Product Description

Within the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic - the ideology of the propertied class - there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success '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. In "The World Turned Upside Down" Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless' men, the outbursts of sexual freedom, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93148 in Books
• Published on: 1984-12-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140137323
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Christopher Hill was educated at St Peter's School, York, and at Balliol College, Oxford, and in 1934 was made a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In 1936 he became lecturer in modern history at University College, Cardiff, and two years later fellow and tutor in modern history at Balliol. After war service, which included two years in the Russian department of the Foreign Office, he returned to Oxford in 1945. From 1958 until 1965 he was university lecturer in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history, and from 1965 to 1978 he was Master of Balliol College. After leaving Balliol he was for two years a Visiting Professor at the Open University. Dr Hill, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the British Academy, has received numerous honorary degrees from British universities, as well as the Hon. Dr. Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1979. His publications include Lenin and the Russian Revolution; Puritanism and Revolution; Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England; Reformation to Industrial Revolution (second volume in the Penguin Economic History of Britain); God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution; The World Turned Upside Down; Milton and the English Revolution, which won the Royal Society of Literature Award; The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries; A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church, which won the 1989 W. H. Smith Literary Award; The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, which was shortlisted for the 1993 NCR Book Award; and Liberty against the Law. Many of these titles are published by Penguin. Dr Hill is married with two children.

Customer Reviews

It ain't Humpty-Dumpty
Hill's book taught me an ironical lesson. I've been smugly complaisant about a country I long viewed as smugly complaisant. What I knew of England's history before Hill's work, I learned from the usual unreliable sources: school textbooks, TV, PBS, "thin red line" movies, Churchill's rodomontade, etc. In short, like other Americans, my image of a distant people was molded by all the approved sources of official fact, acceptable stereotype, and general misinformation. The result - the English are a highly dutiful people who dearly love their Queen mum, are respectably unimaginative and hardworking, make good detectives, but most of all, obediently march off to war in the name of the king, the East India Company, The Empire, NATO, or any other patriotic banner that keeps the rabble in line. That is, an orderly society on which to pattern an orderly profit-yielding planet.

Thanks to Hill, I now count Gerrard Winstanley as one of my personal heroes. Because I now know that for one brief, shining period of English history, the spirit of that man and others like him stormed the heavens, smashed the idols, and brought forth the vision of a better society. One that can join with the best of other national inheritances. (There were even disreputable rumors that women might be capable human beings.) It's almost exciting to follow the heroic efforts of the Diggers, Ranters, Levelers, and other assorted itinerants, visionaries, and Biblical scholars, all trying to throw off the oppressive weight of God, King, and the Rising Professional Class. They failed. But England and the rest of us are surely the worse for it. This is hidden history at its best, a magnifying glass held to the beliefs and thoughts of people whose beliefs and thoughts are usually passed over in the grand sweep of events. Yet whose ideas and visions were bold enough to threaten the traditional order and challenge the course of our world.

Judging from the personal data, it looks like the good professor has probably passed back into the biosphere along with those whose words and deeds he did so much to resurrect. I think Hill identified with his subject, though the text is properly sober, scholarly, and certainly not uncritical. Judging from his published works, he's clearly expert in 17th century England and writes for a readership he expects to be also knowledgeable. So my advice is to not be like me, ignorant of the larger events of that period, but to prepare the landscape with a general survey. Whether you identify with his subject or not, the effort is worth it.

Anarchy in the UK!
For those who think that anti-establishmentarianism started with Woodstock or the Punk scene this book is a must read. Christopher Hill shows the roots of the modern left and the populist movement going back to the English Revolution of the 1600's. He shows a variety of different groups that rocked the status of the era, including movements for land reform and quite radical notions about religion.

If you want to understand American history, this book is a must read because many of these movements could be seen later in the American Revolutionary war. It may also surprise many that the friendly face you see on a box of Quaker Oats has more in common with counter-culture rather than corporate culture.

Hill sticks to his theme and writes well. While filled with footnotes, this book was very easy on the eye. In addition he manages to show how these movements change over time. Never a dull page here!

Ranting about the Ranters
There were two revolutions in mid-seventeenth century Britain, Christopher Hill writes in the introduction to The World Turned Upside Down. One was the successful Glorious Revolution that established the constitutional monarchy and secured the rights of property. The other was "the revolution that never happened;" one that threatened to create a political and economic democracy that would have turned Britain on its head.

The World Turned Upside Down documents the second revolution and the ideas and ideologies of the English radicals who sought to redefine freedom, faith and property, "the revolt within the Revolution" and the fascinating flood of radical ideas which it threw up." (13). Though he focuses on what he concedes could be characterized as the "lunatic fringe" of the English revolution, Hill argues that their ideas reflected a widespread popular challenge to power, class and authority in the 1640s and 1650s whose study permits "a deeper insight into English society than the evidence permits either before 1640 or after 1660." (15)

The English Civil War was not merely a struggle between Parliament and the Crown - the "first revolution" - it also unleashed the forces of class antagonisms that had been simmering in the wake of a breakdown of the feudal economy and society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A growing population of "masterless men" had begun to undermine the traditional bonds of "loyalty and dependence between lord and man" (32), incubating subversive ideas in the towns, forests and, above all in the parliamentary New Model Army and growing religious sectaries.

This was very much a religious movement, stimulated by the reformation and by frustration at Stuart attempts to reestablish the traditional Episcopal structures of the English Church. Printing technology, and the great relaxation of censorship after 1642 enabled a efflorescence of radical dissent that was articulated in oppositional religious and social movements like the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and Quakers that not only questioned ecclesiastical authority, but challenged the social and economic relations that it supported. "For a brief 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." (293)

Though these movements and ideas were ultimately crushed - as with the Diggers - or emasculated with the Restoration in 1658, Hill sees in them the inchoate beginnings of an English radicalism that, he says, likely had a deep influence on the American revolution and English radicalism of the late eighteenth century, though he concedes that is difficult to prove. What is important is the effect radicals like Gerrard Winstanley and Richard Overton had on the "longer, slower, profounder changes in men's ways of thinking, without which the heroic gestures would be meaningless." (310)

The World Turned Upside Down is an effective and exciting genealogy of 18th century English radicalism. However, Hill's enterprise is weakened - though not fatally - by his assumption of a mature class dynamic at work in pre-industrial, early capitalist Britain, and by his use, almost exclusively, of political and religious pamphlets as his source material. He totalizes the masses of dispossessed peasants, urban poor, professionals, small merchants and artisans, collectively England's commoners, as a class, though they demonstrably had widely divergent economic interests. Indeed, the lack of cohesion and solidarity between these groups is one of the main themes of the book.

The focus on pamphlet literature, moreover, though fascinating, only reveals the ideas and motivations of literate men (and they are all men) who had the financial resources to print and distribute pamphlets. In effect, The World Turned Upside Down cannot, by definition, document the ideas of "ordinary people," but only their top stratum. While these may have been the leaders and ideologues of "the revolution that never happened," and instructive in itself, that is only part of the story Hill had hoped to tell.