Ideas that sprang from the English Revolution

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-Strengthened: the House of Commons Where did the adherents discover only a segment of petty tyranny of squire and sioned by the course of the of these ideas go after the truth. parson, may have emigrated revolution and fear of repres Many, exasperated by the to America. Others, disillu- sion, simply laid low.

The publication of any work by Christopher Hill should be the object of interest for Marxist historians for no one has done more to deepen our understanding of the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century.

• In this collection of lectures given at the University of Wisconsin, Hill pursues a subject which has long fascinated him, the relationship between the revolution and the ideas to which it save birth or into which it breathed new life.

Hill is accutely aware of the fact that so many of the Instutions which were wither directly challenged or in overthrown in the wurse of the revolutionary drades the 1640s and las were to be re-estabInned at the Restoration in 16h1).

Back in The Monarchy, the House of Lords and the Anglican Church, with its episcopal hierarchy, were all back in place once more.

How then can a revolutionary change be said to have occurred? Hill argues that the forms may have been restored but the social and economic context had changed immeasurably.

Whatever the schemes of the later Stuart kings, the sovereignty of the House of Commons had been established and in the long run coula not but prevall.

The way had been paved for the :. constitutional monarchy, confirmed by the settlement of 1689, in which the royal head was reduced to a cypher, the manipulated monarchy, its • virtues extolled first by a subservient clergy and later by the sycophantic media.

No longer were there to be the prerogative courts of monarchy and church. The rule of law was to prevail; law which had as its prime consideration the protection of property.

As Hill remarks, after the seventeenth centurey revolution, England was the freest country in Europefor those who commanded the wealth of the nation.

The driving forces behind Britain's foreign policy had also changed in the revolutionary decades.

The republican internationalism which had briefly flourished in the 1640s was submerged in the imperjalist ambitions of Cromwellian foreign policy, an economic nationalism dictated by the financial interests in the City of London.

Economic nationalism Henceforth the personal whims of monarchical foreign policy were subordinated to the forces of economic nationalism, enshrined in the Navigation Acts.

The foundations were laid for the crude economic imperialism of the eighteenth century and the pre-eminence of the Bank of England in the economy of the nation.

All of these forces, essential for creating the conditions for the Industrial Revolution of the following century, were released or impelled forward by the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century.

It was the foreing house for modern capitalist concepts concerning political institutions, the law, empire and the role of the church.

But what, asks Hill, was the fate of the radical, democratic, even communistic. ideas which sprang forth in the course of the Civil Wars?

The huge expansion in printed material in the revolutionary decades is summed up in the statistics of 22 pamphlets published in 1640 as compared to 1,966 in 1642, a momentum which was maintained throughout that decade and into the next, though then in a diminishing degree.

Breakdown

The breakdown of monarchical and clerical censorship provided the conditions for this tremendous dissemination of radical ideas which emerged in the course of the revolution the ideas of the Levellers, Diggers, Seekers, Ranters and numerous other groups and sects which briefly flourished. 1660"? Perhaps we can now seen supporting The Specials Au Pairs can be Milton, the great republican propagandist, couched his heretical views in literary terms, as do dissidents in the Soviet Union today.

Yet their ideas were not wholly to perish. The millenarian ideas concerning the immediate coming of Christ's Kingdom were to be transated .. into the secular language of the possibilities of human progress and perfectability, to be carried forward into the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and hence into the thinking of Marx and Engels in the rineteenth.

Radical democratic concepts of an extended franchise and a reformed parliamentary system, universal education, the curtailment of the powers of lawyers and priests, were to remain relatively dormant for century or more, only to find new life the American and French Revolutions of the later eighteenth century, inspiring Tom Paine and the London Corresponding Society who carried forward these challenging concepts into a new era.

Hill's lectures sparkle with ideas on these major historical themes.

Weaknesses

There are weaknesses in the presentation. Being based upon lecture notes, the text bristles with concepts which are presented but not developed.

There is a lack of logical flow in some of the argumentation. The result is that Hill lays himself open to the pettifogging pedantry which passes for historical scholaiship in some circles.

Surely there can be no simple equation-radical Puritanism equals progressive ideas-the critics complain:

The point is too obvious to merit reply.

Of course, Hill is well aware that the Catholic Descartes laid essential foundations for modern thinking in the realm of natural philosophy; of course the Royalist Hobbes was the foremost materialist thinker of the century. Hill is well aware of such subtleties in the history of ideas.

But his essential concern in this collection of essays is not to pursue the ramifications of all progressive trends in thought in the seventeenth century, but to relate some of the essential ideological changes of the epoch to the material conditions of the bourgeois In this he may frequently exasperate, but more often he provokes and stimulates, concentrating our minds wonderfully upon the origins of many of our own concepts.

Hill's book reminds us how much he and others, such as Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, have deepened our knowledge of British history and the social and economic forces that have shaped it.

Revolutionary socialists, whilst reserving the right to criticise wrong political positions, cannot but draw upon the advances made by those historians who have been heavily influenced by the Marxist tradition.

And Trotskyists must be prepared to enter into the fullest dialogue with those who have contributed so much to our understanding.

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