The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History

439 Pages·1996·45.557 MB·English

by  Alastair MacLachlan (auth.)

THE RISE AND FALL OF REVOLUTIONARY
ENGLAND
The Rise and Fall of
Revolutionaw
J
England
An Essay on the Fabrication of
Seventeenth-Century History
Alastair MacLachlan
©Alastair MacLachlan 1996
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First published 1996 by
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ISBN 978-0-333-62009-0 ISBN 978-1-349-24572-7 (eBook)
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 The Great Bourgeois Revolutions: A False Genealogy? 7
2 Reclaiming the Revolution 32
3 Mamist History in a Cold War Era 79
4 Saving Appearances
5 Levelling out the Revolution
6 Retreating from the Revolution
7 Revolution as Text and Discourse
Conclusion: The End of the Line?
Notes
Index
England is a perpetual Theatre of revolutions.. . in an in-
stant the calm is changed into the most furious tempest, and
this tempest changes in a moment into calm.
Eustache Le Noble,
Lettres sur YAngleterre, 1697
One would expect people to remember the past and imagine
the future. But in fact, when discoursing or writing about
history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience, and
when trying to gauge the future they cite supposed analogies
from the past: till, by a double process of repetition, they
imagine the past and remember the future.
Sir Lewis Namier, 'Symmetry and Repetition',
in Conflicts (London, 1942)
Preface
During the writing of this book I have been aided by a number
of institutions. My thanks to Sydney University and my colleagues
in the History Department for an extended absence on an Over-
seas Study Programme and Long Service leave in 1992 and 1993,
and to the directors and secretarial staff of The History of Ideas
Unit and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National
University for placing their resources at my disposal and for pro-
viding such an ideal ambience for writing during a significant
portion of those years. Likewise, to the Communist Party Archive
in North London, the Marx Memorial Library Archive, the Cam-
bridge University Library and the British Library Manuscript Room
for allowing access to materials in their possession. To the late
Eugene Kamenka and to Alice Tay, and to Pat and Liz Collinson
for their hospitality and encouragement in Canberra and
Cambridge; to my dear friends, the late Nigel and Marjorie
Edgerton, and to my sister and brother-in-law, Sheila and Alan
Bracewell, for hospitality and support in London; to John Morrill
for some particularly helpful criticism and advice; likewise to Nick
Sadington, George Matthews, David Burchall, Jonathan Bordo, Iain
MacCalrnan, Iain Wright, John Mee, John Reeve, Tony Cahill, Stuart
MacIntyre, Tony Cousins, and Conal Condren. My thanks also to
Meg Miller and to Antony Howe for reading and commenting
on my typescript and for removing many errors. A special word
of thanks to Vicki for the title; also, for the sharpness and percep-
tiveness of her criticism, and for goading an incorrigible procras-
tinator into finishing his work.
My greatest debt, however, is to my research students over the
past decade: to Mark Gibson for his work on Anderson, to Alistair
Waring for his on the New Left, and, above all, to Antony Howe
for his writing and research on Hill (Christopher Hill: A Study of a
British Marxist Historian, unpublished M.A. 'Long Essay', Sydney,
1988) and on The Historians' Group of the Communist Party.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of this book have benefited greatly from his
highly critical but not (in my view) unfair examination of Hill's
early work in the light of discussions in Soviet historiography
viii Preface
and the charting of a 'correct line' by the Communist Party of
Great Britain.
In 1990 and 1992 Howe conducted extensive interviews and
archival work in England for a PhD (in progress) on the Historians'
Group of the Communist Party. As his supervisor over these years,
I benefited enormously from discussions with him, and in particular
from access to his draft chapters on Marx House, Dona Torr and
the origins of the Historians' Group from the 1930s to 1946. He
has also allowed me to use his files of research materials and
provided me with photocopies from the CP Archive (Historians'
Group and Dutt MSS), the Labour Archive at the University of
Hull, the Marx Memorial Library Archive, the Morris MSS at
University College London, and from Eric Hobsbawm's private
papers (more Morris MSS) - my heart-felt thanks. He is, of course,
in no way responsible for the judgements expressed in the text.
There is one other debt - to the historians themselves. In the
pages that follow, I have often been critical of the work of
Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Lawrence Stone, the late Edward
Thompson and Perry Anderson. But even though they might well
profoundly disagree with much of the argument of this book, I
would like to place on record my appreciation for the stimulus
of their writing.
Introduction
This book is about the fabrication of a revolutionary model of
English history. Its focus will be the 'discovery' of an epochal
revolution in the England of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. Its
starting point will be the distinctive but contiguous concepts of
'bourgeois revolution' and 'modern society', and the attempt to
relate both to seventeenth-century English religious and political
conflicts - an endeavour which can be traced back to the writings
of contemporary pol3tical theorists and to the subsequent 'specu-
lative histories' of eighteenth-century Scottish sociologists, but
which only achieved historiographical significance in the pedi-
grees sought by the French liberal historians of the nineteenth
century for their own revolution, and in the overlapping but dis-
tinctive body of Marx's writings and subsequent Marxist theory.
The first chapter will attempt to chart some of the problems of
this interpretative hybrid, and to show how a distinctively non-
revolutionary, 'constitutionalist' reading of England's seventeenth-
century past became canonical in the hundred years from 1840
to 1940.
The second section of the book will examine the recovery of
seventeenth-century English history for the radical Left in the 1930s
and 1940s, and the invented tradition of an 'English Revolution',
culminating in the native Marxism, often associated with the
collective endeavour of 'The Historians' Group of the Communist
Party', and with early work of Christopher Hill. It will explain
how a particular reading of 'dialectical and historical materialism'
taken from the teaching of Lenin and Stalin came to be applied
to England's supposed bourgeois transformation. And it will
attempt to place this militant and self-consciously Marxist reading
of England's revolutionary past within the Communist Party's
'battle of ideas' in the contemporary political arena during the
period from the 1930s to the mid 1950s. It will also, however,
trace its coexistence with an earlier radical and democratic version
of England's heritage, stretching back through the work of early
twentieth-century socialist historians to the 'reformers' of the late
eighteenth century and thence to the seventeenth-century Levellers
A. MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England
© Alastair MacLachlan 1996
2 .The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England
and Diggers themselves. And it will suggest that the bifocal model
of Marxist theory and 'people's history' - fused by the radical
patriotism pronounced at the end of the Second World War -
accounted for much of its empirical richness, attractiveness of idiom,
and long-term resilience; but, that it was also responsible for its
inconsistencies as a coherent explanation of political, social and
ideological change.
A third section will consider the partial fragmentation of this
model in the twenty-year span from the mid 1950s to the 1970s,
and the heroic endeavours of Christopher Hill, Lawrence Stone
and others at 'saving appearances': through refining categories
and stretching chronology; shifting the argument from causes and
intentions to outcomes and unintended legacies, from political
rupture and class struggle to ideological or psychic transforma-
tion; conflating Marxism with other models of social change and
collapsing it into Whiggism once more; or, at the very least, celebrat-
ing the people's experiences when it could no longer salvage the
triumph of the bourgeoisie. Particular attention will be given to
the ambience of counter-cultural expectation in the late 1960s and
1970s: something which explained the attractions .of 'a world turned
upside down' during the 1640s and 1650s also, and helped to
reorientate Marxist historiography in a manner that ensured its
continuing radical appeal.
A further section will examine the attempt to rethink Marxist
history in a post-Stalinist era, and the celebrated debate which
this engendered between E. P. Thompson and Perry Anderson
over the 'peculiarities' of England's past and the place of the
seventeenth-century 'revolution' within it. In one sense, it will
contend, this was a restatement of the argument between an
exceptionalist version of England's radical heritage and the quest
for a more theoretical Marxist explanation of its insufficiencies;
in another, however, that it marked a retreat from the 'revol-
utionary' reading of English history, and paralleled the 'new wave'
of 'revisionist' writing during the late 1970s and 1980s: the attack
both on Marxist or Marxisant theories of social change and on
the traditional Whig story of constitutional struggle and liberal
reform. Another chapter will examine the survival of the Marxist
interpretation in a new form - as 'cultural materialism': a radicalized
literary history or a celebration of an invisible church of cultural
'witness' in unpropitious times. A concluding chapter will assess
these various survivals and challenges in the age of Mrs Thatcher,