"The master of more than an old Oxford College", Edward Thompson used to say of Christopher Hill, historian and Master of Balliol College, Oxford, who died in March 2003. Hill was the pre-eminent Marxist historian writing on the 17th century and the English Revolution. Harvey Kaye, in his book about the remarkable generation of "British Marxist Historians", judged Hill "one of the greatest historians to work in the English language in the twentieth century". In this issue of Solidarity Alan Johnson begins an appreciation of Hill, his view of history and the significance of his work.
There are many treasures in Christopher Hill's Marxist histories of the 17th century English Revolution. In this appreciation I highlight only one: Hill's grasp of the role of political leadership in the making of a revolution. Within his many books is a subtle grasp of how the capacity of the revolutionary actor is developed, deployed and preserved across the dynamics of a revolution by political leadership and organisation. We can learn much from Hill's books today about the broad tasks facing radicals who seek to turn the world upside down. Read from this angle of vision his books become primers for making revolution today.
Before the Revolution: "Blowing the bellows of their sedition"
In 1649 a King was beheaded and a Republic declared: "How did men get the nerve to do such unheard of things?", asked Hill. The essence of his answer: there are "stops in the mind" which underpin the power of the ruling class, and which "can all be summed up as respect for authority and fear of independent reason". They must be removed by a process of "moral and intellectual reform".
The central task of political leadership before a revolution is cognitive liberation, changing consciousness in order to build the capacity of the collective actor. Hill was no voluntarist, though. "Ideas are all-important for the individuals whom they impelled into action; but the historian must attach equal importance to the circumstances that gave these ideas their chance. Revolutions are not made without ideas, but they are not made by intellectuals".
Hill puts the intellectual leadership of the 17th century pamphleteers and Puritans, mechanic preachers and London scientists, lecturers and army Agitators in a wider context: a century of economic development and the slow-burning "problem of authority" ignited by Luther, had both undermined the old "stops in the mind".
Nonetheless, the work of making a revolution cannot be reduced to the context. We learn from reading Hill that there are five aspects of cognitive liberation or changing consciousness, for capacity building in advance of the revolution, for which leadership is indispensable.
1. Establishing a coherent system of ideas
People, said Hill, "do not break lightly with the past: if they are to challenge conventionally accepted standards, they must have an alternative body of ideas to support them". Puritanism was "the most important complex of ideas that prepared men's minds for revolution, but not the only one". Intellectuals such as Bacon, Ralegh and Coke also "helped to undermine men's traditional belief in the eternity of the old order in church and state, and this was an immense task, without the successful accomplishment of which there could have been no political revolution". Indeed, "together with the Puritan sense of destiny and emphasis on self-help" these intellectuals "prepared men for revolution".
2. Establishing an organic relationship to the revolutionary actor
If they are to produce cognitive liberation -and not just books -alternative bodies of ideas must be developed by certain kinds of intellectuals: those in an organic relationship to their audience. The contrast between traditional and organic intellectuals might be taken as the basic theme of Hill's book Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. He contrasts the "confusion and failure of nerve among the traditional intellectuals" who were mere scholastics, opposed to translation (from Latin), and who "virtually ignored" the scientific and intellectual revolution of 1560-1640, to those he calls the "Montesquieus, Voltaires and Diderots of the English Revolution", organic intellectuals such as Bacon, Ralegh, Coke and the London scientists. Hill stresses "the close understanding between the leading scholars of England and the technicians for whom they wrote". The explosion of vernacular scientific books, written by "self-educated men who had either never been to a university or held no academic posts there" were "consciously aimed at a public of merchants, artisans, mariners, gunners, surveyors". The works of men like Robert Recorde, John Dee, and Thomas Digges were "deliberately intended to help 'mechanicians' to educate themselves". Hill observes that Bacon "elevated to a coherent intellectual system what had hitherto been only the partly spoken assumptions of practical men".
The echo of Gramsci's notion that political leadership distils "good sense" from contradictory "common sense" is unmistakable. (Hill had reviewed an edition of Gramsci's Modern Prince in 1958).
We learn from Hill that it is easier to achieve cognitive liberation if the leader enters or cultivates institutions and social spaces in which dialogue and conversation, education and debate, can flourish. Hill's work is replete with discussion of such institutions and spaces from the alehouse to the "adult education movement", from the endowed colleges to the New Model Army.
In the Independent and Sectarian congregations "people organised themselves in those days to escape from the propaganda of the established Church and discuss the things they wanted to discuss in their own way". "One of the essentials of the sectarian position was that the sermon should be followed by discussion: that worship was not a matter of passively hearing the word preached by a learned minister, but participation by the congregation after a gifted member had opened up a subject for discussion".
The New Model Army became a "hot-house of ideas" marked by "freedom of organisation and discussion". Soldiers used to being only the led and the listener began to develop their capacity to lead. Many took on "preaching functions". The "thinking of the rank and file developed apace". In this space, free of the crushing authority of their "betters", the voice of the democratic leader begins to emerge. Men like William Erbery, Henry Pinnel, and Thomas Collier develop a theory of popular sovereignty wrapped in the raiments of the gospel. An Army chaplain like John Saltmarsh dares to think that "the interest of the people in Christ's kingdom is not only an interest of submission, but of consultation, of debating, counselling, prophesying, voting". The New Model Army transforms the hegemonic or directive capacity of the lower-orders. Political organisation, collective identity, organic intellectuals and indigenous leaders or "Agitators", all developed like ivy on the trelliswork of the army regiments.
3. Victory of these ideas in competition with other ideas propagated by other leaderships
To lead, in ideas or action, is to contest and defeat other leaderships. Cognitive liberation involves undermining rival claims to legitimate leadership. "In the [1640s]" Hill points out, "the radicals attacked in the same breath, the Merchant Adventurers' export monopoly, the Stationers' printing monopoly, and the Church's monopoly of preaching". Hill shows us Cromwell contesting the legitimacy of the leadership of the Irish clergy: "It was your pride that begat the expression, and it is for filthy lucre's sake that you keep it up, that by making the people believe they are not as holy as yourselves, they might for their penny purchase some sanctity from you; and you might bridle, saddle and ride them at your pleasure". But we also see the Digger Winstanley redirecting the attack at Cromwell himself: "First, here in the Presbytery, then there in the Independency
you lead the people like horses by the nose, and ride upon them at your pleasure".
Cognitive liberation also involves intense competition over the tenancy of words, linguistic battles over the power to define reality and construct meaning. Hill is especially gifted at reconstructing these battles over words such as "antichrist" or "liberty" or the "Norman Yoke". We can learn much from Hill in our own fight to reclaim words like "freedom" and "democracy".
4. "Here-and-Nowness": the translation of the body of ideas into a compelling style and idiom
Hill shows us that enormous attention is paid by effective leaders to the style, idiom, tone and form of their communication in this battle of cognitions. He praises Winstanley's re-articulation of traditional myths, such as the biblical "Fall" and "the Norman Yoke" to question the entire structure of society. Winstanley took the entire stock of biblical imagery and symbolic resource and skilfully reworked it as an instrument for cognitive liberation. Winstanley understood that "through the myths, truths about man, society and the universe could be poetically expressed, in a way that would inspire to action".
Hill also highlights the use by Winstanley of the English landscape as a metaphor, praising the "here-and-nowness" of his language. We might reflect on this when reading the private sect language the left often uses.
Hill showed that these shifts in communicative style were the result of the emergence of a new type of leadership in a new relation to a new audience. Hill identifies three new forms of communication: Leveller pamphlet, sect/mechanic lecture, and the scientific popularisation.
Hill relates each form of communication to the more egalitarian relationship between leader and follower produced once the lower-orders begin to set up for themselves. Thus, "it was the radicals and especially the Levellers who perfected the popular approach-Walwyn and Overton-evolved a highly sophisticated simplicity in which art concealed art and wit was disciplined to effect". Citing a Walwyn passage Hill says "That is good prose because it is doing a job". The mechanic preachers deliberately created "a prose of comparable directness and conversationality". Fox and Bunyan "perfected a direct spoken democratic eloquence, its narrative and dialogue drawing on popular democratic traditions". It is the same for the craftsman's prose of scientific popularisers like Recorde, Dee and Culpepper, who "want people to look and understand and see his simple logic. So his style is vivid and direct".
In short, with the emergence in the world of a leadership of a new type, seeking to inspire, empower and enlighten, "the rhythms of ordinary speech are becoming literature". The gobbledygook of "Total Quality Management" is a negative proof of Hill's argument, of course.
5. "Put Your Faith in God and Keep Your Powder Dry"
Hill drew a connection between the sensibility of Puritanism and the skills of leadership. The revolutionary élan of the Puritan integrated freedom and necessity, individual agency and historic process. One thinks of Cromwell's quip, "Trust in God and keep your powder dry", or Marvell's line "Make your destiny your choice". As Hill observes, "such an attitude demands very careful consideration of time and place, accurate assessment of each political situation". Belief in "providence" was a spur to astute generalship. "For Oliver 'waiting on providences' meant making absolutely sure that the political situation was ripe before taking drastic action". Hill argues that "this relation between means and ends, the duty of keeping our powder dry until the time came to commit the Lord's forces was a Puritan commonplace". Comparing the Puritan's "God" and the Leninist's "History" Hill argues both felt themselves to be co-operating with a force larger than self, and so tended to sacrilise political action. The elect had "the courage and confidence to fight, with economic, political, or military weapons, to create a new world worthy of the God who had so signally blessed them". More: both saw knowledge as the basis of action. To co-operate with God's purposes one must first understand them: the more historical and scientific knowledge one possessed, the more capable one was of active co-operation. The gaining of new knowledge itself fosters "cosmic optimism and self-confidence". Hence, the "bookishly-militant" type we find in both Puritanism and Leninism, travelling back and forth from text to action. The problems associated with this figure, such as the tendency to Talmudic text mining or an arrogant and hectoring stance to the unenlightened, was not a theme of Hill's.
The English Revolution, 1640-1660
The English Revolution of 1640-1660 began as a clash between the King's supporters in the court, aristocracy and Anglican church against the Parliamentary leaders and the "middling sort", the rising bourgeoisie. At issue, as Hill put it, "Who was to be the boss, the King and his favourites, or the elected representatives of the men of property?" Being "boss" meant controlling the law, economic policy, the distribution of spoils of office and patronage, and imposing one's world view, morality and religion. The developing capitalist relations of production in agriculture and commerce clashed with the Monarchy's attempt to establish an absolutist state on the French model.
But Parliament could only win the first civil war of 1642-1645 by mobilising the lower class and organising it in the New Model Army. And here, on the left wing of the bourgeois revolution, our class went into business for itself. As Hill put it, "the people saw a door opening out of their own sphere and rushed through it". After victory the two parts of the alliance divided. The Parliamentary "Grandees", such as Cromwell and Ireton, opposed the calls for a radical extension of the revolution and the franchise coming from the Levellers and in the New Model Army.
In 1647 the two sides debated, famously, at Putney. The Leveller Rainsborough appealed to natural rights: "The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he, and therefore every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government". Colonel Ireton replied that natural rights would endanger Property and justify communism: "liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense if property be preserved".
The Levellers, who favoured private property and the disenfranchisement of the poor, were "nonplussed" by this argument at Putney. Only the communist Gerrard Winstanley grasped the nettle insisting that "the common people are part of the nation without exception and are to have freedom" and, turning Ireton's argument around, "There cannot be a universal liberty till this universal community be established". Cromwell bought time.
Reunited by the escape of the King (which may have been by Cromwell's design) and the second civil war of 1647-1649, victory led to the execution of the King, abolition of House of Lords and the declaration of a Republic in 1649.
But it was to be Cromwell's Republic, a quasi-monarchy. The radical forces of the Levellers and the Diggers were crushed by Cromwell at Burford and St George's Hill. Though Cromwell ruled until his death in 1658, his regime rested on neither the gentry nor the people, but only, in the end, the bayonets of the Army. With his personal authority gone, the Restoration of the Monarchy, if not the old feudal regime, took place in 1660.
Christopher Hill, 1912-2003
Hill is often said to have developed "history from below". I think this is misleading. Hill was a Marxist not a History Workshop oral historian. He warned that "if you concentrate too narrowly on a short period of history it is possible to suffer a loss of perspective. Events are more likely to seem determined by chance or by the accidents of personality... it is important to stand back from the trees and look at the wood as a whole".
He bluntly insisted that the meaning of the revolution cannot be read off from "what leaders said they were fighting about", and then went on to study what leaders said very closely indeed.
Hill sometimes employs the image of the seed, the soil, and the sower to capture the relation between ideas, environment, and political organisation and leadership. The dilemma of the Digger and communist, Gerrard Winstanley, noted Hill, was that he "saw the danger of appealing to an uneducated democracy and could not find in contemporary conditions of society the social force which would put through the changes necessary even to make the common people aware of what might be done". Hill was under no illusion about the chance of any leap to communism in 1640s. The industrial revolution, he said, "would give birth to a working class movement which would challenge private property [and] pick up ideas which Winstanley had apparently thrown on stony ground". We must attend to the soil Hill instructs us and not just the seed and the sower.
Conversely, Hill's desire to attend not just to the soil but also the seed and the sower (to give social structure and ideas and human action their due) perhaps leads people to misread him. Hill did not abandon structural analysis for "culturalism", as Richard Johnson and
Andrew Milner allege. Nor was he the Weberian action-theorist that Mary Fulbrook believed him to be. And the SWP's Norah Carlin, herself a gifted historian of the 17th century, is surely wrong and sectarian to say flatly that Hill was "not a Marxist". I think we might, instead, read Hill's oeuvre as a rather heroic example of the development of a Marxist research programme, with Hill constantly seeking to renovate theory in the light of new empirical evidence and critique, developing falsifiable hypotheses on the foundation of the "hard core" of the research programme.
Hill's achievement was to integrate (across his work as a whole rather than any single book) two "ways of looking" at the English Revolution that we might employ to grasp any revolution. First, a kind of historical ethnography involving empathetic understanding of the acts of the protagonists, often heroic and moving. A book like The World Turned Upside Down is exemplary here. Second, a cool weighing of the "longer, slower, profounder changes", the "colossal transformations which ushered England into the modern world", as seen, for instance, in his Century of Revolution, 1603-1714.
What Margot Heinemann says of Hill's treatment of poets and playwrights can perhaps stand for his dialectical approach as a whole: "he can show the pressure of tradition and custom in forming and limiting a writer's language and way of seeing, without needing to diminish the human subject as maker of the work and active agent in history".
Most readers find The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution their favourite, with its cast of inspirational radicals, dreamers and freethinkers. Others respond to his provocative and plangent reinterpretation of radical Milton, Milton and the English Revolution. My own favourite remains his book on Cromwell, God's Englishman.
Hill is not everybody's cup of tea. Paul Foot was right to say Hill was "never difficult to read". But on occasion he could be boring, subjecting the reader to very long lists of names and examples with little analysis. David Underdown has pointed out, correctly, that Hill relied on printed sources and so left "the conforming majority in the shadows". J H Hexter famously accused Hill of "source-mining", finding facts to fit his already-decided conclusion, and "lumping" these facts together to force a "proof".
But the criticisms are small beer next to the two monumental achievements. First, the rescue of the hidden "revolution within the revolution", that failed but which if successful, "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". Second, a rich and supple Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution that did succeed.
• Part two here.
