s Endeavours abroad. 4ly, Where War and peace in the King’s Hand, to declare, that we will be ready, in a Cause concerning Religion and the Commonwealth, we will be ready to second him.“

The other accounts - Pym, Smyth, Z and Howard - confirm Wentworth’s willingness to vote for an interim supply to keep the forces in the Palatinate in being and his desire for a further session in February. Edward Nicholas, furthermore, noted Wentworth’s suggestion of a conference with the House of Lords on the question of supply. On this basis, Wentworth was not just willing to fund military forces in the Palatinate but also to contemplate grants to pay for a wider war if necessary. Russell’s claims about Wentworth as an opponent of a war by 27th November cannot be reconciled with the surviving evidence.

The questions that inevitably arise are very serious. Did Russell read the sources he used or did he misread them or did he ignore their contents altogether in the service of his striking but unfounded hypothesis? I am afraid that there are not just dozens of examples of this kind but hundreds across his body of work. That is why I cannot agree that he was the foremost scholar of his generation working on the history of early Stuart parliaments and politics.

Werner Scholem and the Erasure of the German Left Opposition: A Note on Recent Historiography

Steven E. Aschheim's review of Werner Scholem: A German Life provides a thoughtful analysis of Scholem’s intellectual development and tragic end. However, he overlooks Scholem’s political shift towards the German Left Opposition and his later cooperation with the international Trotskyist movement, which significantly distorts the historical record. This omission is more than biographical; it affects our understanding of the crisis facing the German Communist Party (KPD) in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as the broader struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism.

Pierre Broué’s research remains indispensable for reconstructing Scholem’s political trajectory. Broué identifies Scholem as “a master organiser” who carried out the campaign around the Letter of the 700 “from one end to the other.”¹ This campaign—700 members of the KPD demanding the publication of the Russian Opposition’s documents and rejecting the doctrine of “socialism in one country”—represented the most substantial expression of international support for the United Opposition outside the Soviet Union. Its signatories were purged, vilified, and ultimately left exposed to the Nazi terror.

Scholem’s political journey continued beyond the Letter of the 700. He separated from the Leninbund in February 1928, aligned more with Trotsky’s views, and by 1931, was frequently meeting with Leon Sedov in Berlin.² He wrote unsigned articles for Die Permanente Revolution, the theoretical publication of the German Trotskyists. Trotsky himself held Scholem in high regard, though he opposed Scholem travelling to Prinkipo, as the uploaded document notes—because he did not want "someone like Scholem to risk ending up in Turkey during the critical moment of the struggle on German soil.”³ Ultimately, Scholem represented a living link between the Russian Opposition and the German Communist Left.

Both the Stalinist apparatus and the Nazi state recognised this. When the Gestapo arrested Scholem, they understood they had seized not only a Communist and a Jewish intellectual but a Trotskyist.⁴ At the same time, the GPU was actively infiltrating and destroying the German Left Opposition. Stalinist agents such as the Sobolevicius brothers (Roman Well and Adolf Senin) operated inside the German section, reporting to Moscow and sowing confusion and disruption.⁵ The KPD leadership under Ernst Thälmann denounced Trotskyists to the police, facilitating their arrest.⁶ The convergence of Stalinist and Nazi repression was not accidental: both regimes recognised in the Left Opposition the last coherent revolutionary alternative to their respective forms of counterrevolution.

Aschheim’s omission therefore has broader historiographical consequences. It conceals the fact that some of the most principled and farsighted figures in the German Communist Left found their way to Trotsky. It obscures the existence of a political alternative to the catastrophes of Stalinism and Social Democracy. And it breaks the continuity between the German Opposition and the Fourth International—a continuity that Scholem’s life and death exemplify. As the uploaded document rightly states, “His life… is a chapter in our history, and no amount of academic omission can change that.”⁷

Scholem’s adherence to Trotsky’s international organisation was, as Broué writes, “not just an episode.”⁸ It was the culmination of a political evolution that deserves recognition, not erasure. Any serious account of Scholem’s life must therefore integrate his role within the German Left Opposition and acknowledge the political significance of his final years.

Notes

1. Pierre Broué, The German Left and the Russian Opposition (1926–28), cited in the uploaded document: “a master organiser… from one end to the other.”
2. Broué, ibid.; see also Leon Sedov’s correspondence with the German Opposition.
3. Previous document “Trotsky himself keenly wished to meet him but opposed Scholem travelling to Turkey, not wanting ‘someone like Scholem to run the risk of finding himself in Turkey at the moment of the decisive struggle on German soil.’”
4. Previous document: “The Nazis knew exactly who they had when they arrested him: a Communist, an intellectual, a Jew — and a Trotskyist.”
5. Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany), chapter on Stalinist infiltration of the German Opposition.
6. Ibid.; see also contemporary KPD denunciations of Trotskyists in police records.
7. Previous document: “His life… is a chapter in our history, and no amount of academic omission can change that.”
8. Broué, The German Left and the Russian Opposition.

 

More Correspondence

From Christopher Thompson :

But Harrington's argument was not "the product of an analysis of the contemporary distribution of land, because it does not claim to be" such: it was an investigation of the decline of feudal tenures and the development of freehold tenure, which made possible a state in which a Classical Republic of the kind described by Livy and advocated by Machiavelli. Scholars like J.G.A.Pocock and Judith Schklar showed as long ago as the 1950s that Tawney's view of Harrington was erroneous.

Reply thehistorywoman (http://thehistorywoman.wordpress.com/)

I'm not saying that Harrington's thesis is based on an exact or even correct 'analysis of the contemporary distribution of land'. But he did perceive significant changes which - as you rightly say - were caused by 'the decline of feudal tenures'. And this decline of feudal tenures gave rise to a new type of landownership and at the same time a new type of society characterised increasingly by merit rather than birth. The senators who replace the old lords in Harrington's ideal state hold their office because they are 'wiser than the rest', not by the virtue of their birth. That is what matters. Changes in property ownership produce changes in a country's power structures. In the long term freehold tenure facilitates popular participation in politics.

Correspondence on The historywomans article Property and Power: On James Harrington’s 400th Birthday

Christopher Thompson

I am afraid that these assertions about the transfer of land between the nobility and gentry. The peerage in 1601 may have held less land than in 1558 but it still held more than in 1534. By 1641, the much enlarged peerage had far more land in its hands than in 1601. This is true even using Lawrence Stone's highly improbable figures. The English Civil War or Revolution was preceded by a notable shift in landed possessions towards the peerage and by the rise of "aristocratic constitutionalism".

thehistorywoman (http://thehistorywoman.wordpress.com/)%20On%20t

That's an interesting point. The 'rise of the gentry' hypothesis has long been contested. However, I find it significant that Harrington still perceived a shift of property and power towards the gentry and yeomanry. Of course one might wonder how far this perception was influenced by a political agenda.

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.