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World Turned Upside Down (Popular Rebellions)

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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.

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.

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!

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.

A must read for anyone interested in the history of political ideas or English history.

Hill's richly detailed study of religious and social trends occuring during this tumultuous period in English history is not only endlessly fascinating on its own, but provides historical context still relevant today. Historically excellent and very well written.

Most days, I am nothing but happy about living in a society where nearly everything can be taken for granted, and politics can be ignored as arguments which have no bearing on my day to day affairs. But, every once in a while, those darling revolutionary hopes I hold dear come back to the front of my mind, and remind me that for all the material comfort and personal autonomy I am afforded by nature of being a member of the American lower middle class, a great many ideological assumptions and social folkways that have, at best only an arguable social value, order my life in ways which I am rarely concious of. This has a tendency to make me think and question critically the situation in which I live.

The best thing that I can say about "The World Turned Upside Down," is that it made me think. As Christopher Hill recounts, the years of the English Commonwealth were ones where everything were years when everything was questionable and came under the strict scrutiny of various sections of the population. To many men and women, literally, anything was possible, and ways of ordering society which were unthinkable only a few years before the execution of the king. Though not every sacred cow would meet the end which monarchy did for a time in England, nearly every sacred cow was openly questioned in some quarter by someone.

It is brilliance which allows Hill to distill this truly revolutionary situation into a narrative that an American woefully ignorant of seventeenth century English history--for me English history begins with the Chartists--can understand. This is required reading for anyone who wishes to comprehend their own situation critically.

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.

It is somewhat ironic that we have to turn to a contemporary Marxist historian for the best account of these godly people, on fire for liberty, justice, and equality.

And perhaps a secularising interpretation is best for contemporary readers, many of whom are probably not well enough grounded in Scripture to follow the original writings of these people. The allusions will be lost to them, and the original texts may just seem like pious screeds without practical application. The author's secularising interpretations will help them understand.

Some of these authors were definitely radical, and all may have been prone to getting carried away. When men become free to choose what they believe, some will inevitably choose things that seem wrong. I do think that the author tries too hard to suggest serious unorthodoxy on their part.

As a whole, though, they seem steeped in the spirit of the Hebrew prophets. The very notion of a Christian Left seems almost inconceivable to people in the USA today. The influence on the revolutionary generation in colonial America seems obvious as well. To hear the stories of these Diggers, Levellers, and Ranters is to point out a path not taken: an early and Christian counterculture.

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.

I read this book for a history class on Tudor-Stuart England when we discussed the radical thoughts behind the Civil War. I would recoment this book to anyone who had the time and will power to sitt through 400 pages of radical thought and already had some knowledge of the English Civil Wars.

I must give one caution to readers. Despite this book being 400 pages, I urge anyone who reads it to question how many people are really represented in it. Many readers will get the impression that massive of people followed these radical sects, but Hill occasional gives clues that actualy followers were much smaller in number. Also, despite the emphasis on smaller groups often unheard, there is an almost total absence of female voices even though women played a large part in the movement.

While the book is not a light read, it is a must for anyone wanting to increase their knowledge of what English people were thinking on the eve of Revolution.