Christopher Hill and Marxist History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Tuesday 06 February 2024 is the 112th anniversary of the birth of Christopher Hill (06 February 1912–23 February 2003), who was born in York on this date in 1912.
Hill was a English Marxist historian at a time when we could say that there was something of a school of English Marxist historians, chief among them E. P. Thompson, who wrote The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson’s book opens with a ham-handed discussion of class and class consciousness in the Preface, which, honestly, I am surprised that anyone continued reading after this. But they did. Other Marxist historians were Eric Hobsbawm (who died a multi-millionaire despite being a communist), Rodney Hilton, George Rudé, V. G. Kiernan, and A. L. Morton.
At the same time, there was an influential school of British scientific Marxists, sometimes called the “red scientists,” including J. D. Bernal (by all accounts a charismatic Stalinist who defended Lysenko, so, in other words, a spineless party hack), J. B. S. Haldane (who actually spied for the Soviet Union), Conrad Waddington, Joseph Needham, and Lancelot Hogben. Thus Marxism played a significant role in the intellectual life of England in the twentieth century. We tend to see the Marxist domination of twentieth century thought as a continental phenomenon, but we need to also include the British.
The Marxist historians are associated with the slogans “history from below” and “history from the bottom up,” which are the slogans of social history. Social history was a reaction against traditional history, which emphasized the activities of elites, not least because there were records of elites and few if any records of the ordinary people whose lives are chronicled in social history. Social history has been enabled, in part, by the auxiliary sciences of history, especially archaeology, with its excavation of the material culture of the past, but it has also been the result of more sophisticated historical methods of inquiry, which have made it possible to extract hints of the lives of ordinary people from extant records, reconstructing a social history not present in elite histories.
The social history of the British Marxist historians was social history specifically pursued from a Marxist angle, therefore it was often social history pursued jointly with economic history, and, again, the economic history was economic history written from a Marxist angle. But there were also dissenting voices. Gorden Leff took on the Marxist historians in his book The Tyranny of Concepts: A Critique of Marxism and History and Social Theory, the latter an excellent work on historiography.
Christopher Hill’s history writing is not as openly ideological as E. P. Thompson. We don’t find expositions of class conscious or historical materialism in Hill, but subtler Marxist history is still Marxist history. Nevertheless, it has its value. With Marxist historiography we have an explicit philosophy of history applied to the actual practice of history, and Marxist historiography thus provides a template for the application of philosophy to some non-specifically philosophical activity. Whether or not it is a template anyone would want to follow is another question, which I will not here entertain, but rather, in a philosophical spirit, I offer it as a paradigmatic example of applied philosophy, and that makes it interesting.
As a commie, Hill liked to write about revolutions, a predilection that he shared with the Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, who formulated the origins of civilization in terms of an “urban revolution.” Hill chose a revolutionary period of English history as his focus, namely, the seventeenth century, which one of his books called The Century of Revolution 1603–1714, in the Introduction of which we read:
“The transformation that took place in the seventeenth century is then far more than merely a constitutional or political revolution, or a revolution in economics, religion, or taste. It embraces the whole of life. Two conceptions of civilisation were in conflict. One took French absolutism for its model, the other the Dutch Republic. The object of this book is to try to understand the changes which set England on the path of Parliamentary government, economic advance and imperialist foreign policy, of religious toleration and scientific progress.”
Hill called the seventeenth century a century of revolution. It was unquestionably a turbulent period. A collection of the pamphlet literature of the period, Divine Right and Democracy, edited by David Wootten, begins thus:
“The seventeenth century was England’s ‘century of revolution’. The revolution of 1642–9, which culminated in the execution of the king and the declaration of a republic, saw the formation of the first secular political party defending the inalienable rights of man, the Levellers. It gave rise to the first communist movement with a strategy for effective social action, the Diggers. And it led to the formulation of the first materialist theory of historical change, in the writings of James Harrington.”
In a footnote Wootten cites Hill’s A Century of Revolution and Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age as contrasting views of the century. Laslett writes:
“Every relationship in our world which can be seen to affect our economic life is open to change, is expected indeed to change of itself, or if it does not, to he changed, made better, by an omnicompetent authority. This makes for a less stable social world, though it is only one of the features of our society which impels us all in that direction. All industrial societies, we may suppose, are far less stable than their predecessors. They lack the extraordinarily cohesive influence which familial relationships carry with them, that power of reconciling the frustrated and the discontented by emotional means. Social revolution, meaning an irreversible changing of the pattern of social relationships, never happened in traditional, patriarchal, pre-industrial human society. It was almost impossible to contemplate.”
So is revolution pervasive in the seventeenth century, making it the century of revolutions, or is revolution impossible to contemplate in seventeenth century? This question suggests other questions: Is a period of social instability always revolutionary? Is a revolution always the outcome of social instability? There is also the problem of the scope and scale of what we may meaningfully call a revolution, which closely resembles the problem of what we can meaningfully call a crisis, which I discussed in relation to Sorokin and Barbara Tuchman.
Could we call the seventeenth century a century of crisis? Hugh Trevor-Roper implied that it is a century of crises in his 1959 paper “The General Crisis of the 17th Century” (also discussed in relation to Tuchman). England seems to also have been caught up in the general crisis. While the English experienced their revolutions, on the continent the Thirty Years’ War was raging. Despite these problems — call them revolutions or call them crisis, as you prefer — Hill wrote of early modern England, “It was a powerful civilization, a great improvement for most people on what had gone before.” Contrast this with Kenneth Clark’s estimation of the previous century:
“I suppose it is debateable how far Elizabethan England can be called civilized. Certainly it does not provide a reproducible pattern of civilization as does, for example, eighteenth-century France. It was brutal, unscrupulous and disorderly.”
In regard to the aspects of social life Clark had in mind, I don’t think the seventeenth century differed much from the sixteenth century. The social turbulence of early modern England reminds me of a well known quote from the character of Harry Lime in Orson Welles’ The Third Man:
“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
This is by Graham Greene, who wrote the novel, but it has come to be associated with Orson Welles, who made the film and played the part of Harry Lime. As in the quote, the turbulent seventeenth century in England also produced great things. This period was an inflection point for the scientific revolution, but Hill took the most famous English scientist of the time, Isaac Newton, as a symbol of what was wrong with the period:
“Sir Isaac’s twisted, buttoned-up personality may help us to grasp what was wrong with the society which deified him. So may Dean Swift, the fiercest critic of the new world in which money ruled, whose ‘excremental vision’ extended backwards to a golden age when gold and repression were alike unknown. This society, which on the surface appeared so rational, so relaxed, might perhaps have been healthier if it had not been so tidy, if it had not pushed all its contradictions underground: out of sight, out of conscious mind.” (The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, p. 385)
Here Hill calls Stuart England “tidy,” which sounds antithetical to a turbulent century of revolutions and crises. In the Introduction to The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution we find a something of a summary of Hill’s argument in the book:
“There were, we may oversimplify, two revolutions in midseventeenth-century England. The one which succeeded established the sacred rights of property (abolition of feudal tenures, no arbitrary taxation), gave political power to the propertied (sovereignty of Parliament and common law, abolition of prerogative courts), and removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property — the protestant ethic. There was, however, another revolution which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.” (p. 15)
This theme is continued throughout, and Hill is always suggesting intimations of a lost communist utopia that might have been:
“There had been moments when it seemed as though from the ferment of radical ideas a culture might emerge which would be different both from the traditional aristocratic culture and from the bourgeois culture of the protestant ethic which replaced it. We can discern shadows of what this counter-culture might have been like. Rejecting private property for communism, religion for a rationalistic and materialistic pantheism, the mechanical philosophy for dialectical science, asceticism for unashamed enjoyment of the good things of the flesh, it might have achieved unity through a federation of communities, each based on the fullest respect for the individual. Its ideal would have been economic self-sufficiency, not world trade or world domination.” (op. cit., p. 341)
In a more strictly historiographical vein, Hill addresses the familiar question of how and why each generation writes its own history for itself, which ties in with his interest in the seventeenth century as a revolutionary period:
“History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.” (p. 15)
Hill was, I think, imaginatively re-living the experiences of the Levellers, True Levellers, Diggers, Seekers, Ranters, Quakers, and Muggletonians he wrote about, as these seventeenth century radicals seemed to promote a vision of English society that Hill believed exemplified some of his ideals of Marxism. Moreover, these were experiences ripe to re-lived in the twentieth century, with its many Marxist revolutions. Imagination may have its flights of fancy, but it remains largely bounded by history. In Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (1980), Hill continues to sigh over the lost communist utopia that never was:
“Once the historical event has taken place, it appears inevitable; alternatives recede. History is written by winners, especially the history of revolutions. It is nevertheless worth trying to penetrate imaginatively back to the time when options seemed open.”
Other historians have made similar claims. A half century earlier Johan Huizinga in “The Idea of History” (1934) gave it a fully explicit formulation:
“The historian… must always maintain towards his subject an indeterminist point of view. He must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors still seem to permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win; if he speaks of the coup d’etat of Brumaire, then it must remain to be seen if Bonaparte will be ignominiously repulsed. Only by continually recognizing that possibilities are unlimited can the historian do justice to the fullness of life.”
Hill and Huizinga are saying the historian must perform a thought experiment imaginatively placing themselves within past events with the future not only unknown, but also undetermined, in order to understand the aspirations of participants in that history, who could believe in not only the rightness of their cause, but also the ultimate success of their cause. Clearly, Hill indulged this thought experiment because he valued the contributions of seventeenth century radicals and what they might have accomplished if only things had turned out differently. We could even say that these radicals voiced perennial ideas that were to appear again and again in history, with the outcome three hundred years later being quite different.
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