Cromohs Virtual Seminars

A Matter of Context: 'Radicalism' and the English Revolution

Glenn Burgess
University of Hull

G. Burgess, "A Matter of Context: 'Radicalism' and the English Revolution", 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/burgess_radicalism.html>

1. Introduction

Context matters to understanding the history of radicalism. Any set of ideas will serve 'radical' purposes only in some contexts and not in others. What is likely to be labelled 'radical' will vary from place to place and from time to time. Democratic ideals are a good example: today they are largely unquestioned platitudes, but before the 18^th century they were 'radical', and most people considered democracy the worst form of government. A recent conference on the subject of radicalism set its participants some questions to consider: "How useful are the terms 'radical' and 'radicalism' and should we persist with them? Can we speak of a 'radical tradition'?".^[1] This strong dependency of radicalism on context poses problems for the historian of radicalism seeking to answer such questions, and it poses problems for the historian trying to make sense of the radicalism of the English Revolution.

I shall begin this discussion, therefore, by exploring the ways in which the language of radical/ism has been deployed by historians, and the ways in which they have approached its history.

Radical has been a handy enough alternative to 'extreme', 'subversive', 'conspiratorial' - but those, largely dispositional labels, would not suggest the existence of a corresponding 'ism'. The world is and has always been full of subversives and conspirators, but no one (to my knowledge, and perhaps outside the CIA of MI5) has ever suggested the existence of 'subversivism' or 'conspriritism'. And the reason that they haven't done so is obvious enough - the isms would link together too many things that don't have much in common.  It places things in a category on the basis of their accidents and not their essences.

The key question with radicalism as that term is used by historians is whether or not it escapes from this dilemma.

Certainly, historians are apt to use the term in confusing ways. Thus, Henry Ireton is sometimes portrayed as one of the most radical Independents, and determined to put his king to death. The Independents, in general, can be seen as a radicalising force in the English Revolution (as the Presbyterian, Thomas Edwards, appreciated).^[2]. Except for those occasions when they were not, as in 1647 at Putney church, when Henry Ireton, we are often told, took up a conservative position, representing the propertied conservatism of the Independents generally, and opposed the radical views on the franchise of the Levellers. Even the latter are not consistently seen to be radicals. No doubt in November 1648 Levellers and Independents were both radical together, but in 1649 the Levellers joined with the conservative groups, like Royalists and Presbyterians, opposed to the illegal trial of the king. In any case they were soon replaced by even more radical, though less political, radicals, in the form of the Quakers - though even they take a conservative turn after 1660, like almost everybody else. Each use of the label might make sense in context, but it hardly builds into the most illuminating history.

So it is that most of the time the way in which we use labels like conservative or radical is almost purely situational. It labels the disposition of men and women at particular times and in particular places, and has such has no connected history. It corresponds to no conservatism or radicalism. Indeed, at least as good an antonym for 'radical' would be 'moderate' - and that rather gives the game way, for who would be tempted by this pair of terms to write a history of 'moderatism'. To complicate the matter further, the radical-moderate pairing also reveals the extent to which language games and rhetorical redescription are involved in the application of the terms. Furthermore, as the term 'radical' is applied retrospectively (until more recent periods) - that is to say, it is part of the historian's vocabulary not the vocabulary of the past - there is not even a meaningful history of the changing ways in which the term has been applied through time.

If this was all that there was to say, then my paper would be a short one. If the use of the terms radical and conservative seem to suggest little in the way of justification for the application of the terminology of radicalism / conservatism, we might instead turn to looking at the way in which historians use the ism word, and what they have said in criticism or justification of it.

2. Definitions

There are essentially three views of how to set about defining 'radicalism' as a term of historical analysis.^[3]

1. the substantive - that there is a continuous radical tradition of definable identity
2. the functional - that radicalism exists at certain times and places and can be recognized by the functions it performs.
3. the nominalist - the view that radicalism exists when the name for it exists, and no sooner.

The first of these approaches is closely identified with the initial recovery or rediscovery of much of what we now might call radicalism. Though this has occurred since the 19^th century, it is a process in which Marxist and other radical Left historians have been closely involved, and on which the cluster of historians who passed through the Communist Party Historians' Group have had a crucial impact.^[4] These historians were very explicitly engaged in an exercise that we would recognize as the invention of a tradition. They wished to restore the radical under-currents to English history, to reclaim it from conservative historians who had been responsible for the conformable, reassuring, self-satisfied platitudes of Whig history. They wished to show that there was a radical potential in English history waiting to be tapped, and that the English people had not unanimously fallen for the disempowering and mystifying view of events that conservative historians propounded. But, perhaps above all else, they sought to show that radical democratic and socialist politics were not a foreign import into the England of the 1940s and 1950s, that there was a native English radicalism, the radicalism of the free-born Englishman. Their history was centrally concerned to rebut the slur that their politics made them tools of a foreign power. The radical tradition that they reconstructed, spanning at least the period from the Levellers to the Chartists had at its core democratisation and franchise reform; but, expanded to embrace Lollards and peasant rebels, Winstanley and the Ranters, it could build into something much more diverse, with socialist and counter-cultural dimensions. It was thus democratic, socialist, anti-clerical (but not necessarily atheistic) - it was progressive, libertarian and anti-authoritarian. For many - sometimes unconsciously - 'radicalism' still conjures up these characteristics.^[5]

The second and third approaches largely arise from dissatisfaction with this first one.  The substantive approach was vulnerable on two fronts. First, closer investigation of individuals and groups made them look more complex and ambiguous than their characterisation as proto-democrats and socialists allowed. Their attitude to such things as liberty and authority also came to seem less clear-cut. The Marxist attempt to downplay their powerful religious motivations and the importance of religious pre-suppositions to their arguments also helped to raise doubts. Secondly, and in part as the result of the accumulation of these particular doubts, the incorporation of radicals into the Marxist historical narrative (or into any progressive narrative) seemed to be too constricting. The problem with traditions is that the tradition, only capable of being reconstructed in retrospect, becomes a surrogate context for explanation. Radicals like Gerrard Winstanley, placed in this tradition, seemed increasingly adrift from the contexts that might actually help to explain their emergence and identity.

Alternatives were sought. The functional approach seemed the best way of putting the history of radicalism on a new and sounder fitting. It has nowhere been better expressed than in Colin Davis's 1982, "Radicalism in a Traditional Society" .^[6] In Davis's early formulation - he would not, I suspect say quite the same things now, though clearly the functional definition of radicalism is something that he would continue to defend - a radical ideology needs to do three things. (1) It must de-legitimate an old socio-political order; (2) it must re-legitimate an alternative or new socio-political order; and (3) it must provide a transfer mechanism that will change things from the old to the new. A functional definition of this sort usefully helps to clear some of the terrain, enabling us to limit the range of possible applications of the radical / radicalism terminology. For example, resistance theory does not appear, in itself, to pass the test, though it may in combination with other ideas. Resistance is to radicalism what rebellion is to revolution. A functional definition avoids most of the problems with a substantive approach, and some sort of functional approach seems to underlie most recent work. It should be noted, though, that a functional understanding of radicalism reinforces the sense that radicalism is very much a situational phenomenon, recognisable by the functions it performs in particular contexts.

More recently it has been suggested - by Conal Condren and Jonathan Clark especially^[7] - that the term 'radicalism' should not be applied to phenomena that exist before the term itself was coined. Clark has pointed out that it applies "to a doctrine newly coined in England in the 1820s to describe a fusion of universal suffrage, Ricardian economics and programmatic atheism. To speak of an eighteenth - or a seventeenth-century radicalism is therefore as much of a solecism as to speak of an eighteenth- or a seventeenth-century fascism or Marxism".^[8] His point is essentially that in using the term to yoke together disparate phenomena with a common label, we create false or fictional histories and traditions. Condren suggests other objections. First, that 'radical' as a label risks misdescribing the language used by those so labelled. It attributes to them polemical and rhetorical strategies of subversion and opposition without considering whether such strategies were actually adopted. Secondly, the label risks misdescribing intentionality. Its application suggests an identity - that a person or group is knowingly and consciously 'radical' - whether appropriately or not.

This sceptical or nominalist position has not (so far) persuaded many to abandon all mention of radicalism, and it is unlikely that it will ever do so. That does not, however, mean that the points made by the sceptics lack validity. They should encourage us to think very carefully about what we mean by radicalism, and (more importantly) to be aware of the risks that we incur when using it as a category for the analysis of seventeenth-century ideas and actions.

3. Approaches

At this point, another set of categories should be brought into play, enabling us to take stock very generally of the recent historiography, and to go some of the way towards dealing with my ostensible subject. Cutting across the three different approaches of those historians who have been interested in exploring the history of radicalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been the prioritisation of different explanatory contexts.

1. the social
2. the ideological
3. the linguistic
4. the personal - possibly the psychological, but this has not really been taken up by historians of radicalism in the seventeenth century

There are very likely affinities between approach to definition and explanatory category - it is obvious, for example, that many of those who adopt a substantive view of radicalism have been inclined to find a primary explanatory concept in the social - social class in particular. They have often seen radicalism as a form of class ideology. But these affinities are not the key matter to explore here. It would be more useful to say a little about each of the contexts, and (in particular) the state in which current historiography seems to leave them.

1. The Social - Since the criticisms of the initial work on radicalism by one-time members of the Communist Party Historians' Group - of Hill especially - and especially over the last decade, there has been much exciting work on the social history of early modern England. Not the least exciting aspect of it has been the fact that it has very much been social history with the politics put back in. The work of Mike Braddick, Steve Hindle, Phil Withington and others has transformed our understanding both of the English state and of the 'commonwealth', the network of communities, rural and urban from the parish and village to the nation, with which the state interacts and intersects.^[9] The consequences and implications of this work for those of us who work on other things need a lot more working through than I can give them here. It would be possible for example, to argue as Andy Wood does that by 1600 there was a "functional mismatch between the functional characteristics of the early modern state (incorporative, flexible and dynamic), and the authoritarian, hierarchical principles by which it justified its existence".^[10] Following on, radicalism might be understood - at least to a degree - as the attempt by the "unacknowledged republic" to gain acknowledgement, particularly in circumstances where its practices were coming under critical pressure.^[11] But one is also reminded of the impact, rather longer ago, of Derek Hirst's Representative of the People, which created a realisation that Leveller franchise demands were not - at least to the inhabitants of some urban communities - as unprecedented as many had thought.^[12] In other words, this new social context, in making us aware of the levels of participation in governance, of the roles of reciprocity and negotiation in shaping the interaction of the commonwealth and its rulers, also can make radicalism less radical - something emerging from central features of a polity not marginal challenges to it. It can seem something more rooted in people's experience than we might previously have thought.^[13]
2. The Ideological - Kevin Sharpe once attempted to identify where the ideological challenges to the early modern commonwealth might come from - scepticism, Machiavelli and Puritanism.^[14] Since he wrote this in 1989, a lot of work has been done to reinforce these view points. The 'revolutionary' potential of Puritanism has re-emerged strongly in the historiography, as has the religious foundation for many challenges to the early modern polity. Catholicism, in particular, is often written out of, or marginalised in histories of political thought, yet some strands within Catholic thought represented the most uncompromising of all rejections of the identity and structure of the Elizabethan and early Stuart church-state.^[15] Machiavelli and scepticism as challengers to the Christian moral consensus are still, perhaps figures of the margins, dangerous temptations for philosophers; but the neo-Roman ideologies of which Machiavelli was one exponent have been identified as a major ideological ingredient in the English Revolution by Quentin Skinner.^[16] The view that a man was not free but a slave unless free from the will of others is very much involved in the claims of Parliament and later of Levellers, as Skinner's reading of the evidence suggests - though it is harder to see this as the key to understanding the English Revolution, not least because it pays little attention to religious ideas. But with both Puritanism and neo-Roman liberty, it is once again the centrality of certain issues and ideas before the Civil War, not their 'radical' character that is important. The pressures placed on the conscience by the demands of orthodoxy and conformity are central not marginal to the culture of pre-Civil War England. In puritanism (and not just in this) it is the inescapability of the resultant casuistical dilemma of conflicting obediences to princes and to God that is the core of the matter - and it is a dilemma felt by a great many, conformists as well as puritans, and capable of resolution in many very different ways. Some of the time those ways might be what we would call radical.^[17] Equally, the notion that liberty is incompatible with dependence on the will of another is not an inherently radical proposition - it is an ideology that can be radicalised, or at any rate, pushed to extremes, and the events that contribute to such a process are as important as the ideologies. Skinner notes as crucial in the process the point at which Charles's opponents "suddenly woke up to the fact that every decision of the two Houses . remained subject to the mere will of the king". ^[18]
3. The Linguistic - There is sometimes a temptation to explain radicalism as linguistic innovation - as 'revolutionary' transformation of a linguistic paradigm, to employ Kuhn's terms, inexactly. This never seems to me a very satisfactory approach - one is too likely to end up with more radicals than one knows what to do with (radical Royalists, radical Hobbesians, radical conservatives, and so on). Rather, it would seem (and this really takes us back to the points made in relation to ideology) that we should see radicalism as the particular use of a 'language' in particular circumstances. I'm not sure that there is any such thing as an inherently radical language - there may be new and innovative languages (not the same thing as radical), but there are always many games that can be played with them. Use is an essential concept^[19] - radical traditions may be created by memory, by reading, and by invention. They are - as was that of the Communist Party Historians' Group - assembled for use, for a purpose. And the tradition in consequence is not one of influences. The links in the chain work backwards not forward: they are not casual links.^[20]
4. The Personal - Some work on radicalism - that of Jim Alsop and Colin Davis on Winstanley is a good example^[21] - has made us more aware of the complex intertwining of public and private motivations and concerns in the lives of individual radicals. The radicalism of these people is often temporary - a moment in a complex development rather than an identity donned for good. Indeed, possibly not an identity at all. Again, we seem to be taken back to the situational and the dispositional.

Having attempted to traverse this terrain in some hurry, we find ourselves returning to the point that we set off from. What the various things designated 'radical' by historians have in common lies somewhere in the area of situational disposition. If that is so, then it is not clear how there can be a substantive radicalism; furthermore, any radicalism identified functionally - and a situational disposition does lend itself to such identification - will not necessarily have a history, or form a tradition, or share common ideas. Potentially, on this basis, there are as many radicalisms as there are radicals, and the term loses all precision of application. With that, it risks losing much, perhaps all, of its explanatory power.

The primary force of this argument is to suggest that the idea of a radical tradition is unhelpful, and possibly incoherent if what is meant is a tradition of causal connections and explanatory power. If radicalism is, indeed, genuinely a situational phenomenon, then it must in principle be mistaken to look for the origins of any particular radical episode in terms of uncovering a radical tradition. Certainly, the ideas held by some people or groups whom we label radical will have an ancestry and a history, there will be an intellectual lineage, and intellectual sources - but in tracing the history of their ideas, we will not be tracing the history of their radicalism, nor even of a revolutionary ideal. The radicalism of ideas is an accident of situation, a matter of use and employment not of essence. The ideas may form a tradition but their radicalism cannot.

This is more than a quibble. To insist that there are dangers in understanding radicalism as a continuous tradition, or even as possessing a continuous history, gives us some reasons for taking seriously the claims of those sceptical historians who try to persuade us to stop talking about radicalism altogether. I would not endorse these claims fully. I cannot see much of a future in insisting that there were no 'radical' ideas in England before, during or after the Civil War, though we do need always to be alert to the implications of any application of the label. Usually such application will illuminate only particular situations, and not longer term continuities. It would be a mistake, it would seem, to claim that 'radicalism' emerges necessarily from previous 'radicalism'. Because it is so strongly situational, occurrences of radicalism can only be understood as the products of particular circumstances - in short as the intersection of a history of ideas and a history of events, such that the holders of certain ideas will under pressure of certain events take them in directions we may label radical. Millenarian ideas could be adopted by James I, by William Prynne, and by John Canne; but they used these ideas in different contexts and for very different purposes. If radicalism has a history over the medium to longer term than I suggest that it would include at least the following elements:

• A history of languages and/or ideas;
• A history of events - especially of the state and other political formations;
• Some general 'rules' about the circumstances in which the two will interact to produce 'radical' consequences;

This is important for the history of the English Revolution and its origins because it supports what seems to me to be true: that what made the English Revolution a revolution, its radicalism if you will, is not to be found be tracing a history of previous radicalisms. It is to be found in things central not marginal to the political and religious culture of later Tudor and Stuart England, in things as likely to reinforce as to subvert the commonwealth of pre-Civil War England. That, indeed, is the best case for calling the English Revolution a revolution - it was of the centre and not of the margins, overground not underground. It would be ironic if a pursuit of radical traditions blinded us to this.

4. Applications

Mario Caricchio's opening contribution to this discussion has taken a different track through the recent historiography than the one followed here. There is little, if anything, in his comments with which I feel at all inclined to disagree. Instead, I would like to comment on a few of the issues that he raises in the light of the arguments that I have already advanced.

It follows from the remarks above that a history of 'radicalism' over the long-term is likely to be a comparative history of radical moments (though there may be links between them too) and less the continuous history of a tradition. This comparative history would be concerned to discover the circumstances in which radicalism (by which we here mean political extremism) flourish. From the point of view of the historian interested in any one of these 'moments', the history of radicalism will not identify a radical bacillus that can be isolated and use to explain or diagnose the local outbreak of extremism. In other words, an account of a radical moment will have lots of ingredients, but there is no reason to suppose that any of those ingredients taken in isolation will be worth labelling 'radical'.

Some of Mario Caricchio's comments on recent debates illustrate this point nicely. It is true of any complex society, except perhaps the most resolutely closed, that orthodoxy will always be an "achieved effect" based on agreements to disagree, and ways of negotiating differences. As Caricchio suggests, Peter Lake's work on London Puritanism - more recently extended by the work of David Como - shows us a complexity that makes it hard (or rather, unhelpful) to distinguish radicals and moderates, and reveals the ways in which maintenance of consensus and / or orthodoxy is both hard work and never an innocent activity. The resulting orthodoxy is fractured and fragile, yet also capable of containing conflicts in some circumstances.^[22] The advancement of arguments in public can help or hinder the process, in different circumstances. But for Puritanism the move from what Lake and Como call the "underground" to the "public sphere" in the 1640s exemplifies the approach to the emergence of 'radicalism' I have tried to stress here. Their analysis is worth quoting:

Moreover, in these circumstances [the 1640s "public sphere"] the resulting ideological cacophony was not only the product of a radical or antinomian fringe. On the contrary, it was as much the mainstream Puritan impulses toward order and 'orthodoxy' - precisely, that is, those impulses that have played so central a role in recent characterizations of the 'conservatism' of prewar Puritanism - that, of necessity, now transposed into a more populist polemical key, served to polarize and embitter an already divided and volatile London Puritan scene.^[23]

Thus, an important context for understanding any process of radicalisation in England is the development of print culture, and with it the tactics of polemical engagement and propagandist persuasion that can produce radical effects from some unlikely (as well as from some likely) roots. Unfettered print creates circumstances in which the constituent elements of a pre Civil War religious and political culture are separated and re-combined, applied and reapplied in rapidly changing circumstances. It is notable, partly as an aside and partly as an example, that a lot of radicalism exists in print in the fears of its opponents before it is fully articulated. Radicalism is often not about thinking the unthought so much as valuing the unvalued argument or position. The Levellers are, in a sense, the nightmare that Filmer envisaged in Patriarcha, and this is what Henry Ireton was saying (though not in these terms) at Putney. In another sense, the Levellers were also to adopt positions that in the early Royalist / Parliamentarian pamphlet wars had been considered reductions to the absurd.^[24] But the impact of print culture, especially when relatively unfettered, goes (of course) well beyond this narrow example. For reasons well made already by Jason Peacey, I do not find the concept of the "public sphere" helpful in understanding this process. The term as used by Habermas is too implicated in Whig-Marxist narratives of the development of modernity, and his requirement that a public sphere be characterised by non-instrumental rationality consigns it to the island of utopia.^[25] But the dynamic processes that underlie the conduct of argument in public and in print are likely to form one part of the task of understanding the circumstances in which radical moments come into being. I agree, though, with Mario Caricchio's suggestion that we could not confuse this process with radicalism - he distinguishes radicalisation of conflict from radicalism (section 5) - and that we should hesitate before accepting as radicals all of those who engaged extensively in the process of public argument to achieve their ends.

What we have so far it seems to me exemplifies two of my chief points - the fact that there cannot be a 'stand alone' history of radicalism, and that we need to explore the circumstances that will enable a produce a 'radical' response to certain events, of which print culture and public argument are clearly constituent parts. There is one final issue raised by Mario Caricchio's paper that I would like to comment on. Was there a "fundamental unity" to the radicalism of the English Revolution? (Section 5). Jonathan Scott has argued the case for unity powerfully: "civil war radicalism . was distinguished by its religious character".^[26] But it was also part of a radical process, the second part of which was the republicanism that followed 1649, and the third was Restoration radicalism, which "drew upon both its religious and classical predecessors".^[27] The move from the first to the second phase of radicalism was "not a complete break", and republicanism incorporated many of the features of its predecessor, Civil War 'radicalism'.^[28] As Scott makes even clearer in recent work, the religious character of English radicalism also had a powerful shaping impact on republicanism - "almost all republican writing was overtly religiously engaged", and it drew much from "radical Protestantism".^[29] This is a very complex way of uncovering what the radicalism of the Civil War was, and is all the better for that.

Thus, for Scott, radical beliefs, which were the English Revolution, had three phases, the first essentially religious, the second republican. Much of his account is illuminating, especially its reading of religious radicalism, but I remain unconvinced both by the concept of a single three-phase radicalism, and unconvinced by the view that Civil War radicalism, the first phase, had a religious essence. For reasons that this essay is intended to suggest, I think it inherently unlikely that any substantive content will convincingly be identified as the 'essence' of radicalism. Unless, that is, we engage in an awful lot of re-categorisation to ensure that we remove from the radical group all of those who don't fit.

Radicalism seems to embrace three quite different things that need to be separated.

1.      Constitutional and legal argument leading from parliamentarianism to Leveller ideas of popular sovereignty, and becoming radicalised in the process.

2.      Republicanism, which may, as Skinner suggests, share with the first strand, a common neo-Roman theory of liberty, but which is primarily a language of collective political and individual moral self-government developed to address the circumstances that follow the regicide. I would, with Blair Worden, maintain a distinction "between the civic vocabulary voiced before the civil wars [which could intertwine with English legal-constitutional argument] and the arguments for kingless rule deployed in the 1650s".^[30]

3.      Religious radicalism, couched in a language of Reformation, and derived from various elements on pre-Civil War Puritanism, as well as more immediately from the sermons of the 1640s.^[31]

The three differ in origins and in language. The third is certainly the most powerfully destructive, and originates in the intense desire to destroy the forms of the old world in order to open the path along which one must follow God, but it is not all that there is to what we have called radicalism. These three strands interact and overlap in various ways - there is no doubt, for example, that some of the Leveller writers draw as well on religious radicalism. But the appearance of an underlying unity is often created by (temporary) tactical alliances, and by the existence of shared enemies. We can see in the Whitehall debates at the end of 1648 some of these radicalism pitted against others.

Mario Caricchio has gone even further than Scott in finding unity in the principle that radicals were people "for whom the issue of error itself became irrelevant in the context of the public debate", and who in consequences "fought for a non-confessional state". This certainly embraces some of them very neatly, and is undoubtedly one of the things to be found in the English Revolution. But were all radicals of this mind? Did none of them have a concept of heresy? Were Fifth Monarchists, for example, likely to have valued a non-confessional state as opposed to a uni-confessional state (the two can sometimes be made to look much the same)?^[32] Much religious radicalism would appear, I suggest, to be caught between a commitment to liberty of conscience and a wish that everyone could be persuaded or made to join the ranks of the Godly, whether that meant a formal sectarian identity or (more usually) living the gospel.

In short - as I have tried to argue - the category 'radicalism' can be used in two ways. If we are looking at usage, what historians have generally used the term to mean, then it must be a phenomenon that is strongly situational and without a core content that can give it substantive identity; if we stipulate a definition that enables more precise attributions of identity, we run the risk of talking about our words more than the words of people in the past, because we open ourselves to the endless multiplication of definitions, and endless (fruitless) argument about which is the 'right' one. I suspect the sceptics are right, and that we would be better to find words and categories that cut less across the grain of the seventeenth-century past; but I suspect just as strongly that any hope of doing without the category of radicalism is a forlorn one.

References

^[1] The conference, organised by Ariel Hessayon and Philip Baker was held at Goldsmiths College, London, 21-23 June 2006, on the theme “Rediscovering Radicalism in the British Isles and Ireland, c.1550-c.1700: Movements of People, Texts and Ideas”.

^[2] Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the English Revolution, Oxford, 2004.

^[3] See further my introduction to Glenn Burgess & Matthew Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism 1550-1850 (forthcoming: Cambridge, 2006/7).

^[4] Important accounts of the Group are Eric Hobsbawm, “The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party”, in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton, London, 1978, pp. 21-47; Bill Schwarz, “‘The People’ in History: The Communist Party Historians’ Group, 1946-56”, in R. Johnson, et al (eds), Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics, London, 1982, ch. 2; and Alistair MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History, Basingstoke, 1996, ch. 3.

^[5] The classic work that represents this approach is Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, London 1972; but also important are those writings that expand the approach to the uncovering of a radical tradition, especially Christopher Hill, “From Lollards to Levellers”, in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton, London, 1978, pp. 49-67; reprinted in Christopher Hill, The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, Volume Two: Religion and Politics in Seventeenth Century England, Brighton, 1986, ch. 7; and E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge, 1993.

^[6] J.C. Davis, “Radicalism in a Traditional Society: The Evaluation of Radical Thought in the English Commonwealth 1649-1660”, History of Political Thought, 3, 1982, pp. 193-213.

^[7] Conal Condren, “Radicals, Conservatives and Moderates in Early Modern Political Thought: A Case of the Sandwich Islands Syndrome?”, History of Political Thought, 10, 1989, pp. 525-42; Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth Century England, Basingstoke, 1994, ch. 5; J.C.D. Clark, Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History, London, 2003, ch. 4 (“How Ideologies are Born: The Case of Radicalism”).

^[8] I quote from the author’s abstract of the version of Clark’s essay to appear in Burgess & Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism.

^[9] Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550-1700, Cambridge, 2000; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550-1640, Basingstoke, 2000; Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 2005.

^[10] Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, Basingstoke, 2002, p. 111.

^[11] The term is derived from Mark Goldie, “The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England”, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded c.1500-1850, Basingstoke, 2001, pp. 153-94.

^[12] Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge, 1975, especially pp. 21-3.

^[13] There are some moves towards such a history in J.C. Davis, “Political Thought During the English Revolution”, in Barry Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain, Oxford, 2003, ch 19; and more in Davis’s forthcoming contribution to Burgess & Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism.

^[14] Kevin Sharpe, “A Commonwealth of Meanings: Languages, Analogues, Ideas and Politics”, in Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies, London, 1989, ch. 1, especially pp. 20-31.

^[15] As one indication of this see Luc Borot, “Is Father Robert Parsons’ Memorial a Utopia? A Few Thoughts About the Question of Succession”, in J-C. Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations, Montpellier, 2004, ch. 7.

^[16] Most recently, Quentin Skinner, “Rethinking Political Liberty”, History Workshop Journal, 61, 2006, pp. 156-76. Cf. David Wootton, “From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642/3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism”, English Historical Review, 105, 1990, 416, pp. 654-69 - both are interesting on the strands linking parliamentarian and ‘radical’ thought.

^[17] For some helpful brief comments on the re-emergence of a view of Puritanism as ‘radical’ see David Como’s review of Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents (2003) in American Historical Review, 109, 2004, 4, pp. 1196-7 (and the book itself).

^[18] Skinner, “Rethinking Political Liberty”, p. 166.

^[19] Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance, and the History of Ideas, Princeton NJ, 1985, ch. 5, especially pp. 138-41.

^[20] An interesting example of this was provided at the Goldsmiths conference in Jason McElligott’s paper, which explored William Hone’s construction of a radical tradition from his reading and book collecting. See also Ben Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph: William Hone and the Fight for the Free Press, London, 2005, pp. 32-4 on Hone’s reading of John Lilburne.

^[21] Summed up in J.C. Davis and J.D. Alsop, “Winstanley, Gerrard (bap. 1609, d. 1676)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29755, accessed 4 July 2006]

^[22] Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodxy’ ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London, Manchester, Stanford CA, 2001, “Conclusion”, pp. 389-415.

^[23] Peter Lake & David Como, “‘Orthodoxy’ and its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of ‘Consensus’ in the London (Puritan) Underground”, Journal of British Studies, 39, 2000, pp. 34-70, at pp. 69-70.

^[24] Wootton, “From Rebellion to Revolution”. Also Andrew Sharp. “John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’s Book of Declarations: A Radical’s Exploitation of the Words of Authorities”, History of Political Thought, 9, 1988, pp. 19-44; Glenn Burgess, “Protestant Polemic: The Leveller Pamphlets”, Parergon, n.s., 11, 1993, pp. 45-67.

^[25] Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, Aldershot, 2004, pp. 313-332. Perhaps the most concerted attempt to apply the term is David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England, Princeton NJ, 2000. Cf. also Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture, Oxford, 2005, pp. 48-53.

^[26] Philip Baker’s paper at the Goldsmiths conference provided a most illuminating discussion of this contention that Civil War radicalism was all religious in character. He argued that, though religious radicalism was certainly one variety, there were others, especially those of a constitutionalist sort.

^[27] Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 37-8.

^[28] Ibid, pp. 294-5.

^[29] Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 42, 49.

^[30] Blair Worden, “Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience”, in Martin van Gelderen & Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Cambridge, 2 vols, 2002, I, ch. 15, p. 309.

^[31] John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640-1648, Princeton NJ, 1969; Steven Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution, London, 1993.

^[32] The question is an open one not a rhetorical one: on some of the ambiguities see Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism, London, 1972, pp. 183-5.

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