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jazzy_daveChristopher Hill "The World Turned Upside Down : Radical Ideas During the English Revolution" (Penguin)
In a culmination of a long period of challenges to royal prerogatives, Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army overthrew the royal government. His foot soldiers, if you will, included some of the most original, radical and exuberant political thinkers in Western history. For a brief moment the king was gone and radical leaders like John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley and their ideas held sway, although Cromwell and the gentry were shortly able to reassert control (before eventually losing power in the English reformation). Cromwell considered the radicals "a despicable and contemptible generation of men."
Hill's book tells the marvelously exciting stories of the Ranters and Seekers, Levellers and True Levellers (or Diggers), and the Quakers. Diggers, so called because they cultivated land they held in common in communes, were the most radical strain. They vied with the Levellers, who "merely" supported the universal right of every male head of household to vote for parliament. These events scared to death the usual powers-that-be. Thomas Hobbes' wrote the Leviathan in reaction against the chaos, as he saw it, of the English Civil War.
In summarizing the impact of the radicals' ideas, Hill quotes their enemy Clement Walker that they had "cast all the secrets and mysteries of government...before the vulgar (like pearls before swine)...[and] made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule."
Hill states, "For a short time, ordinary people were freer from the authority of church and social superiors than they had ever been before, or were for a long time to be again." Hill's excellent book tells the story of how such an event came to be and how the lords and gentry regained power and smashed the radicals.
In a culmination of a long period of challenges to royal prerogatives, Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army overthrew the royal government. His foot soldiers, if you will, included some of the most original, radical and exuberant political thinkers in Western history. For a brief moment the king was gone and radical leaders like John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley and their ideas held sway, although Cromwell and the gentry were shortly able to reassert control (before eventually losing power in the English reformation). Cromwell considered the radicals "a despicable and contemptible generation of men."
Hill's book tells the marvelously exciting stories of the Ranters and Seekers, Levellers and True Levellers (or Diggers), and the Quakers. Diggers, so called because they cultivated land they held in common in communes, were the most radical strain. They vied with the Levellers, who "merely" supported the universal right of every male head of household to vote for parliament. These events scared to death the usual powers-that-be. Thomas Hobbes' wrote the Leviathan in reaction against the chaos, as he saw it, of the English Civil War.
In summarizing the impact of the radicals' ideas, Hill quotes their enemy Clement Walker that they had "cast all the secrets and mysteries of government...before the vulgar (like pearls before swine)...[and] made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule."
Hill states, "For a short time, ordinary people were freer from the authority of church and social superiors than they had ever been before, or were for a long time to be again." Hill's excellent book tells the story of how such an event came to be and how the lords and gentry regained power and smashed the radicals.
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Date: 2015-06-07 08:01 pm (UTC)Hill is now considered very dated as his Marxist approach (very much the one I grew up with as an undergrad) has been overtaken by post Marxist discourse although he remains interesting historiographically- a real snapshot of historical views in the sixties and seventies.
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Date: 2015-06-07 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-07 08:18 pm (UTC)I have to run to keep up with the reading!
Diane Purkis's: 'The English Civil War' is a good overview of specifically English experience of a more recent date.
Or for a broader overview, perhaps Ian Gentles': The English Revolution and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms' because it's not all just about England!
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Date: 2015-06-07 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-07 09:22 pm (UTC)It was exciting to look back at a period when anything seemed possible; and the world seemed being made anew (especially after our recent dreary same-old-same-old General Election). Sadly, of course, dissent got quashed anyway.
I don't know if you could get hold of a copy of the play (it was certainly on sale at the National Theatre shop when we were there - but all the books are mighty pricey).
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Date: 2015-06-07 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-07 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-08 03:47 am (UTC)*HUGS*
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Date: 2015-06-08 06:17 am (UTC)Hugs, Jon
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Date: 2015-06-08 09:33 am (UTC)