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The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
Within the English revolution of the mid-17th century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic--the ideology of the propertied class--there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success "might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic."
In The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them.
The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless men,' the outbursts of sexual freedom and deliberate blasphemy, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs. It is a portrait not of the bourgeois revolution that actually took place, but of the impulse towards a far more fundamental overturning of society.
"Incorporates some of Dr. Hill's most profound statements yet about the 17th-century revolution as a whole."
-- The Economist
In The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them.
The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless men,' the outbursts of sexual freedom and deliberate blasphemy, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs. It is a portrait not of the bourgeois revolution that actually took place, but of the impulse towards a far more fundamental overturning of society.
"Incorporates some of Dr. Hill's most profound statements yet about the 17th-century revolution as a whole."
-- The Economist
431 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
Christopher Hill
179 books80 followersJohn Edward Christopher Hill was the pre-eminent historian of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history, and one of the most distinguished historians of recent times. Fellow historian E.P. Thompson once referred to him as the dean and paragon of English historians.
He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II, he served in the Russian department of the British Foreign Office, returning to teach at Oxford after the war.
From 1958-1965 he was University Lecturer in 16th- and 17th-century history, and from 1965-1978 he was Master of Balliol College. He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the British Academy. He received numerous honorary degrees over the course of his career, including the Hon. Dr. Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1979.
Hill was an active Marxist and a member of the Communist Party from approximately 1934-1957, falling out with the Party after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprisings of 1956.
In their obituary, The Guardian wrote of Hill:
"Christopher Hill…was the commanding interpreter of 17th-century England, and of much else besides.…it was as the defining Marxist historian of the century of revolution, the title of one of the most widely studied of his many books, that he became known to generations of students around the world. For all these, too, he will always be the master." [http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/...]
He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II, he served in the Russian department of the British Foreign Office, returning to teach at Oxford after the war.
From 1958-1965 he was University Lecturer in 16th- and 17th-century history, and from 1965-1978 he was Master of Balliol College. He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the British Academy. He received numerous honorary degrees over the course of his career, including the Hon. Dr. Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1979.
Hill was an active Marxist and a member of the Communist Party from approximately 1934-1957, falling out with the Party after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprisings of 1956.
In their obituary, The Guardian wrote of Hill:
"Christopher Hill…was the commanding interpreter of 17th-century England, and of much else besides.…it was as the defining Marxist historian of the century of revolution, the title of one of the most widely studied of his many books, that he became known to generations of students around the world. For all these, too, he will always be the master." [http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/...]
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July 24, 2018
A question on the r/askhistorians subreddit the other day expressed confusion over Milton's Paradise Lost: how was it that such an established canonical writer was able to compose such a subversive work, which expresses so much sympathy with the Devil? How was this allowed in the seventeenth century – didn't he get in trouble?
Underlying the query is the assumption that in the Old Days, the tenets of religion were monolithic and universally accepted. In fact, as this book shows, the disruption of the English civil war(s) and the chaotic interregnum saw the biggest flare-up of religious experimentation and batshit unorthodoxy that side of the Enlightenment (for which, in some ways, it may have laid the groundwork). A whole baffling array of fantastically radical politico-religious sects sprang up: Levellers, Familists, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, Seekers, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, Grindletonians…all of them merging into each other, all of them with extraordinary and subversive ideas.
Many thought the Bible was merely allegorical; some did not believe in life after death, or the historical Christ, or the concept of a soul. Gerrard Winstanley, one of the Diggers, equated ‘God’ with ‘Reason’, or spoke ambiguously about ‘the God Devil’; one of the Ranters, Laurence Clarkson, wrote that to the truly pure, ‘Devil is God, hell is heaven, sin holiness, damnation salvation’. (Here you might sense Milton taking notes directly.) A lot of these pamphleteers and itinerant preachers were, in modern terminology, essentially atheists, though in the religious atmosphere of the seventeenth century even this unbelief was expressed in theological terms: they called themselves ‘pantheists’ or ‘deists’. ‘God has become a synonym for the natural world,’ as Christopher Hill puts it. Many of them were profoundly impressed by the emerging rational science – so much so that, Hill says, ‘chemistry became almost equated with radical theology’. This new materialism could make people's objections to religion awesomely practical – I loved hearing the record of one John Boggins of Great Yarmouth, who demanded:
As in religion, so in politics. All these radical sects were, in a general sense, speaking for the masses as against the ruling classes; they had supported the Parliamentarian side in the civil war, they opposed the union of church and state (‘The function of a state church was not merely to guide men to heaven,’ Hill reminds us: ‘it was also to keep them in subordination here on earth’); they believed in a widespread redistribution of wealth and land, and thought traditional moral censure should give way to an enjoyment of life's brief pleasures. This included sex: opposition to marriage as a state-sanctioned (and expensive) piece of admin was pretty universal among these groups, but some took it much further and advocated a kind of free love. ‘There's no heaven but women, no hell save marriage,’ according to one rector. Hill is professorial about all this, and shows himself well aware of the fact that
Women's voices are rarely heard directly in this book, though; hopefully that's something that later historians have been able to improve upon.
Overall, it's hard not to feel on the side of the radical underdogs, but you can see why they had such a tough time because their vision was genuinely revolutionary. When an opponent of Winstanley's objected that his ideas, if realised, would destroy all government, ministry and religion, ‘Winstanley replied coolly: “It is very true.”’
And ranged against them was a land-owning aristocracy and a hierarchy of bishops, whose conservatism and staunch antidisestablishmentarianism aimed to keep property in the hands of the few and to regulate the behaviour of the great unwashed – though, on the plus side, it did mean I was able to use the word ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, so swings and roundabouts.
A Marxist historian, Hill perhaps sees things in more overtly class-warlike terms than other writers would – he never talks about the ‘civil war’, for instance, but always refers to it as the English Revolution. This is justified, but it does reflect a certain perspective. Personally I find it a very productive way to approach the period, but your yardage may vary.
Certainly one thing you don't get much of in this book is the wider historical context. Hill assumes you know the outline of all the major players and events going in, takes it for granted that you appreciate the difference between the Long Parliament, the Rump Parliament, the Barebones Parliament and the Restoration Parliament, and can identify Cornet Joyce or Thomas Fairfax at fifty paces. ‘The events following Nayler's symbolic entry into Bristol in 1656…are well known,’ he says, rather optimistically. The last time I did any serious reading in this period was twenty years ago during a ‘17th century literature and culture’ module at university, so I found it all a bit of a shock to the system at first – even half a page on what the Civil War was all about would have helped. But once I'd waded a few chapters into it, I was won over by the sheer heady excitement of the time and place – the sudden rush of ideas, the intellectual melting-pot, is very powerfully evoked.
And for a narrative historian (which Hill isn't quite), the whole thing does have the appealing shape of a classical tragedy. The monarchy was restored, a state Church was re-established, and social equity, for the most part, remained an unrealised fantasy. Of the spectrum of weird and wonderful sects, the only survivors are the Quakers, and they survived only by submitting to the worldly authority they had originally opposed – an evolution that, for Hill, epitomises ‘the fading of the [countercultural] dream into the half-light of common day’.
It is sad, in a way – but it's also hugely inspiring to get such a comprehensive overview of this rich, anti-authority tradition in English intellectual history. It was a tradition that was picked up by Milton, and later by Blake and the Romantics, and that by rights should be drawn on today, by people looking for inspiration in turning today's inequalities upside-down, too.
Underlying the query is the assumption that in the Old Days, the tenets of religion were monolithic and universally accepted. In fact, as this book shows, the disruption of the English civil war(s) and the chaotic interregnum saw the biggest flare-up of religious experimentation and batshit unorthodoxy that side of the Enlightenment (for which, in some ways, it may have laid the groundwork). A whole baffling array of fantastically radical politico-religious sects sprang up: Levellers, Familists, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, Seekers, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, Grindletonians…all of them merging into each other, all of them with extraordinary and subversive ideas.
Many thought the Bible was merely allegorical; some did not believe in life after death, or the historical Christ, or the concept of a soul. Gerrard Winstanley, one of the Diggers, equated ‘God’ with ‘Reason’, or spoke ambiguously about ‘the God Devil’; one of the Ranters, Laurence Clarkson, wrote that to the truly pure, ‘Devil is God, hell is heaven, sin holiness, damnation salvation’. (Here you might sense Milton taking notes directly.) A lot of these pamphleteers and itinerant preachers were, in modern terminology, essentially atheists, though in the religious atmosphere of the seventeenth century even this unbelief was expressed in theological terms: they called themselves ‘pantheists’ or ‘deists’. ‘God has become a synonym for the natural world,’ as Christopher Hill puts it. Many of them were profoundly impressed by the emerging rational science – so much so that, Hill says, ‘chemistry became almost equated with radical theology’. This new materialism could make people's objections to religion awesomely practical – I loved hearing the record of one John Boggins of Great Yarmouth, who demanded:
‘Where is your God, in heaven or in earth, aloft or below, or doth he sit in the clouds, or where doth he sit with his arse?’
As in religion, so in politics. All these radical sects were, in a general sense, speaking for the masses as against the ruling classes; they had supported the Parliamentarian side in the civil war, they opposed the union of church and state (‘The function of a state church was not merely to guide men to heaven,’ Hill reminds us: ‘it was also to keep them in subordination here on earth’); they believed in a widespread redistribution of wealth and land, and thought traditional moral censure should give way to an enjoyment of life's brief pleasures. This included sex: opposition to marriage as a state-sanctioned (and expensive) piece of admin was pretty universal among these groups, but some took it much further and advocated a kind of free love. ‘There's no heaven but women, no hell save marriage,’ according to one rector. Hill is professorial about all this, and shows himself well aware of the fact that
[s]exual freedom, in fact, tended to be freedom for men only, so long as there was no effective birth control.
Women's voices are rarely heard directly in this book, though; hopefully that's something that later historians have been able to improve upon.
Overall, it's hard not to feel on the side of the radical underdogs, but you can see why they had such a tough time because their vision was genuinely revolutionary. When an opponent of Winstanley's objected that his ideas, if realised, would destroy all government, ministry and religion, ‘Winstanley replied coolly: “It is very true.”’
And ranged against them was a land-owning aristocracy and a hierarchy of bishops, whose conservatism and staunch antidisestablishmentarianism aimed to keep property in the hands of the few and to regulate the behaviour of the great unwashed – though, on the plus side, it did mean I was able to use the word ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, so swings and roundabouts.
A Marxist historian, Hill perhaps sees things in more overtly class-warlike terms than other writers would – he never talks about the ‘civil war’, for instance, but always refers to it as the English Revolution. This is justified, but it does reflect a certain perspective. Personally I find it a very productive way to approach the period, but your yardage may vary.
Certainly one thing you don't get much of in this book is the wider historical context. Hill assumes you know the outline of all the major players and events going in, takes it for granted that you appreciate the difference between the Long Parliament, the Rump Parliament, the Barebones Parliament and the Restoration Parliament, and can identify Cornet Joyce or Thomas Fairfax at fifty paces. ‘The events following Nayler's symbolic entry into Bristol in 1656…are well known,’ he says, rather optimistically. The last time I did any serious reading in this period was twenty years ago during a ‘17th century literature and culture’ module at university, so I found it all a bit of a shock to the system at first – even half a page on what the Civil War was all about would have helped. But once I'd waded a few chapters into it, I was won over by the sheer heady excitement of the time and place – the sudden rush of ideas, the intellectual melting-pot, is very powerfully evoked.
And for a narrative historian (which Hill isn't quite), the whole thing does have the appealing shape of a classical tragedy. The monarchy was restored, a state Church was re-established, and social equity, for the most part, remained an unrealised fantasy. Of the spectrum of weird and wonderful sects, the only survivors are the Quakers, and they survived only by submitting to the worldly authority they had originally opposed – an evolution that, for Hill, epitomises ‘the fading of the [countercultural] dream into the half-light of common day’.
It is sad, in a way – but it's also hugely inspiring to get such a comprehensive overview of this rich, anti-authority tradition in English intellectual history. It was a tradition that was picked up by Milton, and later by Blake and the Romantics, and that by rights should be drawn on today, by people looking for inspiration in turning today's inequalities upside-down, too.
Read
July 24, 2018The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of this book, the long and the short of it, is that just like the TV advert says: it does exactly what it says on the tin. To wit: The world turned upside down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. So it is not a history of the English revolution , nor of Radical thinkers, no it is really just about the ideas. The downside is that this a bit like The making of the English Working Class, a pile of intricate jigsaw pieces - which may or may not fit together into a coherent picture, and the author has thrown the box away. Allied to this the prose in places looks as though the author was dead set on having certain sentences even if they had no smooth relation to the rest of the paragraph, the first time I read this I remember running aground and having to wait until the tide turned before I could float on through the rest of the book.
In the critical column of the ledger one might also note that as with The making of the English Working Class this is a book about a historian finding their own radical heritage in the past and find native intellectual roots for himself. In so far as Hill succeeds one can ask - is this a fair or useful picture of the intellectual scene 1642 -1660ish? It is also a book suitable for Brexit Britain, Calvinist radical republicanism was not unique to England, indeed on e the problems that King James sought to address through the creation of an authorised translation of the Bible was that the Geneva Bible pointed out the occasions when God turned on Kings and had them overthrown, Huguenots had advanced republican ideas during the French wars of religion too , but Hill gives himself a 'get out of jail' card early on by saying History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors (p.15). A man in 1972 wrote this book, we in ours would write other ones.
For me though the most serious issue is that this book is exactly what it says it will be Radical ideas during the English Revolution how they relate to each other, if they relate to each other, mostly we have no idea if they fitted into a wider debate or the politics of the era. A couple of times Hill mentions that some one work was influential and I wondered how he could know that - was it cited by other works, did it have an unusually large print run? Once and only once is a radical printer mentioned: Giles Calvert (p.373) and this is as close as he takes us to knowing how Radical ideas circulated, or if they circulated.
At its worst then this book trickles out to people hauled up in front of the courts for having said something mildly unacceptable about the King or the church, and one can't tell if this adds up to a picture of a culture or a handful of unconnected cases pulled from the archives.
But the significance and interest of this book is exactly that it is a journey through a vast unknown territory. He sets forth through deepest darkest radicalism and he finds the headwaters which flowed intoJohn Milton,John Bunyan and Thomas Hobbes, he claims these reach as far as Defoe and Blake, but like a newcomer to a yoga class one might say that is a bit too much of a stretch. Here was a period of ferment from which emerged the Quakers and the Baptists, as well in Hill's view Restoration comedy and Lord Rochester. Hill lays out something of a time when serious Christians burnt the Bible as an insufficient guide to a Christian life, when the Bible was accepted as allegory to be read as myth , that the Resurrection was an event which would occur within each believer, that all people were equal, that wars of conquest everywhere were wrong, that property was sin, that salvation might be found in communal living and thorough manuring, that universal education was a good idea, that the law in England could be practised in English , that both men and women might freely smoke and swear . All of this proved too radical for the seventeenth century, some of this radicalism Hill notes too radical for his own times, some still too radical perhaps for hundreds of years yet to come.
In this Hill was proved to be abundantly right as I was reading, first on the radio I heard Roger Scruton claiming that the EU was bad because it was forcing on England a foreign conception of the law, what made England England and perfect and God's own country, was in his view, the Common law tradition which he held had emerged from the English, for the English. To this our Seventeenth century radicals reply with the long and smelly fart of disdain, some held to the Norman Yoke tradition - that there had been such an age of nice and good law of the people and for the people but it had been ended with the Norman conquest, and since then law is about the subservience of the majority to an exploitative elite. Others went further, all law, including God's law as laid out in the Bible and preached by organised Churches, is intrinsically about control and domination and coercion. Later I watched a television programme about private companies' involvement in space travel one moderately mad scientist laid out a Hobbesian conception of humanity - a philosophy of the finitude of resources is evil, he more or less said, because all nations must then fight each other to ensure they have all the washing machines they want, the only answer lies in expansion in to space just as colonists had expanded from Europe into other continents but this time without pesky natives, then everybody can have as many fridge freezers as they desire to make their hearts sing. To this the seventeenth century says the Earth is our common treasury, there is plenty for all if we work together and learn to share.
I see reading this what Simon Schama in Citizens was running away from, but also partly why he ends up in a mess. In contrast Hill is interested in the interior life and so is explicit about ideologies and also how ideology and psychology tie a community together, Schama is shy about putting intellectual and emotional life at the centre of our political and economic being and even shyer about the effects of threats to, or actual breakdowns of, those mind forg'd manacles. I might suspect that Schama is too deeply injured by the 1980s and can't bear to challenge the judgement of the iron lady that 'there is no such thing as society' while we might visualise Hill's seventeenth century as competing spiderwebs - everything is connected Religion is the only firm foundation of all power says that man of Blood, Charles Stuart (p.98), therefore you can have no freedom of thought and you must have Church courts to police thoughts (as well as family law, and church discipline), the Father is the King in his house, this is a top down, ordered society, it is linked to trade monopolies and control over the labour force both through law and organisation - guilds and corporations. Unfortunately for the Stuarts there is a worm in the apple which is that their royal forbear Henry VIII had rejected Papal supremacy in favour of the Bible. And the Bible can be a seditious little book. Literally so, Hill mentions that editions of the Geneva Bible were being printed in very small formats and he imagines debates down the old ale house settled by people thumbing through their bibles to find the clinching text to support their view (and since almost everything has been justified somewhere at some time by recourse to the Bible they probably could).
Hill is famous as an exemplar of the 20th century British Marxist historian, yet applying himself to the seventeenth century, what I see is a history that is indebted to R.D. Laing and psychology, this is about mentalities, worldviews, attitudes and outlooks, the psychological shocks and crises that individuals went through. It is the seventeenth century understood from the perspective of having lived through the 1960s and having experienced it as a liberation, though not necessarily a painless one. What happens to a society once it goes through repeated Reformations and then is exposed to Calvinism and at the same time Capitalism both soaking into the fabric of the country at different rates, reaching different areas at different times. On the one hand half the country at war with the other half with "change" as their battle-cry and watch word but both Royalists and Parliamentarians divided between those who wanted none of it or even more change. At the same time a battle took place in the human mind the one you might recognise from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: am I saved or damn'd to Hell? And if saved can I sin, or is all my behaviour sanctified by God?
As armies march about the country so thoughts rushed about the head, one can imagine then under such pressures how society begins to fall apart and people think, and for once, can print, and for a while can say even in churches, all kinds of things without being flogged or having a hole bored through your tongue.
When the lid is put back on the play box of ideas in 1660, there is a slow clamp down. Many of these radicals simply disappear, others settle down and merge back into more or less acceptable churches.
The gentleman of the restoration era is convinced Voltaire style that Christianity is socially necessary - he of course may not believe in the State church but he supports it anyway because the fear of Hell limits the thieving of his servants and keeps his wife's adultery within acceptable bounds.
This book is I feel both flawed and deservedly a classic in part because although there are some big names like Hill's hero Gerrard Winstanley, or George Fox, most of the book is filled by people who but for the brief period of the Republic could never have aired their views in print - it is a worm's eye perspective, not of what people did but of what they thought and felt and feared.
A last word of warning - you do have to bring your own lobster pot helmet and breastplate to this book, precious little is provided for you, a horse is not obligatory, but you may find a sharp edged sword of discernment useful.
In the critical column of the ledger one might also note that as with The making of the English Working Class this is a book about a historian finding their own radical heritage in the past and find native intellectual roots for himself. In so far as Hill succeeds one can ask - is this a fair or useful picture of the intellectual scene 1642 -1660ish? It is also a book suitable for Brexit Britain, Calvinist radical republicanism was not unique to England, indeed on e the problems that King James sought to address through the creation of an authorised translation of the Bible was that the Geneva Bible pointed out the occasions when God turned on Kings and had them overthrown, Huguenots had advanced republican ideas during the French wars of religion too , but Hill gives himself a 'get out of jail' card early on by saying History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors (p.15). A man in 1972 wrote this book, we in ours would write other ones.
For me though the most serious issue is that this book is exactly what it says it will be Radical ideas during the English Revolution how they relate to each other, if they relate to each other, mostly we have no idea if they fitted into a wider debate or the politics of the era. A couple of times Hill mentions that some one work was influential and I wondered how he could know that - was it cited by other works, did it have an unusually large print run? Once and only once is a radical printer mentioned: Giles Calvert (p.373) and this is as close as he takes us to knowing how Radical ideas circulated, or if they circulated.
At its worst then this book trickles out to people hauled up in front of the courts for having said something mildly unacceptable about the King or the church, and one can't tell if this adds up to a picture of a culture or a handful of unconnected cases pulled from the archives.
But the significance and interest of this book is exactly that it is a journey through a vast unknown territory. He sets forth through deepest darkest radicalism and he finds the headwaters which flowed intoJohn Milton,John Bunyan and Thomas Hobbes, he claims these reach as far as Defoe and Blake, but like a newcomer to a yoga class one might say that is a bit too much of a stretch. Here was a period of ferment from which emerged the Quakers and the Baptists, as well in Hill's view Restoration comedy and Lord Rochester. Hill lays out something of a time when serious Christians burnt the Bible as an insufficient guide to a Christian life, when the Bible was accepted as allegory to be read as myth , that the Resurrection was an event which would occur within each believer, that all people were equal, that wars of conquest everywhere were wrong, that property was sin, that salvation might be found in communal living and thorough manuring, that universal education was a good idea, that the law in England could be practised in English , that both men and women might freely smoke and swear . All of this proved too radical for the seventeenth century, some of this radicalism Hill notes too radical for his own times, some still too radical perhaps for hundreds of years yet to come.
In this Hill was proved to be abundantly right as I was reading, first on the radio I heard Roger Scruton claiming that the EU was bad because it was forcing on England a foreign conception of the law, what made England England and perfect and God's own country, was in his view, the Common law tradition which he held had emerged from the English, for the English. To this our Seventeenth century radicals reply with the long and smelly fart of disdain, some held to the Norman Yoke tradition - that there had been such an age of nice and good law of the people and for the people but it had been ended with the Norman conquest, and since then law is about the subservience of the majority to an exploitative elite. Others went further, all law, including God's law as laid out in the Bible and preached by organised Churches, is intrinsically about control and domination and coercion. Later I watched a television programme about private companies' involvement in space travel one moderately mad scientist laid out a Hobbesian conception of humanity - a philosophy of the finitude of resources is evil, he more or less said, because all nations must then fight each other to ensure they have all the washing machines they want, the only answer lies in expansion in to space just as colonists had expanded from Europe into other continents but this time without pesky natives, then everybody can have as many fridge freezers as they desire to make their hearts sing. To this the seventeenth century says the Earth is our common treasury, there is plenty for all if we work together and learn to share.
I see reading this what Simon Schama in Citizens was running away from, but also partly why he ends up in a mess. In contrast Hill is interested in the interior life and so is explicit about ideologies and also how ideology and psychology tie a community together, Schama is shy about putting intellectual and emotional life at the centre of our political and economic being and even shyer about the effects of threats to, or actual breakdowns of, those mind forg'd manacles. I might suspect that Schama is too deeply injured by the 1980s and can't bear to challenge the judgement of the iron lady that 'there is no such thing as society' while we might visualise Hill's seventeenth century as competing spiderwebs - everything is connected Religion is the only firm foundation of all power says that man of Blood, Charles Stuart (p.98), therefore you can have no freedom of thought and you must have Church courts to police thoughts (as well as family law, and church discipline), the Father is the King in his house, this is a top down, ordered society, it is linked to trade monopolies and control over the labour force both through law and organisation - guilds and corporations. Unfortunately for the Stuarts there is a worm in the apple which is that their royal forbear Henry VIII had rejected Papal supremacy in favour of the Bible. And the Bible can be a seditious little book. Literally so, Hill mentions that editions of the Geneva Bible were being printed in very small formats and he imagines debates down the old ale house settled by people thumbing through their bibles to find the clinching text to support their view (and since almost everything has been justified somewhere at some time by recourse to the Bible they probably could).
Hill is famous as an exemplar of the 20th century British Marxist historian, yet applying himself to the seventeenth century, what I see is a history that is indebted to R.D. Laing and psychology, this is about mentalities, worldviews, attitudes and outlooks, the psychological shocks and crises that individuals went through. It is the seventeenth century understood from the perspective of having lived through the 1960s and having experienced it as a liberation, though not necessarily a painless one. What happens to a society once it goes through repeated Reformations and then is exposed to Calvinism and at the same time Capitalism both soaking into the fabric of the country at different rates, reaching different areas at different times. On the one hand half the country at war with the other half with "change" as their battle-cry and watch word but both Royalists and Parliamentarians divided between those who wanted none of it or even more change. At the same time a battle took place in the human mind the one you might recognise from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: am I saved or damn'd to Hell? And if saved can I sin, or is all my behaviour sanctified by God?
As armies march about the country so thoughts rushed about the head, one can imagine then under such pressures how society begins to fall apart and people think, and for once, can print, and for a while can say even in churches, all kinds of things without being flogged or having a hole bored through your tongue.
When the lid is put back on the play box of ideas in 1660, there is a slow clamp down. Many of these radicals simply disappear, others settle down and merge back into more or less acceptable churches.
The gentleman of the restoration era is convinced Voltaire style that Christianity is socially necessary - he of course may not believe in the State church but he supports it anyway because the fear of Hell limits the thieving of his servants and keeps his wife's adultery within acceptable bounds.
This book is I feel both flawed and deservedly a classic in part because although there are some big names like Hill's hero Gerrard Winstanley, or George Fox, most of the book is filled by people who but for the brief period of the Republic could never have aired their views in print - it is a worm's eye perspective, not of what people did but of what they thought and felt and feared.
A last word of warning - you do have to bring your own lobster pot helmet and breastplate to this book, precious little is provided for you, a horse is not obligatory, but you may find a sharp edged sword of discernment useful.
December 19, 2011
Nearly 400 years ago, from the midst of the English Revolution, I hear the same anger at the despoilation and hooliganism of their rich ravening rulers as I do today, in the incoherent but passionate Occupy movements, and, if I'm honest, in the outraged and outrageous screechings of the tea party - on all sides there is the sense of trying, pitifully, to raise up a single skinny fist and shake it and howl
This is not the way things were supposed to be!
So here are the words of an Englishman who thought the same in 1649. His name was Gerrard Winstanley and he wasn't a Leveller, he was a True Leveller.
******
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.
And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself;
The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves:
And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.
Money must not any longer....be the great god that hedges in some and hedges out others, for money is but part of the Earth; and after our work of the Earthly Community is advanced, we must make use of gold or silver as we do of other metals but not to buy or sell.
Break in pieces quickly the Band of particular Property, disown this oppressing Murder, Opression and Thievery of Buying and Selling of Land, owning of landlords and paying of Rents and give thy Free Consent to make the Earth a Common Treasury without grumbling.....that all may enjoy the benefit of their Creation.
And hereby thou wilt honour thy Father and thy Mother : Thy Father, which is the spirit of community, that made all and that dwels in all. Thy Mother, which is the Earth, that brought us all forth: That as a true Mother, loves all her children. Therefore do not hinder the Mother Earth from giving all her children suck, by thy Inclosing into particular hands, and holding up that cursed Bondage of Inclosure by thy Power.
Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?
Gerrard Winstanley & others
The True Levellers Standard Advanced - April, 1649
The New Law of Righteousness, 1649
A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England Directed to all that Call Themselves or are Called Lords of Manors, 1649
This is not the way things were supposed to be!
So here are the words of an Englishman who thought the same in 1649. His name was Gerrard Winstanley and he wasn't a Leveller, he was a True Leveller.
******
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.
And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself;
The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves:
And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.
Money must not any longer....be the great god that hedges in some and hedges out others, for money is but part of the Earth; and after our work of the Earthly Community is advanced, we must make use of gold or silver as we do of other metals but not to buy or sell.
Break in pieces quickly the Band of particular Property, disown this oppressing Murder, Opression and Thievery of Buying and Selling of Land, owning of landlords and paying of Rents and give thy Free Consent to make the Earth a Common Treasury without grumbling.....that all may enjoy the benefit of their Creation.
And hereby thou wilt honour thy Father and thy Mother : Thy Father, which is the spirit of community, that made all and that dwels in all. Thy Mother, which is the Earth, that brought us all forth: That as a true Mother, loves all her children. Therefore do not hinder the Mother Earth from giving all her children suck, by thy Inclosing into particular hands, and holding up that cursed Bondage of Inclosure by thy Power.
Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?
Gerrard Winstanley & others
The True Levellers Standard Advanced - April, 1649
The New Law of Righteousness, 1649
A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England Directed to all that Call Themselves or are Called Lords of Manors, 1649
May 31, 2019
Hill, a Marxist historian, begins The World turned Upside Down with this observation:
‘Popular revolt was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition, and the middle decades of the seventeenth century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain’
This book, he goes on, deals with the ideas developed by various groups of the common people who wanted to change the existing order, often to the acute discomfort of the middle classes, let alone the aristocracy.
I was familiar with some of the groups whose ideas he discusses – the Levellers, the Ranters, the Baptists and the Quakers. But the Fifth Monarchists, the Muggletonians and Diggers were unknown territory. I was also unfamiliar with the widespread use of the words ‘mechanics’ and ‘mechanicals’ to describe artisans, but dimly recalled Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’ in Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Now I understand better the origins and naming of the nineteenth century rise of Mechanics Institutes as education centres for working class people. Small shafts of illumination come from the most unlikely places!)
Some of the ideas generated during this period were truly revolutionary and, despite subsequent suppression, many flowed through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the view that all men (yes, men) had a right to say how they should be governed.
The Reformation’s challenge to the authority of Rome and the priesthood, leading to anticlericalism was the starting point for many of the more radical ideas.
For instance, the Leveller Winstanley rejected a deity who justified the rule of property; argued that God and the Saviour were within the individual, and that many stories from the Bible and articles of Christian faith, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection, were allegorical. Truth was not absolute but was continually evolving, and could be sought through observation and experience, leading to scientific enquire, for instance. I
In previous generations Winstanley and others would have been burned for heresy. In his conclusion, Hill remarks that the authorities in the 1640s showed much greater tolerance during the great religious debates than those 10 years later, as the political climate became more conservative again.
Ranters’ political ideas subverted the existing society and its values: ‘the world exists for man and all men are equal. There is no afterlife: all that matters is the here and now’ (p339).
For some the belief that God and/or Christ were in the individual meant that the individual could not sin nor go to hell, because God could not sin etc. Some Ranters, uneducated in the niceties of theology, took this to give them to indulge enthusiastically in licentious, and lascivious behaviour: they frequented taverns, sang blasphemous songs to the tunes of psalms and were sexually promiscuous.. Their extremism discredited them, and reflected discredit on other sects.
The radicals were defeated in the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Res..., when Charles II returned to England to take up the throne, but it was a very different England from that his father had ruled.
By the end of the seventeenth century the Protestant faith was firmly established in England, the protestant ethic dominated the attitudes of the middle classes and the mechanical attitude dominate scientific thinking. Printed material was readily available and the political world profoundly changed.
It’s fascinating to read about this revolutionary period and to think about the influences the ideas of the artisans and the mechanics, had over nearly 400 years ago.
‘Popular revolt was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition, and the middle decades of the seventeenth century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain’
This book, he goes on, deals with the ideas developed by various groups of the common people who wanted to change the existing order, often to the acute discomfort of the middle classes, let alone the aristocracy.
I was familiar with some of the groups whose ideas he discusses – the Levellers, the Ranters, the Baptists and the Quakers. But the Fifth Monarchists, the Muggletonians and Diggers were unknown territory. I was also unfamiliar with the widespread use of the words ‘mechanics’ and ‘mechanicals’ to describe artisans, but dimly recalled Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’ in Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Now I understand better the origins and naming of the nineteenth century rise of Mechanics Institutes as education centres for working class people. Small shafts of illumination come from the most unlikely places!)
Some of the ideas generated during this period were truly revolutionary and, despite subsequent suppression, many flowed through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the view that all men (yes, men) had a right to say how they should be governed.
The Reformation’s challenge to the authority of Rome and the priesthood, leading to anticlericalism was the starting point for many of the more radical ideas.
For instance, the Leveller Winstanley rejected a deity who justified the rule of property; argued that God and the Saviour were within the individual, and that many stories from the Bible and articles of Christian faith, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection, were allegorical. Truth was not absolute but was continually evolving, and could be sought through observation and experience, leading to scientific enquire, for instance. I
In previous generations Winstanley and others would have been burned for heresy. In his conclusion, Hill remarks that the authorities in the 1640s showed much greater tolerance during the great religious debates than those 10 years later, as the political climate became more conservative again.
Ranters’ political ideas subverted the existing society and its values: ‘the world exists for man and all men are equal. There is no afterlife: all that matters is the here and now’ (p339).
For some the belief that God and/or Christ were in the individual meant that the individual could not sin nor go to hell, because God could not sin etc. Some Ranters, uneducated in the niceties of theology, took this to give them to indulge enthusiastically in licentious, and lascivious behaviour: they frequented taverns, sang blasphemous songs to the tunes of psalms and were sexually promiscuous.. Their extremism discredited them, and reflected discredit on other sects.
The radicals were defeated in the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Res..., when Charles II returned to England to take up the throne, but it was a very different England from that his father had ruled.
By the end of the seventeenth century the Protestant faith was firmly established in England, the protestant ethic dominated the attitudes of the middle classes and the mechanical attitude dominate scientific thinking. Printed material was readily available and the political world profoundly changed.
It’s fascinating to read about this revolutionary period and to think about the influences the ideas of the artisans and the mechanics, had over nearly 400 years ago.
July 9, 2012
Blaaaaah.
Where to start? How about with the aspect of the book that irritated me the most?
No women! How could you write a book about the English revolution and have no women? This was 100% a man's history. Yes, yes, I'm an angry feminist, but I couldn't believe, page after page, that a full 50% of the population was completely left out of Hill's analysis.
The only time women's issues were specifically addressed was in the chapter about changing sexual mores, and then the discussion was so terrible that I wish he hadn't even attempted it. For pages, he carries on about the improving condition of women in England at this time and cites ALL MALE SOURCES to prove his point! Well, if male travelers from Italy, and male religious leaders, and male scientists all thought women's position was on the up and up, that must really have been so, right?
And the constant references to looser sexual mores among certain radical sects bugged me too. He mentioned again and again throughout the book that radicals (male radicals, because that is all he included in his analysis) thought that "enjoying women" and "taking pleasure in your neighbor's wife" should not be considered sins; and he never once even kind of addresses whether or not this expanded sexual liberty on the part of women was at all voluntary or compulsory. He spends all of one paragraph (quoting a male source) mentioning that looser sexual standards led to heavier child-caring duties for women abandoned by "sexually liberated" men. Just wonderful.
The sad thing is, if I hadn't read feminist histories of this era and others, I might come away from this book thinking that women must have been a mostly illiterate (and non-linguistic?) batch of dummies who did nothing at all. Boo.
Other than roiling feminist issues, however, I was just so let down that someone could take such an exciting topic (radical political theories during the English Revolution! Aah!) and make it so mind-numbingly BORING. I gave him an extra star just as a hat tip to the coolness of the subject matter.
I need to stop reading history books that are written like Ph.D. dissertations.
Where to start? How about with the aspect of the book that irritated me the most?
No women! How could you write a book about the English revolution and have no women? This was 100% a man's history. Yes, yes, I'm an angry feminist, but I couldn't believe, page after page, that a full 50% of the population was completely left out of Hill's analysis.
The only time women's issues were specifically addressed was in the chapter about changing sexual mores, and then the discussion was so terrible that I wish he hadn't even attempted it. For pages, he carries on about the improving condition of women in England at this time and cites ALL MALE SOURCES to prove his point! Well, if male travelers from Italy, and male religious leaders, and male scientists all thought women's position was on the up and up, that must really have been so, right?
And the constant references to looser sexual mores among certain radical sects bugged me too. He mentioned again and again throughout the book that radicals (male radicals, because that is all he included in his analysis) thought that "enjoying women" and "taking pleasure in your neighbor's wife" should not be considered sins; and he never once even kind of addresses whether or not this expanded sexual liberty on the part of women was at all voluntary or compulsory. He spends all of one paragraph (quoting a male source) mentioning that looser sexual standards led to heavier child-caring duties for women abandoned by "sexually liberated" men. Just wonderful.
The sad thing is, if I hadn't read feminist histories of this era and others, I might come away from this book thinking that women must have been a mostly illiterate (and non-linguistic?) batch of dummies who did nothing at all. Boo.
Other than roiling feminist issues, however, I was just so let down that someone could take such an exciting topic (radical political theories during the English Revolution! Aah!) and make it so mind-numbingly BORING. I gave him an extra star just as a hat tip to the coolness of the subject matter.
I need to stop reading history books that are written like Ph.D. dissertations.
August 6, 2024
“There had been moments when it seemed as though from the ferment of radical ideas a culture might emerge which might be different both from the traditional aristocratic culture and from the bourgeois culture of the protestant ethic which replaced it. We can discern shadows of what this counter culture might have been like. rejecting private property for communism, religion for rationalistic and materialistic pantheism, the mechanical philosophy for dialectical science, asceticism for unashamed enjoyment of the good things of the flesh, it might have achieved unity through a federation of communities, each based on the fullest respect for the individual. Its ideal would have been economic self-sufficiency, not world trade or world domination. The economic significant consequence of the Puritan emphasis on sin was the compulsion on labour, to save, to accumulate, which contributed so much to making the Industrial Revolution possible in England. Ranters simply rejected this; Quakers ultimately came to accept it. Only Winstanley put forward an alternative....... ...It came nearest to realisation in the Digger communities, which might have given the counter-culture some economic base.”
Christopher Hill was one of the doyens of Marxist historiography in the twentieth century. His specialism was the English Civil War. I have been reading a fair amount of historical novels set in the seventeenth century and so this complements them well. This is a remarkable piece of historical writing, not without its flaws, but opening a window into the many and diverse groups that were given the opportunity to develop and grow in the vacuum that the Civil War created.
Hill does speculate where all these ideas came from, and there were many of them. He makes the case they were always there, underground and unrecorded. The sudden removal of authority (ecclesiastical and royal) and the availability of the means to print pamphlets and tracts provided the impetus for these ideas to surface.
The list of groups is impressive: Levellers, Familists, Ranters, Gridletonians, Diggers, Quakers, Muggletonians, Seekers, Fifth Monarchists, Anabaptists and many more. For a brief time these ideas were freely expressed until the ruling classes got themselves organised and the new elite was in place.
What about these ideas. Free healthcare for all was one as was education for all up to the age of eighteen. Divorce on an equal basis for all. Free love was also part of equation, although as Hill points out, as there was no effective birth control it tended to be freedom for men only. There was also a questioning of marriage.
Religious views were also challenged, particularly the Divinity of Christ and the resurrection. If you think Nietzsche was the first to talk about the Death of God, think again. Joseph Salmon and Richard Coppin both wrote about the Death of God. There were lots of political ideas relating to democracy and equality as well. There was even criticism of the trade with India because of its effects on those in India. There was a common call “All lanlords are thieves”.
For me the most impressive group were the Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley. They reoccupied land that had been enclosed and turning it common land again. They planted crops on it, hence the name Diggers. Inevitably it didn’t last, but the ideas remained.
Historical thinking has moved on and the work has been much criticized and debated, but it is an excellent introduction to the ideas that were thrown up by the Civil War and is well worth reading.
Christopher Hill was one of the doyens of Marxist historiography in the twentieth century. His specialism was the English Civil War. I have been reading a fair amount of historical novels set in the seventeenth century and so this complements them well. This is a remarkable piece of historical writing, not without its flaws, but opening a window into the many and diverse groups that were given the opportunity to develop and grow in the vacuum that the Civil War created.
Hill does speculate where all these ideas came from, and there were many of them. He makes the case they were always there, underground and unrecorded. The sudden removal of authority (ecclesiastical and royal) and the availability of the means to print pamphlets and tracts provided the impetus for these ideas to surface.
The list of groups is impressive: Levellers, Familists, Ranters, Gridletonians, Diggers, Quakers, Muggletonians, Seekers, Fifth Monarchists, Anabaptists and many more. For a brief time these ideas were freely expressed until the ruling classes got themselves organised and the new elite was in place.
What about these ideas. Free healthcare for all was one as was education for all up to the age of eighteen. Divorce on an equal basis for all. Free love was also part of equation, although as Hill points out, as there was no effective birth control it tended to be freedom for men only. There was also a questioning of marriage.
Religious views were also challenged, particularly the Divinity of Christ and the resurrection. If you think Nietzsche was the first to talk about the Death of God, think again. Joseph Salmon and Richard Coppin both wrote about the Death of God. There were lots of political ideas relating to democracy and equality as well. There was even criticism of the trade with India because of its effects on those in India. There was a common call “All lanlords are thieves”.
For me the most impressive group were the Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley. They reoccupied land that had been enclosed and turning it common land again. They planted crops on it, hence the name Diggers. Inevitably it didn’t last, but the ideas remained.
Historical thinking has moved on and the work has been much criticized and debated, but it is an excellent introduction to the ideas that were thrown up by the Civil War and is well worth reading.
March 2, 2019
I view that book as being an introduction to some of the Dissenting groups that were in existence during the British Civil War.
I would have liked more information on some of the groups, such as The Ranters. Luckily there was a reference to another book about that sect in the footnotes.
I would have liked more information on some of the groups, such as The Ranters. Luckily there was a reference to another book about that sect in the footnotes.
October 6, 2015
This book opened my eyes, not only insofar as its strict subject matter, but also in its applicability to our own times. Christopher Hill was without a doubt one of the most knowledgeable commenters on the seventeenth century in England, especially of that period between 1640 and 1660 which he refers to as the English Revolution.
I recommend The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution to anyone who is interested not only in English history, but our own. I find in Hill's Antinomians and Ranters a fore-runner of the Tea Party and many of the more radical evangelical preachers in the American South and Midwest. As Hill summarizes:
Hill's The World Turned Upside Down was a revelation to me. We tend no to read much about the seventeenth century, but it was a yeasty period which is still affecting us today.
I recommend The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution to anyone who is interested not only in English history, but our own. I find in Hill's Antinomians and Ranters a fore-runner of the Tea Party and many of the more radical evangelical preachers in the American South and Midwest. As Hill summarizes:
Since the external world is the manifestation of [Gerrard] Winstanley's God, our senses are to be valued because by thm we know this world. Man must live in himself, not out of himself; in his five senses, not in empty imaginations, books or hearsay documents. Then God walks and delights himself in his garden, mankind. We know God by the senses, 'in the clear-sighted experience of one single creature, man, by seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling.' When the five senses act in their own light, this is 'the state of simple plainheartedness or innocency.'What is missing are the priesthood, the Bible, the theologians ... for these radicals, every man was his or her own prophet, and dogma be damned.
Hill's The World Turned Upside Down was a revelation to me. We tend no to read much about the seventeenth century, but it was a yeasty period which is still affecting us today.
November 27, 2017
Of course, the British Marxist historians are old hat. 35 years ago they would have been argued against, but now they can be treated with condescension, ignored, while the stars of modern history extol the virtues of Empire. But for many of the younger historians the greatest crime of the Marxists is that they didn’t tell stories: they deal with the dried up world of ideas. This is perhaps Christopher Hill’s most respected work and is unashamedly a history of ideas: as its sub-title tells us, radical ideas during the English revolution. I will admit that the most annoying thing about Hill’s studies of the Seventeenth Century is the way he presumes we know not only the broad narrative outlines of the English revolution and civil war, but also much of the detail... although now we can click onto the internet and fill in our ignorance with timelines and such internetty things. Personally I think the structure of The World Turned Upside Down is intriguing, narrative replaced by modernist flexibility, Hill moving from broad historical movements to closer detail. As a good Marxist, Hill begins by filling in a background to the revolutionary intellectual life, pointing to a range of influences from unemployment to astrology. Hill’s detractors tend to attack him for reducing the upheavals of the early Seventeenth Century to a conflict of class, but, for anyone who bothers to read his books, this is obviously not the case: his is not a crude exposition of base and superstructure, rather Hill identifies a range of formative influences with a fluid ease...I imagine back in the 1970s he would have been attacked by some Marxists for his lack of rigorous theoretical method, but even Marx looked to the events of history before theory. The heroes of the book are undoubtedly Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers. These communistic Christians, with their belief that none should employ others, are generally regarded as utopians, either heroic or misguided, but Hill views them as deeply practical: while, for instance, other radicals denounced the enclosure of common land, against the new economic efficiency they could do little more than suggest a return to an imaginary past, but the Diggers worked for an alternative form of cooperative land cultivation. They tried to build an egalitarian society based on a faith in God and manure. The pivotal chapter of The World Turned Upside Down is one about sin: for Hill the erosion of the idea that we were all tainted by Original Sin, that the Law was needed to hold back the corruption of Man, was a deeply liberating one, allowing a challenge to established ideas, religion and politics. Hill continues by considering two of the religious movements: the Ranters and the Quakers. The Ranters were not a cohesive movement, lacking any organization or even a united body of ideas: they tended to pantheistic, seeing God in everything, and, with the abolition of Sin, they thought behaviour was marked as neither good nor evil. When Hill published his book, parallels with hippies and 1960s counter-culture would have been obvious. With the Commonwealth and the control of revolutionary ideas, the Ranters were suppressed. It is Hill’s contention that the Quakers came from a similar milieu, but under the Commonwealth their survival was dependent on a new discipline and centralization, and with the Restoration of the monarchy they had no alternative but to turn to quietism, dedicating themselves to hard work, the avoidance of sin (Sin had returned) and a belief in the hereafter, rather than building a New Jerusalem on earth. All history is a study in the time of its writers as much as a study of the past and Hill makes both intellectual and emotional sense to me: I first read Hill and his colleagues, and other Marxist writers, in the early 1980s, when I was in my early twenties, i.e., many of my ideas were formed at the tail end of the Marxist revival of the 1960s and 70s. I still share the emotional identification with radical trouble makers and still believe that Marxism gives us the most useful methods of understanding our society, even, and especially, in our market dominated times. To those who think I am an irresponsible utopian and an apologist for social chaos, I can only reply, ‘I only wish.’
March 5, 2022
The life’s work of Christopher Hill (1912-2003) was taken up almost entirely by a reevaluation of England in the seventeenth century. By 1972, the year this book was published, he had already written nearly a dozen books, with more than half of them about the culture, society, and intellectual life of England of that time. “The World Turned Upside Down” mostly examines the new and radically sectarian Protestant ideas that contributed to the revolutionary atmosphere.
If you want a good description of the basic revolutionary groups mostly mentioned this period, this does the job, but it’s not exactly what most people would consider an introduction (see below). For those completely new to the subject, sometimes his explanations run together a bit more than they should. He first introduces the Diggers, the Christian communitarian sect that first got its name by taking control of some commons abutting the Thames and planting their crops there. Before long, dozens of other sites had been similarly commandeered – an idea that might be shocking if a full third of all English land hadn’t been commons that were laying about similarly unused. He then moves on to describe the beliefs of the Ranters, the Seekers, the Quakers, and the Muggletonians, the whole time emphasizing their radical ideas about sex and private property.
Being a Marxist and having more than a revisionist tint, Hill freely uses the word “communist” to describe many of their beliefs, but this may very well be ex post facto confirmation bias. Whatever it is, it was at least a very heterodox form of religious practice that sometimes disposed of the most fundamental of Christian assumptions. This is definitely one of the big takeaways of the book: that the radicals of the time were beginning to question what used to be thought of as their preordained hierarchies and roles in society, and slowly but surely figured out that institutions of law, government, and private property are really nothing more than what people themselves are willing to defend.
“The World Turned Upside Down” is often passed off as an “introduction to the English Revolution” and the ideas that pushed it forward. But without some previous grounding in the history of the time, readers are going to be left far afield. It’s not an entry point. Nor is it so scholarly to be called a monograph. It’s an approachable book for the informed reader. I’m guessing the reason why it has the reputation as an “introduction” comes from the sheer number of people it has influenced in the fifty years since it has been published.
For anyone interested in thick, hearty histories of England in the seventeenth century, the good people over at Verso Press have done the world a tremendous favor by republishing much of Hill’s work, including “Experience and Defeat: Milton and His Contemporaries,” “Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies,” “Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England,” “Reformation to Industrial Revolution,” “A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People” (Hill’s book on John Bunyan) and “Milton and the English Revolution.” In and of themselves, they look like nearly a complete education in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the time. Over the next several years, I plan to work through them with the care and appreciation they deserve.
If you want a good description of the basic revolutionary groups mostly mentioned this period, this does the job, but it’s not exactly what most people would consider an introduction (see below). For those completely new to the subject, sometimes his explanations run together a bit more than they should. He first introduces the Diggers, the Christian communitarian sect that first got its name by taking control of some commons abutting the Thames and planting their crops there. Before long, dozens of other sites had been similarly commandeered – an idea that might be shocking if a full third of all English land hadn’t been commons that were laying about similarly unused. He then moves on to describe the beliefs of the Ranters, the Seekers, the Quakers, and the Muggletonians, the whole time emphasizing their radical ideas about sex and private property.
Being a Marxist and having more than a revisionist tint, Hill freely uses the word “communist” to describe many of their beliefs, but this may very well be ex post facto confirmation bias. Whatever it is, it was at least a very heterodox form of religious practice that sometimes disposed of the most fundamental of Christian assumptions. This is definitely one of the big takeaways of the book: that the radicals of the time were beginning to question what used to be thought of as their preordained hierarchies and roles in society, and slowly but surely figured out that institutions of law, government, and private property are really nothing more than what people themselves are willing to defend.
“The World Turned Upside Down” is often passed off as an “introduction to the English Revolution” and the ideas that pushed it forward. But without some previous grounding in the history of the time, readers are going to be left far afield. It’s not an entry point. Nor is it so scholarly to be called a monograph. It’s an approachable book for the informed reader. I’m guessing the reason why it has the reputation as an “introduction” comes from the sheer number of people it has influenced in the fifty years since it has been published.
For anyone interested in thick, hearty histories of England in the seventeenth century, the good people over at Verso Press have done the world a tremendous favor by republishing much of Hill’s work, including “Experience and Defeat: Milton and His Contemporaries,” “Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies,” “Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England,” “Reformation to Industrial Revolution,” “A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People” (Hill’s book on John Bunyan) and “Milton and the English Revolution.” In and of themselves, they look like nearly a complete education in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the time. Over the next several years, I plan to work through them with the care and appreciation they deserve.
August 18, 2019
An invigorating book, if slightly messy overall. Hill has such an extreme amount of personal love for many of the radicals he studies, and I appreciate his honesty in lauding the creative prose of Abiezer Coppe and in recommending readers, very genuinely and wholeheartedly, to read Gerrard Winstanley themselves if they really wish to understand his ideas. This is the vigour. The mess comes down to a bit of a gulf between Hill and me. His way of putting an academic book together and making arguments is disorganised when compared with the highly formulaic manner in which it is done now, leaving me, as a reader, in a weird place between the freer forms of writing I enjoy and the more mannered kinds. This is only a minor quibble in what is an extraordinarily erudite work. One does get the sense that Hill has read everything.
January 2, 2014
Christopher Hill has written a stunning intellectual history of radical thinkers during the unruly decades of the English Civil Wars (roughly 1640-1660). Censorship of printed material was strict for most of British history until the 19th century, but from 1641-1660, censorship was lifted. When the restraining dam burst, a flood of eccentric, radical, blasphemous, and sometimes brilliant literature washed over Britain. Christopher Hill has mastered this literature and brought it into some order for the appreciation, entertainment, and even awe of the reader.
This book focuses on the left wing of the left wing, those revolutionaries whom the more mainstream revolutionaries marginalized and even suppressed. Religious ideas from heterodoxy to pantheism to atheism are found. Economic ideas approaching national communism or local communitarianism were broached. Entirely new critiques of existing government and proposals of novel governmental systems were advanced. The material is a glorious mess. However, running through almost all the radical critiques are a thorough-going democratic impulse and a reliance on individual conscience, which therefore required individual liberty of conscience.
This book is a window onto many fascinating characters. One is Gerrard Winstanley, a proponent of the Diggers, a short-lived association of people who confiscated common lands for agricultural purposes in protest against the agricultural policies of the government. Winstanley leveled (a pun) criticisms of the economic order of landed gentry, but his positive proposal is even more interesting. He is one of the first to have grasped that a long-term solution to England's economic crises was to increase the area of arable land. Much like Marx, Winstanley believed that in an egalitarian society, most of the law and government would wither away. After all, isn't law just the landed class's way of perpetuating their privilege? He was a pantheist and materialist; his anti-clericalism was fueled by his (mostly correct) belief that the clergy were a professional class in a symbiotic relationship with an oppressive government. The professional classes most go: scientific, theological, and legal instruction should be available to all in a system of universal education, so that specialists will not be needed. Winstanley was a monopoly buster. And a failure.
Other fascinating characters pepper the pages. Thomas Nayler was a revolutionary Quaker who entered London riding on a donkey; his rejection and brutal flogging pushed the Quakers to try pacifism instead of revolution. Alchemists and prophets lurk behind every corner and sometimes sit openly in the parlor. John Warr proposed an almost Hegelian dialectic between Equity and Form that explained the historical development and justified the aims of the radical revolutionaries.
Hill's scholarship is thorough; a truly impressive congregation of primary source material takes center stage. He is also generous in giving praise to contemporary scholars whose work he finds useful. Hill is a daring writer with a penchant for synthesis. He makes many interpretive claims that have garnered criticism and likely will continue to do so. But he advances them with courage and with evidence. If he has sometimes been tackled short of the goal line, he has never failed to move the ball downfield.
I found this book absolutely electrifying. I even made several notes of aspects I would like to imitate in my own scholarly work. I recommend it to anyone interested in modern intellectual history.
This book focuses on the left wing of the left wing, those revolutionaries whom the more mainstream revolutionaries marginalized and even suppressed. Religious ideas from heterodoxy to pantheism to atheism are found. Economic ideas approaching national communism or local communitarianism were broached. Entirely new critiques of existing government and proposals of novel governmental systems were advanced. The material is a glorious mess. However, running through almost all the radical critiques are a thorough-going democratic impulse and a reliance on individual conscience, which therefore required individual liberty of conscience.
This book is a window onto many fascinating characters. One is Gerrard Winstanley, a proponent of the Diggers, a short-lived association of people who confiscated common lands for agricultural purposes in protest against the agricultural policies of the government. Winstanley leveled (a pun) criticisms of the economic order of landed gentry, but his positive proposal is even more interesting. He is one of the first to have grasped that a long-term solution to England's economic crises was to increase the area of arable land. Much like Marx, Winstanley believed that in an egalitarian society, most of the law and government would wither away. After all, isn't law just the landed class's way of perpetuating their privilege? He was a pantheist and materialist; his anti-clericalism was fueled by his (mostly correct) belief that the clergy were a professional class in a symbiotic relationship with an oppressive government. The professional classes most go: scientific, theological, and legal instruction should be available to all in a system of universal education, so that specialists will not be needed. Winstanley was a monopoly buster. And a failure.
Other fascinating characters pepper the pages. Thomas Nayler was a revolutionary Quaker who entered London riding on a donkey; his rejection and brutal flogging pushed the Quakers to try pacifism instead of revolution. Alchemists and prophets lurk behind every corner and sometimes sit openly in the parlor. John Warr proposed an almost Hegelian dialectic between Equity and Form that explained the historical development and justified the aims of the radical revolutionaries.
Hill's scholarship is thorough; a truly impressive congregation of primary source material takes center stage. He is also generous in giving praise to contemporary scholars whose work he finds useful. Hill is a daring writer with a penchant for synthesis. He makes many interpretive claims that have garnered criticism and likely will continue to do so. But he advances them with courage and with evidence. If he has sometimes been tackled short of the goal line, he has never failed to move the ball downfield.
I found this book absolutely electrifying. I even made several notes of aspects I would like to imitate in my own scholarly work. I recommend it to anyone interested in modern intellectual history.
January 31, 2018
Much of “The World Turned Upside Down” is not for the general reader. It is aimed at professional historians of 17th century England and advanced students so it is full of references to historians active 45 to 50 years ago when Hill was writing his book, because he disagreed with both the top down view of history then prevalent and schools of thought that dismissed the ideas of religious radicals during the period as unhinged harangues of dissidents to the established church. That said there is a lot of profound content for unlearned and unlettered (like myself). While it would increase one’s understanding of this work, it isn’t necessary to know, for example, the various conflicts within English Protestantism or the politics of the gentry vs. the nobility.
1620 to 1660 and especially the last decade of that period were among the worst in England's economic history with failing harvests and scarcity of goods throughout the island. This prompted more enclosures of formerly common land, driving peasants off the land onto the roads and into forests to live rough; some became highwaymen, footpads or robbers while others survived by collecting firewood, hunting or fishing, braving the law's wrath (and the hangman's noose) as poachers. Many of the recruits into both the radical religious sects like the Levelers or the Ranters, as well as those who joined the Parliamentary army came from these dispossessed tillers of the soil.
The collapse in censorship meant that anyone could preach the gospel and many of the chaplains of the New Model Army also preached to civilians. These sermons included calls for turning landowners into peasants by confiscating their estates, reversing the movement among some of the great landlords to enclose forests and pastures formerly held for the common use and even early forms of socialized land tenure. Some of the more radical campaigned for toleration of Jews since all men were born equal in the sight of God.
Trends of thought which caused people to question traditional dogmas about original sin, hell and damnation led to discussion among the lower classes about the social functions of sin and how wicked politicians had invented sin or that it was the result of a competitive society. Accepted social categories and hierarchies were upset in the next world—heaven, hell, saints and angels—and also in this one. But, according to Hill, with no real political and social revolution possible what developed was a materialism that was subject only to cyclical change, a philosophy of despair and turning inward.
That the potentially upside down world was restored to its rightful balance in 1660 was shown by the Convention Parliament of that year. It was not summoned by the king—it summoned him; bishops and lords were returned and radicals were purged from the government. “Tumultuous petitioning” (one of the main methods of organizing dissent before the restoration of the monarchy) was made illegal “for alteration of matters established by church or state” unless the petition was approved by the local power structure, once again run by the landowning gentry.
Hill was a Marxist historian and he made the point that England wasn’t ready for revolution no matter how unstable the property owning class seemed nor how many masterless men took over Crown lands. The Industrial Revolution, Darwin and Marx himself were far in the future but the radical basis for social transformation had occurred. Hill made sure that it would no longer be ignored by English historians.
1620 to 1660 and especially the last decade of that period were among the worst in England's economic history with failing harvests and scarcity of goods throughout the island. This prompted more enclosures of formerly common land, driving peasants off the land onto the roads and into forests to live rough; some became highwaymen, footpads or robbers while others survived by collecting firewood, hunting or fishing, braving the law's wrath (and the hangman's noose) as poachers. Many of the recruits into both the radical religious sects like the Levelers or the Ranters, as well as those who joined the Parliamentary army came from these dispossessed tillers of the soil.
The collapse in censorship meant that anyone could preach the gospel and many of the chaplains of the New Model Army also preached to civilians. These sermons included calls for turning landowners into peasants by confiscating their estates, reversing the movement among some of the great landlords to enclose forests and pastures formerly held for the common use and even early forms of socialized land tenure. Some of the more radical campaigned for toleration of Jews since all men were born equal in the sight of God.
Trends of thought which caused people to question traditional dogmas about original sin, hell and damnation led to discussion among the lower classes about the social functions of sin and how wicked politicians had invented sin or that it was the result of a competitive society. Accepted social categories and hierarchies were upset in the next world—heaven, hell, saints and angels—and also in this one. But, according to Hill, with no real political and social revolution possible what developed was a materialism that was subject only to cyclical change, a philosophy of despair and turning inward.
That the potentially upside down world was restored to its rightful balance in 1660 was shown by the Convention Parliament of that year. It was not summoned by the king—it summoned him; bishops and lords were returned and radicals were purged from the government. “Tumultuous petitioning” (one of the main methods of organizing dissent before the restoration of the monarchy) was made illegal “for alteration of matters established by church or state” unless the petition was approved by the local power structure, once again run by the landowning gentry.
Hill was a Marxist historian and he made the point that England wasn’t ready for revolution no matter how unstable the property owning class seemed nor how many masterless men took over Crown lands. The Industrial Revolution, Darwin and Marx himself were far in the future but the radical basis for social transformation had occurred. Hill made sure that it would no longer be ignored by English historians.
August 2, 2021
The middle decades of the 1600s saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain. It can and should be called The English Revolution. However, this book doesn't rehash how the New Model Army of the Long Parliament overcame the forces of King Charles I, executed the king and established a short-lived republic though in the end, the consequences of the Revolution were all to the advantage of the gentry and ruling classes.
What this book concentrates on are the attempts of various groups of the 'common people' to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to their so-called 'betters' who had called them into political action at the start of the 1640s. This revolt within The Revolution took many forms. Levellers, Diggers, and Fifth Monarchists offered new political solutions. The Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley offered new economic solutions. Baptists, Quakers, and Muggletonians offered new religious solutions. Others asked awkward questions about the institutions of the times and the beliefs of the time - Seekers, Ranters, and the Diggers again. All these groups and sects are dealt with in this amazing book about an incredible time, and left me with the feeling of a massive opportunity lost. The crucial turning was the defeat of the Leveller regiments at Burford in 1649 and perhaps the death of Henry Ireton in 1651. Ireton would have been a worthy successor to Oliver Cromwell.
This book will lead me to find out more about The Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley and who knows where that will lead. For me this is what marks a great book, it's the start of a journey with no known destination.
What this book concentrates on are the attempts of various groups of the 'common people' to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to their so-called 'betters' who had called them into political action at the start of the 1640s. This revolt within The Revolution took many forms. Levellers, Diggers, and Fifth Monarchists offered new political solutions. The Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley offered new economic solutions. Baptists, Quakers, and Muggletonians offered new religious solutions. Others asked awkward questions about the institutions of the times and the beliefs of the time - Seekers, Ranters, and the Diggers again. All these groups and sects are dealt with in this amazing book about an incredible time, and left me with the feeling of a massive opportunity lost. The crucial turning was the defeat of the Leveller regiments at Burford in 1649 and perhaps the death of Henry Ireton in 1651. Ireton would have been a worthy successor to Oliver Cromwell.
This book will lead me to find out more about The Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley and who knows where that will lead. For me this is what marks a great book, it's the start of a journey with no known destination.
April 8, 2014
One of the seminal works of the 'British Marxist Historians'. Does what it says on the tin: a history of radical religious thought and debates during the English Revolutionary (1640-60) period. Exemplary intellectual history/sociology of ideas, linking religious and ideological change to the tumult of the Civil War and ongoing deepening of capitalist social relations in 17th century England. Hill surveys the various Protestant sects, their social make-up and beliefs, parallel political movements (Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists), scientific debates, political theory, and literature of the period. Some aspects of Hill's macro historical narrative (e.g. bourgeois revolution thesis) have been challenged by later empirical scholarship, but the fundamental historical-materialist approach to the history of ideas and the debates of the Reformation remains insightful.
July 14, 2007
Kind of surprised by the number of low ratings. This is a terrific introduction to Hill, readable as a novel, and pretty much a landmark book Marxist and 17th Century studies. It's an accessible introduction to Hill's writings on the period which have been so influential in reconsidering an intriguing period of not just English but human history. By giving serious consideration to groups casually dismissed as madmen and criminals (when they were mentioned at all), and tracking their influence and the congruity of thought with more mainstream movements in 17th century England as well as modern social movements, the book contextualizes forgotten pioneers of modern nonconformity.
May 11, 2021
A fascinating book filled with numerous intrinsic details of the English Revolution period that would prove extremely useful to historians or sociologists studying that era. I particularly enjoyed discovering how the Protestant people of England played with the idea of a religion without clergy, a religion in which each man and woman is his or her own parson, and can preach and give counsel according to his or her judgment, his only judge being God. This notion of a direct link between the devout follower and God is perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the English Revolution, and proves how these times were times in which rational thought and conception made leaps and bounds.
August 26, 2019
Read parts of it in college for a paper on Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, but this was my first time completely through.
This time around I got the pleasure of having several people ask me if it had anything to do with Hamilton. Hill already gets cribbed from without citation often enough (This Michael Harrington speech is a great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv3Gw...) that I responded at first with my nose up about how singular and groundbreaking Hill's work was. It turns out, as Hill's own epigraphs at his chapter heads indicate, there's an incredibly long and complicated history of people's playing with the phrase "the world turned upside down" or with the idea of those who would turn the world upside down. There's even a footnote relatively early in the book in which Hill cites a book published just 2 years before his own called "The World Upside-Down" and expresses regret that "I did not read this interesting book before writing my own".
It is always pretty shocking to read about millenarianism before our time. After all, there is an enormous amount of millenarianism in left politics today, mostly in terms of climate collapse. It was helpful to read Hill's reminders that the conviction that Jesus was going to return within a generation was an extremely common one across most religious/political divides in the early half of the seventeenth century right before reading the Andrea Dworkin anthology I'll post about next, in which she refers several times to nuclear apocalypse as the logical endpoint of male domination. Does the end of the world motivate radicals in every generation? Are they all wrong? Does the British empire always come in to fill the seat left open for the messiah? Was nuclear winter a more optimistic hope when we were obviously hurtling toward the unipolar world?
I think in the end Hill's Marxist orthodoxy provided boundaries for the powers of imagination his encounters with these seventeenth-century radicals clearly unleashed. He'll spend a whole chapter describing common people throwing out the doctrines of heaven and hell entirely, saying that the bible is as much an idol as the body of Christ, that scripture is everything from a living gospel in the saints to a boring myth written for social control, and then he'll end the chapter inexplicably by saying that this society wasn't scientifically advanced for atheism to have any revolutionary potential. Literally just because they didn't have an understanding of evolution, these fringe radicals and lower-class dissidents were rushing ahead of the range of progress their scientific knowledge allowed them. It doesn't fit for me, and it reads like Hill's ideology steps in at the last moment to tell him that he can't have seen what he has seen, that these were just mirages all along, and as similar as Winstanley might sound to Engels or Kropotkin, there's no way the Ranters' brand of materialism could've ever led to socialism. In other areas, he makes very convincing arguments that the Diggers, had they not been stamped out by force, had a model that could've brought just as much power of production to England as capitalism soon did, if not even more.
More than anything, I think this book has given me a good shot of Christian pessimism. I don't know if the world will end, but it does seem worse than ever. What else makes sense except that we're living in the third age? We must be in a fallen state of nature. Even Hill's passage about how the one-to-one personal relationship to God used to have a collective nature points to how much we've lost now that we live in a society where that kind of theology can only lead to greater competition:
"Acceptance of interpretations of the Bible by a congregation guarantees their relevance for a given group, is a check against mere anarchic individualism. Today, in our atomized society, the appeal to the individual conscience, to the integrity of the isolated artist, is ultimately anarchistic, the extreme of illusory withdrawal from society. But in the seventeenth century the inner light was a bond of unity because God *did* in fact say similar things to the mechanics who formed his congregations."
Hill obviously belonged to a certain school of socialism, and I take what he says about anarchy with a grain of salt, but who could argue with him that the era when a bunch of tinkerers could sit around a meeting house and end up saying things like, "This is what I believe", "That's so funny, I believe that, too" is over, and that this kind of God-in-you ideology can today only lead to the Protestant ethic, to isolation, to socialism in one person, which is, as Stew Albert says, capitalism?
This time around I got the pleasure of having several people ask me if it had anything to do with Hamilton. Hill already gets cribbed from without citation often enough (This Michael Harrington speech is a great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv3Gw...) that I responded at first with my nose up about how singular and groundbreaking Hill's work was. It turns out, as Hill's own epigraphs at his chapter heads indicate, there's an incredibly long and complicated history of people's playing with the phrase "the world turned upside down" or with the idea of those who would turn the world upside down. There's even a footnote relatively early in the book in which Hill cites a book published just 2 years before his own called "The World Upside-Down" and expresses regret that "I did not read this interesting book before writing my own".
It is always pretty shocking to read about millenarianism before our time. After all, there is an enormous amount of millenarianism in left politics today, mostly in terms of climate collapse. It was helpful to read Hill's reminders that the conviction that Jesus was going to return within a generation was an extremely common one across most religious/political divides in the early half of the seventeenth century right before reading the Andrea Dworkin anthology I'll post about next, in which she refers several times to nuclear apocalypse as the logical endpoint of male domination. Does the end of the world motivate radicals in every generation? Are they all wrong? Does the British empire always come in to fill the seat left open for the messiah? Was nuclear winter a more optimistic hope when we were obviously hurtling toward the unipolar world?
I think in the end Hill's Marxist orthodoxy provided boundaries for the powers of imagination his encounters with these seventeenth-century radicals clearly unleashed. He'll spend a whole chapter describing common people throwing out the doctrines of heaven and hell entirely, saying that the bible is as much an idol as the body of Christ, that scripture is everything from a living gospel in the saints to a boring myth written for social control, and then he'll end the chapter inexplicably by saying that this society wasn't scientifically advanced for atheism to have any revolutionary potential. Literally just because they didn't have an understanding of evolution, these fringe radicals and lower-class dissidents were rushing ahead of the range of progress their scientific knowledge allowed them. It doesn't fit for me, and it reads like Hill's ideology steps in at the last moment to tell him that he can't have seen what he has seen, that these were just mirages all along, and as similar as Winstanley might sound to Engels or Kropotkin, there's no way the Ranters' brand of materialism could've ever led to socialism. In other areas, he makes very convincing arguments that the Diggers, had they not been stamped out by force, had a model that could've brought just as much power of production to England as capitalism soon did, if not even more.
More than anything, I think this book has given me a good shot of Christian pessimism. I don't know if the world will end, but it does seem worse than ever. What else makes sense except that we're living in the third age? We must be in a fallen state of nature. Even Hill's passage about how the one-to-one personal relationship to God used to have a collective nature points to how much we've lost now that we live in a society where that kind of theology can only lead to greater competition:
"Acceptance of interpretations of the Bible by a congregation guarantees their relevance for a given group, is a check against mere anarchic individualism. Today, in our atomized society, the appeal to the individual conscience, to the integrity of the isolated artist, is ultimately anarchistic, the extreme of illusory withdrawal from society. But in the seventeenth century the inner light was a bond of unity because God *did* in fact say similar things to the mechanics who formed his congregations."
Hill obviously belonged to a certain school of socialism, and I take what he says about anarchy with a grain of salt, but who could argue with him that the era when a bunch of tinkerers could sit around a meeting house and end up saying things like, "This is what I believe", "That's so funny, I believe that, too" is over, and that this kind of God-in-you ideology can today only lead to the Protestant ethic, to isolation, to socialism in one person, which is, as Stew Albert says, capitalism?
Read
June 21, 2022Fascinating account of the radical movements that came about during the mid-17 century in England. With the breakdown of censorship and unprecedented movement of people between regions, classes, religions, and allegiances, truly radical ideas developed. While the Levellers are often singled out as the radicals on the parliamentarian side, they are in fact milquetoast in comparison with other minority radical groups, from Diggers, Ranters, Seekers, Quakers, Muggletonians, Grindletonians, Fifth Monarchists, and the like. These groups in of themselves had no consistent beliefs, differing in eschatology, nature of Christ, economic philosophy, sexual ethics, pantheistic instincts, the reality of sin, etc in ways that are sometimes radical even by our standards. Some movements, like the Ranters, took the Calvinist idea of free grace to its extreme end, stating that no actions were sinful for true Christians. Interestingly, even pseudo-Atheist/Deist/Pantheist (it gets murky) groups still couched their philosophies in Biblical language, or at the very least using Christian jargon. Such radical groups also seem to have been prevalent among the lowest, itinerant classes as they experienced coerced transition into proto-capitalist society and the social disruptions of agricultural improvement.
These ideas are also presented as a challenge to the emerging protestant ethic which was replacing the aristocratic worldview during the Civil War. Insofar as the protestant ethic represents the triumph of the Puritan middle class, Hill envisions a competing ecosystem of radical ideas that attempted to strike at the very root of both aristocratic and middle class legitimacy. This also led to the sometimes baffling alliance between aristocrats and low-class radicals in an effort to cut down the growing stranglehold of the protestant middle class. They of course were unsuccessful, with this Protestant/Calvinist class and ideology ushering in the Glorious revolution, setting the stage of modern capitalism, rationalism, efficiency, and imperialism that characterized the British 18th and 19th centuries.
Hill is obviously partial towards the Diggers and their intellectual leader, Gerarrd Winstanley, given his Marxist origins and the Diggers' proto-communist roots. Although many of these groups were later folded into the increasingly more respectable and interior-centered Quaker movement, Hill tries to tie the influence of these radical ideas to later post-Restoration literature and philosophy, including Milton and Bunyan, but I am not familiar enough with these to comment on whether he does so convincingly. Although this book was not the most well structured, the anecdotes and examples were absolutely fascinating and shed light on a time of true social chaos, revolutionary zeal, and unrestrained radical ideas that were far ahead of their time.
These ideas are also presented as a challenge to the emerging protestant ethic which was replacing the aristocratic worldview during the Civil War. Insofar as the protestant ethic represents the triumph of the Puritan middle class, Hill envisions a competing ecosystem of radical ideas that attempted to strike at the very root of both aristocratic and middle class legitimacy. This also led to the sometimes baffling alliance between aristocrats and low-class radicals in an effort to cut down the growing stranglehold of the protestant middle class. They of course were unsuccessful, with this Protestant/Calvinist class and ideology ushering in the Glorious revolution, setting the stage of modern capitalism, rationalism, efficiency, and imperialism that characterized the British 18th and 19th centuries.
Hill is obviously partial towards the Diggers and their intellectual leader, Gerarrd Winstanley, given his Marxist origins and the Diggers' proto-communist roots. Although many of these groups were later folded into the increasingly more respectable and interior-centered Quaker movement, Hill tries to tie the influence of these radical ideas to later post-Restoration literature and philosophy, including Milton and Bunyan, but I am not familiar enough with these to comment on whether he does so convincingly. Although this book was not the most well structured, the anecdotes and examples were absolutely fascinating and shed light on a time of true social chaos, revolutionary zeal, and unrestrained radical ideas that were far ahead of their time.
May 16, 2021
An area of history that I had never delved into, but am increasingly under the impression that the 1640s and 50s are perhaps the most important decades of the last millennium in the formation of Britain. While I don’t share his Marxist school of history lens, I was convinced that the energy and chaos of the decades was indeed an attempt to turn the world upside and other than for a brief period, was almost totally snuffed out. A fascinating view of the origins of Quakerism, communitarianism and the sociological implications of the Reformation. Criticisms would be how Hill’s own view of history was overt throughout, and that it relied on a lot of presumed knowledge, which I certainly didn’t have.
March 20, 2024
All men, once brothers in Christ, must meet each other as strangers in the new marketplaces of English towns and cities. Hill’s masterful work plots the emergence and decline of religious dissenters during England’s, I would argue, formative years of the 1640s-50s. As the new-birthed capitalism reshaped how people interacted and lived with each other, so did it reshape how they interacted with their God; the old iron-clad hierarchies of feudal state and church could be called into question.
Questions of righteous law and a godly king were all over the place in this period. However, the most important and cutting questions were asked by Gerard Winstanley and the ‘Diggers’. Whilst the Levellers et al. were lit by religious fervour in changing the constitution of the kingdom, they were all too content to enshrine property laws in a way recognisable to us today, in Winstanley one sees something different. Winstanley and the Diggers saw that what stood in the way of man’s return to Eden and a bringing about of justice and peace on earth was property itself; in this we see a lucid articulation of class conflict that predates Marx by 200 years!
I’ve gone on a bit of a rant there but PLEASE READ THIS
Questions of righteous law and a godly king were all over the place in this period. However, the most important and cutting questions were asked by Gerard Winstanley and the ‘Diggers’. Whilst the Levellers et al. were lit by religious fervour in changing the constitution of the kingdom, they were all too content to enshrine property laws in a way recognisable to us today, in Winstanley one sees something different. Winstanley and the Diggers saw that what stood in the way of man’s return to Eden and a bringing about of justice and peace on earth was property itself; in this we see a lucid articulation of class conflict that predates Marx by 200 years!
I’ve gone on a bit of a rant there but PLEASE READ THIS
May 1, 2022
Interesting read about the radical ideas that emerged in revolutionary England, when an atmosphere of cataclysmic political upheaval encouraged people to dream of turning the world upside down.
Hill shows that most of the radical groups that emerged were primarily inspired by Christianity - the book mainly covers a litany of short-lived, non-conformist religious sects - and drew on the Bible to make the case for political democracy or, in the case of the proto-socialist Diggers, for turning the English land into a 'common treasury for all'.
Also, Alchemy.
Hill shows that most of the radical groups that emerged were primarily inspired by Christianity - the book mainly covers a litany of short-lived, non-conformist religious sects - and drew on the Bible to make the case for political democracy or, in the case of the proto-socialist Diggers, for turning the English land into a 'common treasury for all'.
Also, Alchemy.
August 6, 2022
I've been reading this one on and off over the past two years. This is definitely a must read for anyone interested in the seventeenth century and the English Civil Wars beyond the grand narrative of the events. Hill gives great attention to the smaller radical groups during the revolutionary decades. I found the chapters about the Diggers and the Ranters to be the most compelling as they are unfortunately some of the forgotten groups of history. As ever, Hill's writing style is on point and, despite being academic, is incredibly accessible and readable.
April 19, 2019
Given some of the crazy stuff that went on during the English Revolution and the Interregnum, you can understand why so many were content with the Restoration of 1660.
February 27, 2024
the good part of this book is that is does have some genuinely interesting information about the various radical sects during the english revolution. the stuff on the diggers and gerrard winstanley is particularly interesting, portraying winstanley as very much a proto communist who even seems to have developed a kind of christian materialism.the not so good part of the book is that it mostly assumes that you already know what happened in the english revolution and who the various important people and groups are, and it jumps around a lot without really centring itself in the events very much.
April 26, 2021
So true bestie <3 The earth SHOULD be a common treasury for all
September 8, 2021
Düşüncelere katılırsınız veya katılmazsınız, ancak bunların özgürce dile getirilmesi ve tartışılması önemlidir. 1600’lü yıllarda, İngiliz devrimi sırasında, konuşulan, tartışılan konular gerçekten etkileyici. O dönemde bu konuları dile getiren, tartışan bir toplumun, düşünce yapısının, bugün dünyanın en ileri toplumu olması ve dünyaya şekil verebilmesi hiç de şaşırtıcı değil. Okuması kolay değil, tekrar tekrar okumak zorunda kalabiliyorsunuz bazı cümleleri.
July 15, 2008
Very enlightening read on a moment of the Enlightenment that doesn't always get the attention it deserves -- radical movements during the English revolution. It's not the best introduction to the period (unless you don't mind wiki-ing every other name) but it's vital material for anyone interested in social movements. And who isn't these days?
The basic idea is, amidst the more well-known events of the period: the Parliamentarians vs. the Royalist supporters of King Charles I, the latter's execution, Cromwell's interregnum, the collapse of the revolution and the restoration of kingly power, up to the Glorious revolution of 1688 -- there were a number of 'Dissenting' Christian sects, with unorthodox, anti-clerical, and sometimes radical social theories, all opposing state control of religion.
These groups functioned the way activist groups do today, and even pioneered some of their tactics, such as petitioning, pamphleteering, the formation of intentional communities, etc. The book pays the most attention to the Levellers -- sort of like social democrats, supporting equality before the law, Diggers -- 'Christian communists' who opposed private property (equality of land ownership), and the Ranters -- hippies, more or less. Gerrard Winstanley is evidently Christopher Hill's favorite person (with good reason, evidently) and there are several wonderful quotes from him:
"The poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man...True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth...If the common people have no more freedom in England but only to live among their elder brothers and work for them for hire, what freedom then have they in England more than we can have in Turkey or France?" (133)
Just as these sects are made to feel surprisingly contemporary in Hill's hands, many of the challenges they had to deal with -- how free is too free, how much discipline is necessary, how to balance radical conviction with pragmatism, how to maintain hope in spite of defeat -- are the same faced by any small group of determined individuals dedicated to opposing the Evil Empire of today.
As one can guess, 'moderate' middle-class protestantism won out in the end, the most radical dissenters made their peace with the status quo or disappeared into history -- and "Milton's nation of prophets became a nation of shopkeepers" (379). But just as obviously, their ideas have continued long after their actual efforts became impractical.
The basic idea is, amidst the more well-known events of the period: the Parliamentarians vs. the Royalist supporters of King Charles I, the latter's execution, Cromwell's interregnum, the collapse of the revolution and the restoration of kingly power, up to the Glorious revolution of 1688 -- there were a number of 'Dissenting' Christian sects, with unorthodox, anti-clerical, and sometimes radical social theories, all opposing state control of religion.
These groups functioned the way activist groups do today, and even pioneered some of their tactics, such as petitioning, pamphleteering, the formation of intentional communities, etc. The book pays the most attention to the Levellers -- sort of like social democrats, supporting equality before the law, Diggers -- 'Christian communists' who opposed private property (equality of land ownership), and the Ranters -- hippies, more or less. Gerrard Winstanley is evidently Christopher Hill's favorite person (with good reason, evidently) and there are several wonderful quotes from him:
"The poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man...True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth...If the common people have no more freedom in England but only to live among their elder brothers and work for them for hire, what freedom then have they in England more than we can have in Turkey or France?" (133)
Just as these sects are made to feel surprisingly contemporary in Hill's hands, many of the challenges they had to deal with -- how free is too free, how much discipline is necessary, how to balance radical conviction with pragmatism, how to maintain hope in spite of defeat -- are the same faced by any small group of determined individuals dedicated to opposing the Evil Empire of today.
As one can guess, 'moderate' middle-class protestantism won out in the end, the most radical dissenters made their peace with the status quo or disappeared into history -- and "Milton's nation of prophets became a nation of shopkeepers" (379). But just as obviously, their ideas have continued long after their actual efforts became impractical.
February 25, 2016
As a Friend myself and a bit of a history geek, I’ve read plenty about early Quakerism but mostly by other Quakers. I’ve been looking forward to reading this book to read about the birth of Quakerism by a non-Friend for sometime. Quakers were a part of a wide and varied radical landscape in Britain, and were influenced by many of these groups.
Not a history of the English Civil War, but a study of the radical groups that, finding themselves suddenly free of censorship and the iron authority of the king, propagate their ideas in print with an astonishing voracity. Hill’s research and footnotes are extensive (if occasionally a bit stuffy for the casual reader). Anyone on this side of the pond will do well to have a map of 17th century Britain and an index of English biographical sketches atlas of English movers and shakers. I certainly found both useful.
The radical religious groups able to explore religion for themselves for the first time found themselves challenging authority, time-honored English traditions like land ownership and primogeniture, and the power structure. Diggers, Muggletonians, Levellers, and Ranters were all vocal and many of their ideas and practices were subsumed into the early Quaker movement. Numerous peculiarities that made Friends a “peculiar people” like hat honor, plain language, as well as theological anomalies began within these other groups and were adopted by Friends.
And, while George Fox is most often listed as the founder of the sect, several others stand in that spot with him. “Fox���s achievement was to form a disciplined sect, with a preaching ministry, our of a rabble of ex-Ranters and others new to the idea of thinking for themselves about religion.” (p 373)
Not a history of the English Civil War, but a study of the radical groups that, finding themselves suddenly free of censorship and the iron authority of the king, propagate their ideas in print with an astonishing voracity. Hill’s research and footnotes are extensive (if occasionally a bit stuffy for the casual reader). Anyone on this side of the pond will do well to have a map of 17th century Britain and an index of English biographical sketches atlas of English movers and shakers. I certainly found both useful.
The radical religious groups able to explore religion for themselves for the first time found themselves challenging authority, time-honored English traditions like land ownership and primogeniture, and the power structure. Diggers, Muggletonians, Levellers, and Ranters were all vocal and many of their ideas and practices were subsumed into the early Quaker movement. Numerous peculiarities that made Friends a “peculiar people” like hat honor, plain language, as well as theological anomalies began within these other groups and were adopted by Friends.
And, while George Fox is most often listed as the founder of the sect, several others stand in that spot with him. “Fox���s achievement was to form a disciplined sect, with a preaching ministry, our of a rabble of ex-Ranters and others new to the idea of thinking for themselves about religion.” (p 373)
November 29, 2023
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin Books, 1975.
From the outset, Hill identifies revolt as essential to English society for many centuries prior to the English commonwealth, or, in his terms, the English revolution. In examining the radical ideas of the English revolution, Hill cites Elizabethan Brownists as well as Newton and makes frequent (though consciously forward-looking) references to Blake—all of which fall outside of the Commonwealth or Interregnum period. The World Turned Upside Down is semi-chronological, organized around topic or group: Masterless Men, the North and West, Sin and Hell, Seekers and Ranters, to name a few. This rejection of limiting material to a period based on King or Parliament, focuses The World Turned Upside Down even more intensely on lower class radicals and the development and influence of their ideas.
As Hill himself notes in the conclusion, this is not a book of grand gestures; the Diggers’ attempted cultivation of St. George’s Hill near Kingston, West of London, and Northern Quaker Nayler’s ordeal is treated sparingly. Even London is not given centerstage. Rather, a host of religious-political dissenters populate Hill’s pages: leaders given the devotion of a subheading in a chapter, some mentioned once, many nameless. Hill examines the itinerant lower classes—the vagabonds, the tradesmen, the musicians—who remained on the margins of or outside traditionally organized religious-political life and who, therefore, were susceptible to and spread radical ideas. Especially insightful was Hill’s discussion of the forests, heaths, and fens as places of radicalism for a similar disconnection from the formational power of parish life. The spreading radical idea of “inner light” that speaks to each individual prompted a breakdown of authority—that of the clergy, land owners, royalty, even of the Bible itself. Radicals wanted to democratize and communalize, all property and heaven included.
Hill argues that there are two revolutions of the mid-1600s in England: that which happened and that which didn’t happen, but could have. The revolution that might have been is that outlined above, a revolution of leveling government and legal authority, digging and cultivating of land communally, rejecting state religion, and equalizing and freeing relationships between men and women. This almost-revolution’s embrace of irrationality and idleness and their distaste for hierarchy crumbled before the Puritan ethic’s organization, emphasis on reason, and sanctification of property that spurs on labor. This was the revolution that did succeed. To base a thesis on, not what did happen, but what might have happened, not only requires historical imagination—to place oneself in the historical moment and realize outcomes are not guaranteed—but also a framework of interpretation that invites an answer for what might have been. For Hill this is Marxist historiography. For Hill, the radicals of this period were ahead of their time—specifically their ideas were ahead of their technical advances. He compares these radicals to the Lollards of the 15th century: their ideas survived and would be expressed more fully in later centuries. Hill identifies the English industrial revolution as the full-flowering of these ideas.
Indeed, this identification of proto-Romanticism was especially beneficial in highlighting the continuity between periods of English history. In my experience, the period of Locke and Hobbes is contrasted with that of Blake and other Romantics. Emphasis on organization, reason, and principle seem non-precedents for the following period’s fascination with naturalness, simplicity, and the irrational. These ideas were not a purely negative and reactionary tendency. Hill’s discussion of the “inner light” and “Christ in all” that gives authority to even (and especially) the most lowly from the rural north anticipates the wisdom of the rustic peasant present in Romantic poetry, the uneducated prophet, even the veneration of the sublime in dramatic northern landscape. Hill’s “Isle of Great Bedlam” as a monicker for Great Britain precedents the Romantic motif of madness; Newton’s description as the last scientist-magician and gravity as the last accepted magical force links the Age of Reason to the Romantic exploration of magic; the Ranter sexual revolution puts Oscar Wilde’s escapades into a new and older context. Hill repeatedly likens the words of radical preachers to those of Blake.
While the content of The World Turned Upside Down rightly focuses on radicals, I am left without a sense of the extent of this radicalism in England: are these sects truly a radical fringe or do they form the warp and woof of English society? Especially in Hill’s chapter on Sin and Hell, a brief description of the religious standard of the period would be helpful in understanding the radical deviation. Hill rightly asserts that the larger-than-life symbolic gestures in histories of his period would be meaningless without a sense of the broader and more pervasive changes in ideas. He further says that we might otherwise pass over these changes if we are too immersed in the details. Nevertheless, in this book, I found myself lost in the barrage of sects, figures, and ideas. Hill has certainly succeeded in offering his readers a sense of these changes, but clear identification of the key ideas of various sects are few and far between. I would often find myself unsure of the identity of a radical used as an example without explanation to find that his subsection was yet forthcoming in the following chapter. The same occurred with many of the sects. Because of this, since Hill’s chronology is loose, and since Hill does a good deal of relating his audience’s own historical moment of the 1970s to his period rather than building from ideas of preceding periods, the reader may find a retrograde chronology or at least a consideration of Hill’s conclusion and key ideas at the outset to be beneficial. It is only at the conclusion that Hill defines what he means by “The World Turned Upside Down,” after quoting this phrase throughout his book: evidence of an assumption concerning the ordering of the world that radicals of the 17th century imagined might be wrong.
Rachel Huchthausen
From the outset, Hill identifies revolt as essential to English society for many centuries prior to the English commonwealth, or, in his terms, the English revolution. In examining the radical ideas of the English revolution, Hill cites Elizabethan Brownists as well as Newton and makes frequent (though consciously forward-looking) references to Blake—all of which fall outside of the Commonwealth or Interregnum period. The World Turned Upside Down is semi-chronological, organized around topic or group: Masterless Men, the North and West, Sin and Hell, Seekers and Ranters, to name a few. This rejection of limiting material to a period based on King or Parliament, focuses The World Turned Upside Down even more intensely on lower class radicals and the development and influence of their ideas.
As Hill himself notes in the conclusion, this is not a book of grand gestures; the Diggers’ attempted cultivation of St. George’s Hill near Kingston, West of London, and Northern Quaker Nayler’s ordeal is treated sparingly. Even London is not given centerstage. Rather, a host of religious-political dissenters populate Hill’s pages: leaders given the devotion of a subheading in a chapter, some mentioned once, many nameless. Hill examines the itinerant lower classes—the vagabonds, the tradesmen, the musicians—who remained on the margins of or outside traditionally organized religious-political life and who, therefore, were susceptible to and spread radical ideas. Especially insightful was Hill’s discussion of the forests, heaths, and fens as places of radicalism for a similar disconnection from the formational power of parish life. The spreading radical idea of “inner light” that speaks to each individual prompted a breakdown of authority—that of the clergy, land owners, royalty, even of the Bible itself. Radicals wanted to democratize and communalize, all property and heaven included.
Hill argues that there are two revolutions of the mid-1600s in England: that which happened and that which didn’t happen, but could have. The revolution that might have been is that outlined above, a revolution of leveling government and legal authority, digging and cultivating of land communally, rejecting state religion, and equalizing and freeing relationships between men and women. This almost-revolution’s embrace of irrationality and idleness and their distaste for hierarchy crumbled before the Puritan ethic’s organization, emphasis on reason, and sanctification of property that spurs on labor. This was the revolution that did succeed. To base a thesis on, not what did happen, but what might have happened, not only requires historical imagination—to place oneself in the historical moment and realize outcomes are not guaranteed—but also a framework of interpretation that invites an answer for what might have been. For Hill this is Marxist historiography. For Hill, the radicals of this period were ahead of their time—specifically their ideas were ahead of their technical advances. He compares these radicals to the Lollards of the 15th century: their ideas survived and would be expressed more fully in later centuries. Hill identifies the English industrial revolution as the full-flowering of these ideas.
Indeed, this identification of proto-Romanticism was especially beneficial in highlighting the continuity between periods of English history. In my experience, the period of Locke and Hobbes is contrasted with that of Blake and other Romantics. Emphasis on organization, reason, and principle seem non-precedents for the following period’s fascination with naturalness, simplicity, and the irrational. These ideas were not a purely negative and reactionary tendency. Hill’s discussion of the “inner light” and “Christ in all” that gives authority to even (and especially) the most lowly from the rural north anticipates the wisdom of the rustic peasant present in Romantic poetry, the uneducated prophet, even the veneration of the sublime in dramatic northern landscape. Hill’s “Isle of Great Bedlam” as a monicker for Great Britain precedents the Romantic motif of madness; Newton’s description as the last scientist-magician and gravity as the last accepted magical force links the Age of Reason to the Romantic exploration of magic; the Ranter sexual revolution puts Oscar Wilde’s escapades into a new and older context. Hill repeatedly likens the words of radical preachers to those of Blake.
While the content of The World Turned Upside Down rightly focuses on radicals, I am left without a sense of the extent of this radicalism in England: are these sects truly a radical fringe or do they form the warp and woof of English society? Especially in Hill’s chapter on Sin and Hell, a brief description of the religious standard of the period would be helpful in understanding the radical deviation. Hill rightly asserts that the larger-than-life symbolic gestures in histories of his period would be meaningless without a sense of the broader and more pervasive changes in ideas. He further says that we might otherwise pass over these changes if we are too immersed in the details. Nevertheless, in this book, I found myself lost in the barrage of sects, figures, and ideas. Hill has certainly succeeded in offering his readers a sense of these changes, but clear identification of the key ideas of various sects are few and far between. I would often find myself unsure of the identity of a radical used as an example without explanation to find that his subsection was yet forthcoming in the following chapter. The same occurred with many of the sects. Because of this, since Hill’s chronology is loose, and since Hill does a good deal of relating his audience’s own historical moment of the 1970s to his period rather than building from ideas of preceding periods, the reader may find a retrograde chronology or at least a consideration of Hill’s conclusion and key ideas at the outset to be beneficial. It is only at the conclusion that Hill defines what he means by “The World Turned Upside Down,” after quoting this phrase throughout his book: evidence of an assumption concerning the ordering of the world that radicals of the 17th century imagined might be wrong.
Rachel Huchthausen
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