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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Marxist Classic., 29 Aug 2001
John Edward Christopher Hill wrote this short book, originally published in 1940 as part of a larger work with essays by other authors, with the intention of shaking the established norms of Civil War historiography, and of being left behind as a radical statement by a young man off to war. As such, the book trembles with undisguised urgency, as though the story could not unfold fast enough.This is Hill's first book (he was not to publish another for fourteen years) and it is also his most famous, for in it he gives us the first thoroughly Marxist exploration of the English Revolution. It is surprising, after sixty years, how much of the book's orientation is still applicable in the light of recent research. We have long-since ditched the idea that the crisis was a simmering, long-term conflict between defunct Feudalism and nascent Capitalism, but Hill's basic argument that the Revolution constituted a turning-point in English history still stands. Whether it is sensible to talk of a 'bourgeoisie' an 'aristocracy' these days is another matter. We now know that the development of the Civil Wars/Revolution was far more complex, and cannot be reduced, as Hill does here, to a duality of forces. Although, to be fair, Hill does point to the convoluted and complex construction and constitution of classes, and of the need for a fluid, dialectical consideration of class. As with all of Hill's books, the familiar set of characters have their walk-on parts: Winstanley, Harrington, Hobbes, the Levellers, and so on, which regular readers of Hill will appreciate. Indeed, this book is essential for all readers of Hill, and those interested in the Revolution in general, because, in the first instance, themes are developed here which have a subsequent bearing on his later work. In the second, Hill's interpretation here has been so massively influential, especially outside the academy, that, by force of numbers, it demands to be read and considered. This work must have been ground-breaking in 1940, because it offered the first radical, Marxist interpretation of the Civil Wars, but also because it was written in an accessible, polemical style, which very much suited the time in which it was composed. I suspect it was that drive towards producing something radically new that Hill occassionally lapses into historical hubris. His argument has changed from that of a class struggle of bourgeoisie and aristocracy, to a more complex condsideration of tensions within the more loosely defined 'ruling class', exacerbated by the tensions which rent soicety at that time. Thus a multitude of forces must now be considered when analysing the causes of the English Civil War. There was no 'revolutionary party' in England in the early 1600s, but we can forgive that because here we have the foundations of a much more engaged historical analysis, which has given us the lead to develop more sophisticated understandings of the 'revolutionary decades'.
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by Christopher Hill
by Charles Spencer
