*ANOTHER LOOK AT THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN-Professor Christopher Hill's Look At The Great English Revolution Of The 1600s

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Professor Christopher Hill.

BOOK REVIEW

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN, CHRISTOPHER HILL, PENGUIN BOOKS, 1972

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 has been noted by more than one Marxist historian, including Leon Trotsky in his history of the Russian Revolution, 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 the afore-mentioned 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 Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army where the plebeian 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, the 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 plebeian 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.