Michael Braddick’s new biography of Christopher Hill reaffirms his value and importance as a historian of the seventeenth century, finds John Rees

Marx famously remarked in Capital that he’d openly associated himself with Hegel’s philosophy because at that time Hegel was being treated as ‘a dead dog’ by the ‘arrogant, mediocre’ academics of the day. It is not too much of a flight of fancy to imagine that if Christopher Hill had reread those remarks late in his career, they might well have brought a wry smile to his face. For Hill too became treated as a ‘dead dog’ by academia after the rise of the revisionist school of historians of the English Revolution in the late 1970s.

Central to the critique of Hill, and of Marxism generally, was the accusation that historical materialism was a determinist or reductionist methodology. Hardly a new critique of Marxism, and one answered by a generation or more of students of Lukács, Trotsky, Gramsci, and many other thinkers of the New Left, it nevertheless struck some seventeenth-century historians as a blinding fresh thought.

Mike Braddick’s biography of Christopher Hill has many virtues. The first and most important of these is that it rescues Christopher Hill’s Marxism from this charge. Hill’s Marxism was certainly formed originally in the 1930s at the same time that he joined the Communist Party. Even then, the historians within the Communist Party were certainly not a pale reproduction of Moscow orthodoxy. In part, they were simply more deeply engaged in the study of their various periods, and were producing material in greater depth than could be covered by the generalities of the orthodoxy. This was not necessarily a hostile counter position. Generalisations and specific research can often interact in productive ways: generalisation is amended by specific findings, and specific findings altered when placed in a general context.

However that may be, by the time Hill and other members of the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) left the party in 1957 in the wake of the Russian invasion of Hungary, they were also being shaped by the so-called Marxist-humanist current of that time. This current had deep roots in Marx’s method, in particular the early writings then for the first time becoming widely available. It obviously was adopted, and methodologically defended, by Hill’s friend and comrade Edward Thompson. It was also common coin for Hill, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Brian Manning, and other former members of the CPHG.

This approach stressed agency and was the very opposite of any kind of determinism. This reinforced in Hill his commitment to seeing the way in which historical actors and historical circumstances interacted with one another. Although the more politically blinded revisionists were unable to see it, this was a perspective which deeply influenced Hill all the way from God‘s Englishman (1970), his biography of Cromwell, through The Experience of Defeat (1984), his investigation of the way in which the ‘good old cause’ persisted after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, through to his late biography of John Bunyan, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People (1989).

Revisionists debunked

Perhaps the misapprehension by the revisionists of what Hill was about is nowhere clearer than on the issue of religion. Hill was accused of ignoring it’s causal power. This was always a strange charge when levelled at the author of The Economic Problems of the Church (1956) and the mammoth The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution (1992). What the accusation really meant was not that Hill ignored religion, but that he insisted on placing it in its economic and political context. The revisionists wanted to return, oddly, to an older tradition of seeing it as a standalone cause. Ironically, this was another form of reductionism.

Michael Braddick is therefore absolutely right to insist that Hill’s Marxism was a dialectical materialism and not any form of reductionism. The great virtue of this biography is that that charge cannot now be made, as it has been for decades, without serious argument and without engaging in the case that Braddick makes in this book.

This is a biography with more than one strength. Braddick’s portrait of how Hill became a Marxist in the social, political, economic, and international crisis of the 1930s is not only sophisticated in itself but cannot help but have contemporary echoes.

Hill was reacting to the implosion of the state system internationally, and the impoverishment which the depression brought to working people in Britain and throughout the West. He saw the verities of the liberal political order collapsing around him, manifestly incapable of dealing with the depth of the unfolding crisis. One does not need to be unduly sensitive to contemporary echoes to read these passages with instruction.

There are some incidental pleasures as well. Anthony Glees, now of the Thatcher-inspired private University of Buckingham, and still to be found on the BBC providing poorly formulated critiques of the left, is devastatingly taken to task for his wildly misinformed account of Hill’s wartime work at the Foreign Office. This was all dragged up at the time he was master of Balliol College, Oxford and then working at the Open University, of which he was a fierce advocate.

Braddick‘s overall conclusions are judicious, aiming to separate out the more egregious, politically motivated criticisms of Hill from the critiques that should be treated seriously, whether one agrees with them fully or not. In the end, Christopher Hill’s reputation has been sustained by his popularity with the reading public outside academia. There are few historians, and they do not include many of Hill‘s most trenchant critics of recent decades, who can go into practically any bookshop in any High Street in the country and find their books still prominently displayed in the history section.

The reading public found Hill’s conception of the English revolution still of deep interest when academic followers of fashion turned away from it. Popular opinion is not always right, and academic consensus is not always wrong. And there are many academics who are constructive and welcoming of debate. But, taken as a whole, the revisionists did not have that attitude to Hill or to Marxists generally. Perhaps historians might now ask themselves whether the work of Christopher Hill is not in need of scholastic rehabilitation.

Michael Braddick‘s biography has already seen Hill more seriously discussed in, for instance, The Spectator and The New Statesman, than he has been for many years. Braddick’s account is a very good place to revive the discussion of Hill’s vision of the English Revolution, warts and all.