When I was studying for my A-Level History exams, I sometimes used to pop into Foyle’s bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road to browse the voluminous History shelves, and on one of my visits I came across The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 by Christopher Hill, published in 1961. As I leafed through it, I soon discovered that this was a textbook like no other: concise, well organised and written in a wonderfully lucid and accessible style.
The lapidary exposition was enlivened with quotes and anecdotes to give a flavour of the period. The trenchant judgments – “Charles I was much stupider than his father”; “James I was a pedantic and undignified person with gross and unseemly personal habits” – added to the entertainment value of the book. The chapters on “religion and ideas” delivered far more than they promised, because they also covered culture and the arts. Even here there were surprises, for the book opened up the whole world of the popular culture of the age, something I’d barely realised had actually existed. It was a pleasure to read, especially if you’d been fed on a diet of the tedious political narratives that were the stock-in-trade of the normal school history textbooks of the time.
On my next visit to Foyle’s, I checked out the History shelves for more work by Hill and found Puritanism and Revolution, published in 1958, a collection of essays and articles. Particularly fascinating was a chapter titled “The Mad Hatter” about the eccentric Roger Crab, whose hermit-like existence, homespun sackcloth clothing and strange religious beliefs Hill entertainingly described before relating them convincingly to the doctrines of the sectarians and political radicals of the mid-17th century, notably the egalitarian Levellers. Crab wasn’t actually a hatter but a haberdasher, and nowadays we know that the term “mad as a hatter” derives not from the eccentricities of Mr Crab, as Hill claimed, but from absorbing too much of the mercury used in making felt hats. But as an example of technique and historical perspective, it captures Hill’s particular style: profound learning lightly worn, combined with Marxism that was beneath the surface rather than in-your-face. Unsurprisingly, its influence spread through our discipline well beyond its ideological confines.
The gem of the collection was a long essay on “The Norman Yoke”, which traced with staggering erudition the history of the idea that native English liberties had been suppressed by the feudal regime introduced by William the Conqueror. This, again, was characteristic of Hill’s work, a particular view of the English past instrumentalised in the service of radical politics in the present. Hill related this to larger social processes, in which, eventually, the nostalgia of the declining village community was replaced by the forward-looking ideology of the urban working class. It was a way of showing how much myths and beliefs were rooted in the real social and economic structures of the day, illustrating on a small scale a crucial point made in a much larger way by The Century of Revolution.
My A-Level History went well, thanks not least to my reading of Hill’s work, and I was duly accepted to Oxford to study the subject. Of course, the first thing I did was to make a beeline to one of Hill’s undergraduate lectures at Balliol College, where he was then Master. Nothing but disappointment awaited, however. He was a terrible lecturer – stuttering, hesitant, soft-spoken, showing none of the energy and power exhibited in his written work. I gave up quickly enough, and went off to hear Keith Thomas instead, a far more cogent and compelling teacher. At the same time, however, I discovered that Hill was only one of a whole group of British historians who were propagating a novel and exhilarating approach to modern British history: men like Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, John Savile, Rodney Hilton, Raphael Samuel, and of course Edward Thompson. It was above all they who made the late 1960s and early 1970s such an exciting time to study History at university.
The huge influence of the English Marxists, particularly on my own generation of historians, has now been brought to our attention again by Michael Braddick’s biographical study Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian, just published by Verso. A very private man, Hill left few resources for any potential biographer, and Braddick is forced to concentrate mainly on the work. Currently a Fellow of All Souls, he seems more at home in charting the ins and outs of Hill’s tenure of office as Master of Balliol than he is dealing with the politics and culture of the Communist Party of Great Britain. While some of the other British Marxist historians were forced during the Cold War to work on the margins of university life, teaching extra-mural, part-time and mature students, Hill made his way into the very centre of the academic Establishment, a paradox that requires more empathetic exploration than Braddick is willing, or able, to supply. Born in Yorkshire, Hill spent decades of his academic life not just in Oxford but at one of its oldest and most prestigious Colleges, Balliol, interrupted before his retirement only by a trip to the Soviet Union in the Thirties, and then war service in the Forties. Still, it is good to have this biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest and most significant Marxist historians.
What united Hill and his Marxist contemporaries – who were also his comrades in the Communist Party – was a drive to link the different aspects of the past (economy, society, culture, ideology and politics) in a causal web ultimately powered by the structures and processes inherent in the economy and its development. British historians by and large had hitherto followed the example of an Oxford historian of the previous generation, Herbert Fisher, who famously confessed in his three-volume history of Europe, published in 1935: “Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave… [There is] only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
By contrast, Hill and his comrades took their cue from Karl Marx, who had declared: “People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The key task of the historian was to work out in a convincing way the relationship between individual choices and the wider structures and processes within which they had to be taken. And that is what Hill spent his career trying to do.
There were many prevalent myths on which Hill and the other Marxist historians trained their guns. One was the “Great Man” theory of history, according to which individuals such as Napoleon, Hitler or Alexander the Great had moulded events without being subjected to any wider influences or constraints. Hill’s fascination with the allegedly Great Man of 17th-century England, Oliver Cromwell, about whom indeed he published a biography (God’s Englishman) in 1970, did not prevent him from exploring the broader historical context in which Cromwell operated. This and his other writings showed convincingly, on the other hand, that Marxists, as had often been alleged, did not write the individual entirely out of history in favour of anonymous and impersonal forces.
The other myth the Marxists destroyed was the “Whig Theory of History”, in which England’s past was characterised as a centuries-long struggle between the champions of freedom and democracy on the one hand and the defenders of privilege and authority on the other: Roundheads versus Cavaliers, Puritans versus Catholics, Whigs versus Tories. The distortions and suppressions inherent in this division of historical figures and movements into goodies and baddies were obvious, as the rise of economic liberalism led to the ruthless exploitation of the labouring classes and the emerging proletariat. Hill directed his fire specifically against the Whig historians Macaulay, Gardiner and Trevelyan, whose magnificent narrative depiction of 17th-century English history he regarded as a smug, bourgeois-liberal justification of the current state of affairs.
A good deal of the best work of the English Marxist historians focused on restoring dignity and agency to the forgotten lower and lowest classes in history. This ranged from the Diggers, Levellers and other socially radical sectarians in Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1975) to the European peasant movements of Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels (1959), and above all Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), with its declared aim “ to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity”.
It was here that arguably Hill’s most significant historical legacy lay. By the 1960s, younger historians were already at work bringing locally-based research to bear on the question of whether or not the 17th-century Civil War was a class struggle between a rising bourgeoisie, formed by the landowning gentry and the merchants and financiers of the City, and a declining aristocracy. Hill augmented this with an analysis of the Church of England’s position, in his Economic Problems of the Church (1956). At the same time, he redirected attention to the central role of ideas in his Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965). The link between these two sides of his work was the argument that ideas had to be understood in their social, economic and political context, a seemingly obvious point, but one which perhaps constitutes Hill’s greatest contribution to historical study in a broader sense.
Hill, along with Thompson, Hobsbawm and the other British Marxist historians, saw close links between what they regarded as the crisis of bourgeois civilisation in the 20th century and comparable crises in the past. They were all at one time or another members of the Communist Party. But what was striking about them was the fact that their hugely influential work was published after they left the Party, mostly following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (the exception was Hobsbawm, who left it in spirit but not officially). While they were still subjected to Party discipline they had not been free to follow their own paths as historians, as Hill’s short study Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1947) commissioned by the Party, with its Leninist pieties and its virtual erasure of Trotsky, notoriously demonstrated. (Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams managed to save at least a bit of their integrity by deviating from the Party line when ordered to publish a justification of the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939.)
The impact of this vanguard of historians upon my own, “boomer” generation, was enormous, informing the many ways in which we approached the past and the evidential traces it left behind: not any more as a set of structures and processes that followed “scientific” laws as the Communists proposed, but still interconnected in myriad and comprehensible ways. More surprisingly, perhaps, their legacy also lies in their clarity of exposition, free of jargon and pretension, which reflected their determination to address and engage with the minds of readers far beyond the world of academia – a model which my own generation tried to follow, and which our younger colleagues would do well to remember.
But they also provide an interesting test case for the tension between politics and ideas, and an illustration of the retreat of Marxism into the academic milieu in recent decades. All of these men were fully aware of the fundamental Marxist principle of the “unity of theory and practice”. It was followed closely by Thompson, who took on a leading political role in the campaign for nuclear disarmament. But Hill barely involved himself in politics at all. His contribution was limited to signing letters to the press in support of radical causes. In a similar way, Hobsbawm consciously understood himself from his teenage years on as an “intellectual” rather than an activist. In the last analysis (to adapt a favourite Marxist phrase) the complex relationship between social position and radical ideas that Hill was so adept at analysing in the past applied to him too, but what his career actually showed was a startlingly paradoxical disjuncture between the two.
[See also: The prophet of the new right]
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