Cromohs Virtual Seminars

German Historians and the English Revolution: 17^th and 20^th Century

Gaby Mahlberg
University of East Anglia

G. Mahlberg, "German Historians and the English Revolution: 17^th and 20^th Century", in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-4
<http://www.fupress.net/public/journals/49/Seminar/mahlberg_german_historians.html>

1. Which revolution?

When discussing German historians and the English Revolution it is necessary to point out that we mean the Revolution of 1649. For, until quite recently, most German scholars and students of early modern English history would have considered the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9 as the English Revolution. This is due to the lasting influence of nineteenth-century historiography.

Developments in seventeenth-century England have fascinated German historians ever since Leopold von Ranke published his epic History of England principally in the seventeenth century.^[1] Ranke's account is thoroughly whiggish, if "Whig" is a term that should be applied to a German scholar at all. He focused on constitutional issues and the struggle between Crown and Parliament, and saw England as a model country, which had freed itself from an old regime of feudalism and the dogma of the Catholic Church, and embarked on its way towards political and religious liberty. Ranke saw the seventeenth century as a crucial turning point in this development. However, it was 1689, not 1649, that he considered as the relevant year in which "the centre of gravity of public authority in England shift[ed] decisively to the parliamentary side.'^[2]

Ranke, like many other German historians, was mainly interested in constitutional history and in the English experience as that of an advanced culture with a progressive parliamentary monarchy, distinguishing itself from the rest of Europe and its old-style monarchies. Thus, the image of England was more that of an abstract concept of government than that of a real country with real people.

2. Marxist approaches

However, this view of England did not remain unchallenged. In his famous work on Cromwell and Communism, the devoted Marxist and politician Eduard Bernstein did not only make clear that he saw the mid-century revolution as more important than the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9, he also became the first to move away from a focus on constitutional problems towards an approach that looked at the politics of the people from the bottom up.^[3]

Interestingly, however, Bernstein had not been a trained historian at all, but got to the English Revolution via his interest in socialism. His work on the events of the 1640s and 1650s had grown out of a short biography on the Leveller leader, John Lilburne, which Bernstein had been preparing for Karl Kautsky's History of Socialism. Through his research on Lilburne, Bernstein got then drawn into the history of the Levellers and of the social and economic aspects of the English Revolution as a whole.^[4]

Historians of the German labour movement are particularly interested in the links between Bernstein's historical scholarship and his politics because some of the comments Bernstein made on the Leveller movement and the English Revolution reveal some of his criticism of nineteenth-century German social democracy.^[5] Thus, he criticised for instance the Levellers" rigid doctrinarian approach and their lack of realism and pragmatism, which could also be applied to the German social democrats, especially since Bernstein considered the Levellers to be social democrats themselves.^[6] He also saw the Leveller publication The Moderate as anticipating the social democratic press.^[7]

Bernstein's work, however, goes further than that. For, it also reveals some of his ambiguous attitude towards Marxism. While Bernstein was a strict Marxist in seeing the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, and in believing in the link between the maturity of the labouring classes and the progress of socialism, unlike Marx and Engels he also believed in political pragmatism.^[8] He disagreed with Marx and Engels's point that the possible would only be achieved by demanding the impossible.^[9] Thus, his engagement with history came to alienate Bernstein from the more doctrinaire points of Marxism, which he saw as far too rigid, and led him to open up towards the complexity of socio-political issues. Due to his experience as a practising historian Bernstein came to move from theory towards empiricism as he gained new insights and developed both independent and original ideas.^[10]

Through his historical research Bernstein came to be disillusioned with Marxist theory and to doubt the idea of revolution as a motor of progress.^[11] Yet, although his scepticism towards revolution intensified through his study of the English Revolution, the main influence for his revisionism was Bernstein's contemporary political context.^[12]

3. Modernisation theory and revisionism

Both accounts, of Ranke and of Bernstein, although looking at different sections of seventeenth-century English politics and society (and indeed different revolutions), were interested in England for what it represented to their authors and what nineteenth-century Germany could extract from it: for Ranke this was the need for a regulated representative system, for Bernstein the need for pragmatic socialism. In both cases, however, the English experience had a normative character.

This normative character did not only apply to constitutional issues, but also to England's economic performance, both of which were seen as going hand in hand in the history of state building. The historiography of state building has generally assumed that industrialisation and democratisation are mutually dependent. Thus, German historians have tended to focus on a cluster of Anglo-American countries, such as England, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which they  considered as model countries of modernisation in an international context because they displayed both a high level of wealth as well as stable democratic government. The idea of the normative character of American society survived well into the 1960s, when sociologists began to engage with modernisation theory and focused on more abstract structural features of modernity in contrast to tradition.^[13]

In this context, we have to consider the impact of work by both Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas.

Weber's work on the economic ethics of the world religions in particular gained significance during the 1960s' debate on modernisation because it emphasised more general patterns in the history of state building, such as the relationship between religion and economic performance, while also observing a slow process of secularisation of the so-called "protestant work ethic" associated with the Calvinism of the English "middling sorts". This secularisation was considered as the sign of an emerging modernity.^[14] On the other hand, this very broad approach has also been criticised by German revisionist scholarship of the 1980s and 90s for generalising too much in historical terms and for neglecting the importance of religion in its own right, both within the English Revolution itself as well as across the early modern period as a whole.

Hans-Christoph Schröder, for instance, has criticised Weber's hypothesis of Puritanism as a motor for capitalism and secularisation.^[15] While Weber saw a natural affinity between Protestantism and capitalism, Schröder argues that this affinity did not constitute a direct link but only a very loose connection.^[16] Believers were waiting for signs of God's grace, e.g. through a reward of their work.^[17] However, a direct relationship between Puritanism and capitalism - according to Schröder - cannot be proven empirically.^[18] Neither did Weber sufficiently differentiate between different time periods and types of Puritanism, nor did capitalism necessarily depend on Protestantism.^[19] This becomes also clear in Weber's claim that there was a slow secularisation of the Protestant work ethic, which leaves it unclear whether there remain any links at all.^[20] And the sources are inconclusive.

Schröder argues that Weber exaggerated the worldly and practical side of Puritanism in favour of the spiritual side, and that Puritans spend much more time on prayer and service than the focus on work alone would allow.^[21] The abolition of religious holidays, for instance, did not mean that more time was set aside for work, but that holidays were replaced by spontaneous fast days. Thus, religious service and listening to sermons always took priority over work.^[22] Weber ignored the millenarian tendencies of Puritanism as well as their emphasis on community spirit and love.^[23] He also wrongly associated Puritanism with the middle classes, although particularly in the early seventeenth century Puritanism was very much dependent on the gentry.^[24] And finally, he was too much influenced by the political situation in contemporary Germany to be objective and too much concerned with his theory of imperialism as a replacement for Puritanism.^[25]

Overarching theories of social change, it seems, did not go down well with German historians. This could also be said for the work of Jürgen Habermas. Similarly to the work of Weber, also Habermas's sociological approach to the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has been attacked for its lack of historicism.^[26] Yet, ironically, it was this attack on his credentials as a historian that revived interest in Habermas's hypothesis on the emergence of a public sphere and gave his work a new context in the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s.

Habermas argued in the early 1960s that a bourgeois "public sphere" had been established in England in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries around a coffee-house culture, which enabled aristocratic and middle-class intellectuals to come together and debate literary as well as political matters.^[27] Habermas saw their debates and discussions as part of a reasoned discourse in the spirit of the Enlightenment.^[28] This reasoned discourse was institutionalised through the establishment of journalism as an independent profession and the media as a "fourth estate" which was able to assert itself against the government as the critical organ of the public. Crucial developments which contributed to the emergence of the public sphere were, according to Habermas, the foundation of the Bank of England and with it a new stage of capitalism and a revolutionised way of production; the abolition of prepublication censorship, which opened the press for reasoned argument; and the first cabinet government as the first step on the way to parliamentary sovereignty.^[29]

What is important about the Habermasian public sphere is that it is outside of and separate from the government, which gives it a critical distance and an arguably more objective position. The critical public has therefore a naturally oppositional character, although members of the government might be part of the news business. While in an older Latin sense "public" referred to the universal, state and officialdom, and "private" to the informal and the particular, in Habermas the "public" comes to denote a sociological entity. However, in its modern usage, both the connotations of the older Latin and the more recent Habermasian concept generally overlap and converge as new elements have been added to its meaning over time. Although Habermas's definition of the "public sphere" seems very narrow and specific, it illustrates well how the emergence of the press as a public organ enabled more people than before to take part in an informed and reasoned political discourse and thus became formative for an active civil society. This active civil society then came to be overturned by its own means through the increasing power and diminishing quality of the media, and it has been declining ever since.

However, Habermas has often been criticised for the narrowness of his definition of the public sphere. The Habermasian concept has been perceived as too narrow because it excludes women and the lower social classes, and for ignoring irrational forms of discourse. Moreover, Habermas has been criticised for his dating of the emergent public sphere in England in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Consequently, his concept has repeatedly been widened to include all the above as well as antedated.

A case in point is the work of Dagmar Freist which locates the origins of a public sphere in the Habermasian sense in the 1640s. It was again the mid-century Revolution, not the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9, that triggered major changes in public communication through an outpouring of pamphlet literature and political debate out on the street. Freist who has analysed communication and public opinion in civil war London, however, not only objects to Habermas's time frame. She also criticises his whole concept of the public sphere as too elitist and aims to show that public opinion was not only a preserve of the middle class. According to Freist, the public sphere also included "simple folk" - everybody involved in the transmission of (political) news. Public opinion, according to Freist, "happened" when men and women moved from ordinary discourse and the habitual exchange of news to discussing politics". This was the situation in mid-seventeenth-century London, aided both by the political crisis and the professionalisation of printing and news dissemination.^[30]

Criticisms and revisions in a similar vein have also been made by a range of Anglo-American scholars, including Sharon Achinstein and David Zaret, both of whom widened and antedated the Habermasian concept of the public sphere.^[31] Thus, not only has modernisation theory come to be discredited, but also have broad sociological approaches given way to more specialised case studies of ever smaller areas of seventeenth-century English history.^[32]

4. The European context

A reverse approach to the "compartmentalisation" of history,^[33] however, has recently become visible in a number of works with a broader European outlook. German historians rarely focus on England only. They seem to prefer a comparative approach to seventeenth-century English history, such as Roland Asch's work on the European aristocracy between 1550 and 1700, and work by Wolfgang Reinhard and others on Power Elites and State Building.^[34]  For, if there is one thing that German historians since Ranke seem to have understood long before their Anglo-American counterparts it is that seventeenth-century English history has to be seen in a European context.

While Anglo-American scholars of the seventeenth century, for instance, have focused on problems of English local and provincial government, the role of religion in the Revolution, issues of representation, "multiple kingdoms" and the British problem^[35], or on the transmission of ideas from the English Revolution across the Atlantic^[36], German historians have aimed to establish links between the history of seventeenth-century England and the Continent and to locate England in Europe.

Already in the 1970s, Hans-Christoph Schröder argued that economic and political developments in seventeenth-century England were not just the result of a unique English experience, but that England had, in fact, benefited from external impulses, in particular from the Dutch model.^[37] The United Provinces, which were widely seen as a progressive nation, were a "rival, opponent and model" for England.^[38] It is notable, Schröder points out, that "in particular those Englishmen who most eagerly aimed to free their country from the economic domination of the Netherlands had been most strongly influenced by the Dutch model and had often spent some time in the Netherlands themselves," such as several of the Commonwealth politicians who had been involved in the passing of the 1651 Navigation Act, or George Downing, who had been an envoy to The Hague during the Protectorate and Restoration periods.^[39]

Seventeenth-century Englishmen, however, attributed the success of the United Provinces not only to economics but also to the political and religious freedom of the Dutch.^[40] Thus, we frequently find references to the Dutch model in English arguments in favour of religious toleration which imply an interdependence of religious toleration and economic prosperity.^[41] But also the political system mattered, as can be seen, for instance, in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan in which he described the English Revolution as an imitation of the Netherlands which had established a republic after throwing off Spanish rule.^[42] However, the development of English national identity was not only influenced by interaction with the Netherlands, Schröder points out, but also by conflicts with Spain and France, and the threat of Catholicism from within. Thus, England was far from isolated in its development. In fact, it was more strongly influenced by Continental political thought than has usually been acknowledged.

Only very recently, Robert von Friedeburg has shown, for instance, that German political thought had been used by English and Scottish oppositional authors of the seventeenth century.^[43] English and Scottish thinkers translated German works on "self-defence" against tyrannical rulers by authors such as Henning Arnisaeus and Johannes Althusius. In doing so, however, the translators twisted the meaning of the original texts to suit their own political cause. Thus, German theories of "self-defence" could be used in the conflict between King and Parliament in the mid-seventeenth century.

In order to apply German theory to the English and Scottish situation, however, the translators had to conflate the different levels of government (Empire and princedom) in Germany to match the "country" of England and Scotland. While German theorists justified the right of resistance of the territorial princes against the Emperor in defence of their "patria" or territory, the English translations turned this right into the duty of citizens to resist a tyrannical ruler in defence of the commonwealth.^[44] Thus, the translations came to make much more radical claims about self-defence, justifying citizens' resistance to the king and encouraging speculations about the state of nature.^[45]

With European integration in full swing works by Quentin Skinner, Martin van Gelderen and others have come to locate England more and more within a European context,^[46] and scholars within the Anglo-American tradition now begin to see that the execution of Charles I was not just the starting point for the English Revolution but also the "last act of the Thirty Years War.'^[47]

Yet, it is necessary not only to study England comparatively, but also as an integrated part of a wider European context. The future challenge for historians is to understand what connects the ideas and events in England to those on the European Continent.

References

^[1] Leopold von Ranke, A History of England principally in the seventeenth century, 6 vols., Oxford, 1875.

^[2] Von Ranke, History, vol I, p. viii.

^[3] Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution, Nottingham, 1980 (London, 1930¹); Hans-Christoph Schröder, "Eduard Bernstein als Historiker der Englischen Revolution", Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 7, 1981,, pp. 219-54, pp. 232-3.

^[4] Schröder, "Bernstein", pp. 219-21.

^[5] Ibid., pp. 233-5.

^[6] Ibid., p. 237.

^[7] Ibid., p. 238.

^[8] Ibid., pp. 241-3.

^[9] Ibid., p. 242.

^[10] Ibid., pp. 242ff.

^[11] Ibid., pp. 248-9.

^[12] Ibid., p. 250.

^[13] M. Rainer Lepsius, "Soziologische Theoreme über die Sozialstruktur der 'Moderne' und die 'Modernisierung'", in Reinhart Koselleck (ed.), Studien zum Beginn der modernen Welt, Stuttgart, 1977, pp. 10-29; Barrington Moore Jr., Social origins of dictatorship and democracy. Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world, Boston, 1966.

^[14] Max Weber, "Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' des Kapitalismus", Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XX/ XXI, 1905, pp. 1-54, pp. 1-110. Weber published in total 11 individual essays on "Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen", in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik between 1915-19.

^[15] Hans-Christoph Schröder, "Max Weber und der Puritanismus", Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 21 (1995), pp. 459-78.

^[16] Ibid., p. 460.

^[17] Ibid., p. 460-1.

^[18] Ibid., p. 461.

^[19] Ibid., pp. 462-3.

^[20] Ibid., p. 463.

^[21] Ibid., pp. 464ff.

^[22] Ibid., p. 465.

^[23] Ibid., pp. 466-72.

^[24] Ibid., p. 473.

^[25] Ibid., pp. 475-8.

^[26] Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main, 1990⁵ (1962¹), translated by T. Burger as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, 1989. For a critical engagement with Habermas and the concept of the public sphere, see: Gert Melville/ Peter von Moos (eds.), Das Öffentliche und Private in der Vormoderne, Köln/ Weimar/ Wien, 1998. For critical approaches to Habermas in Anglo-American historiography, see Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge/ Mass. and London, 1992.

^[27] Habermas, Strukturwandel, p. 92.

^[28] Ibid., pp. 96, 107, 123.

^[29] Ibid., pp. 122-6.

^[30] Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637-1645, London, 1997; and the same, "The King's Crown is the Whore of Babylon: Politics, Gender and Communication in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England", Gender and History, 7, 1995, pp. 457-81.

^[31] Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, Princeton, 1994; and David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England, Princeton, 2000.

^[32] Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550-1700, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 97-8.

^[33] The term is borrowed from Roy Foster in: T.P. Wiseman/ G.R. Elton et al., "What is political history?", History Today, 35, January 1985, p. 15.

^[34] Ronald G. Asch, Nobilities in Transition 1550-1700: Courtiers and Rebels in Britain and Europe, London, 2003; Wolfgang Reinhard (ed.), Power Elites and State Building, Oxford, 1996.

^[35] J. S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War 1630-1650, London, 1976; Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England, New Haven/ London, 1986; J. C. Davis, "Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution", Historical Journal, 35, 1992, pp. 507-30; Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People?, Cambridge, 1975; Mark A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 1986; Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War, Oxford, 1990.

^[36] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, 1975; David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society, 1649-1776, Stanford, 1994.

^[37] Hans-Christoph Schröder, "Die neuere englische Geschichte im Lichte einiger Modernisierungstheoreme", in Koselleck (ed.), Studien zum Beginn der modernen Welt, pp. 30-65.

^[38] Ibid., p. 34. The original reads: "Rivale, Gegner und Vorbild Englands" (own translation).

^[39] Ibid. The original reads: "Auffällig ist dabei, daß gerade diejenigen Engländer, die am meisten darauf hinwirkten, ihr Land von der ökonomischen Vorherrschaft der Niederlande zu befreien, am stärksten vom holländischen Vorbild beeinflußt waren und häufig selber einmal einige Zeit in den Niederlanden verbracht hatten". For the relationship between England and the United Provinces see also: Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the making of English foreign policy 1650-1668, Cambridge, 1996.

^[40] Schröder, "Die neuere englische Geschichte", p.36.

^[41] Ibid., p. 37.

^[42] Ibid., p. 39.

^[43] Robert von Friedeburg, "'Self-defence' and Sovereignty: the Reception and Application of German Political Thought in England and Scotland, 1628-69", History of Political Thought, 23, 2002, pp. 238-265. See also his: Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England and Germany, 1530-1680, Aldershot, 2002.

^[44] Von Friedeburg, "'Self-defence' and Sovereignty", pp. 253-4.

^[45] Ibid., pp. 262-5.

^[46] Martin van Gelderen/ Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2002).

^[47] Jonathan Scott, England's Troubles: Seventeenth-century English political instability in European context (Cambridge, 2000), p. 29.

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