Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #183374 in Books
• Published on: 1984-12-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Customer Reviews

another look at the world turned upside down
Although both the parliamentary and royalist sides in the English Revolution, the major revolutionary event of the 17th century, quoted the Bible, particularly the newer English versions, for every purpose from an account of the Fall to the virtues of primitive communism that revolution cannot be properly understood except as a secular revolution. The first truly secular revolution of modern times. The late pre-eminent historian of the under classes of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, has taken the myriad ideas, serious and zany, that surfaced during the period between 1640-60, the heart of the revolutionary period, and given us his take on some previously understudied and misunderstood notions that did not make the conventional history books.

As been noted by more than one historian there is sometimes a disconnect between the ideas in the air at any particular time and the way those ideas get fought out in political struggle. In this case secular ideas, or what would have passed for such to us, like the questions of the divinity of the monarch, of social, political and economic redistribution and the nature of the new society (the second coming) were expressed in familiar religious terms. That being the case there is no better guide to understanding the significance of the mass of biblically-driven literary articles and some secular documents produced in the period than Professor Hill. Here we meet up again, as we have in Hill's other numerous volumes of work, with the democratic oppositionists the Levelers; the Diggers, especially the thoughts of their leader Gerrard Winstanley, in many aspects the forerunner of a modern branch of communist thought; the Ranters, Seekers and Quakers who among them challenged every possible orthodox Christian theory and the usual cast of individual political and religious radicals like Samuel Fisher and, my personal favorite, Abiezer Coppe.

In this expansively footnoted book Mr. Hill, as he has elsewhere, connects the dramatic break up of traditional agrarian English society; the resulting vast increase of 'masterless' men not bound to traditional authority and potentially receptive to new ideas; the widespread availability of the protestant Bible brought about by the revolution in printing and thus permitting widespread distribution to the masses; the effects of the Protestant Reformation on individual responsibility; the discrediting of the theology of the divine right of kings and the concept of the man of blood exemplified by Charles I; the role of the priesthood of all believers that foreshadow a very modern concept of the validity of individual religious expression; radical interpretations of equality and primitive communism, particularly the work of Gerrard Winstanley ; the Puritan ethic and many more subjects of interests to bring to life what the common people who hitherto had barely entered the stage of history were thinking and doing.

As I have noted elsewhere a key to understanding that entry onto history's stage and that underscores the widespread discussion of many of these trends is Cromwell's New Model Army where the plebian base, for a time anyway, had serious input into the direction that society might take. In many ways Professor Hill's book is a study of what happened when the, for lack of a better term, Thermodorian reaction- the ebb of the revolution set in and a portion of those 'masterless' men had to deal with the consequences of defeat for the plebian masses during the Protectorate and Restoration. I might also add that some of the ideas presented here seem very weird even for that time but some seem so advanced, especially in the case of Winstanley, that they put many a modern thinker to shame. Hell, in American society some of those Levelers and Diggers would be standing with us in the left wing of political society fighting today's royalists and reactionaries. Thanks, Professor Hill.

Excellent History
Marxist historian Christopher Hill gives us a lucid and thoroughly researched account of the English civil war and the radical revolutionary movements that followed in the mid-seventeenth century. Born during this period of history was the Protestant ethic, the value of individualism in man's relation to God and society. We also witness many political movements calling for egalitarianism (prefiguring Marx and socialist theory) and several variants of libertarian socialism (albeit with Christianity thrown in the mix). This work of history captures the radical breakdown of the traditional family structure, the decentralization of discourse through the printing press, and the breakdown of England's long lasting monarchy. A must read for any student of revolution and political theory.

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.