(This is a loosely edited transcript of the above
book event. This transcript was done by Christopher Thompson. I include in this
publication some comments made by Thompson.)
Houseman's Thanks everyone for joining today.
Thanks for giving up your Saturday night. We are joined today by Michael
Braddock, who is the author of a new biography of Christopher Hill, which is
out now from Verso. Braddick has written many books before, including a
biography of John Lilburn, Common Freedom of the People. God's fury, England's
fire. Most recently, a useful history of Britain, the Politics of Getting Things
Done. What drove his work? What motivated? And also, I suppose, what motivated
you to write his biography? Thanks.
Braddick: Can I just say thanks so much to you for your interest in Hill and
for giving up your Saturday night to come and hear about him? So Chris Hill was
born in 1912 in York, son of a very prosperous solicitor, and brought up a
believing and devout Methodist with the extreme principled view that you should
have serious thoughts about the world, and you should act on them to make the
world a better place. And that was one of his first important intellectual
inheritances, I think, because he lost his faith in the thirties, but he
retained that seriousness about living an examined life, leading a life that
was serious about how the world could be better and trying to act on that.
Although he did spend a lot of time pondering how he could act helpfully in the
world.
He lost his faith and gained his Marxism in a process that's not very clear.
But he became a convinced Marxist while an undergraduate at Oxford, and he
graduated in 1934. Should know that. But didn't join the communist party
immediately. He had reservations about the communist party strategy.
He went to the Soviet Union between 1934-36 and came back convinced that he
should join the communist party, partly because of what he'd seen in the Soviet
Union and partly because the CBGB had changed its political strategy in a way
that made it an easier party home for him. He remained a member of the CPGB for
nearly twenty years. He left in nineteen fifty-six, fifty-seven. Prompted not
by the invasion of Hungary, but by the refusal of the party to allow free
internal discussion of the invasion of Hungary. It was he who left on the point
of inner party democracy.
And the second part of that was that he didn't think the party had allowed them
to discuss the implications of Khrushchev's secret speech, which had been made
in secret but published by the CIA quite widely. Both of which made him think
that the communists had been misled by the party, had been misinformed by the
party, and that the daily work of the party's paper had deliberately suppressed
information that was critical of the Stalinist line. So I laid it at that point
because he was an intellectual Marxist and a communist, but he was a communist
only for those twenty years. And it was a political strategy that he took up in
'36, and he dropped it in '57. And it's a distinction that isn't much honoured
in liberal commentary on Hill.
He's routinely referred to interchangeably as a communist or a Marxist, but his
membership of the party was a strategy. And understanding why he took it on and
left it is important for understanding his politics. By the time he left the
party in '57, he'd been a fellow of Oxford College. He went to Balliol in 1931
and left in 1978. Not a standard Marxist career.
He had two years in Cardiff in the late 1930s. He had four years, I think, of
military service. But he was in Balliol for his whole life. Down to '56 and
'57, he'd been doing a lot of work for the party, a lot of publication for the
party and party, for explaining Marxism, setting out what a Marxist history
might look like. And also, I'm sorry, write or I'm sorry, writing apologies for
Stalinist, Russia and Stalinist policies.
Out of the party, he then pursued a freer career, I think, an intellectually
freer career to pursue the implications of his intellectual Marxism. Having
dropped the political strategy of the CBGB, he was freer to explore the
implications of Marxism for his understanding of the world. And there, I got
very interested in the relationship between the British left and the British
past, and how, at each phase of his writing career, you can see him in dialogue
with the contemporary world, trying to understand the past for the present that
would equip us better for the future. And in the forties and fifties, that was
mainly about the state and reform of the state and political economy. In the
early sixties, it was about science and progress, how progressive ideas, but
particularly scientific ideas, could be set free.
That's a lot to unpack there, but he did think of politically progressive ideas
as scientific in the same way that an understanding of the natural world could
be scientific. So he had a view of, you know, scientific progress in the early
sixties. Sixties. In the late sixties, he was master of writing, letters to the
undergraduates to explain why they couldn't have a condom machine in the
college, while writing the world turned upside down, this glorious celebration
of personal freedom and personal liberation. So in the late sixties, he was
very interested in the possibilities of personal liberation from a Marxist
perspective.
And then in the eighties, he wrote about the experience of defeat as the shadow
of Thatcherism came to lie over the aspirations he'd been pursuing really for a
whole political career. He began to write about seventeenth-century radicals
and their experience in the Restoration. What is it like when the world turns
against you, and what do you do about your ideals, and how do you nurture them
and keep them alive for better times? So, it's an interesting life in several
ways. And there is that paradox I kind of alluded to, the difficulty of
reconciling a life as a fairly, you know, well, as a very assiduous Oxford
Tutor, undistinguishable, really, in his practice from his liberal colleagues
in Oxford.
Braddick: He behaved as an Oxford Tutor was expected to do. And then as a
master of a college, balancing and representing all the interests in a
relatively conservative institution. And doing all that while pursuing this
radical career in writing. And one final thought about life is, as I said at
the very start, he became a convinced Marxist, also carrying from his Methodism
a view that you should act on your beliefs to improve the world. And the way he
thought he could do that was by writing.
Writing was for him a way of improving the world, equipping people with a
different past to give them a different sense of the present and a different
idea about the possibilities of the future. That's what he thought he could
contribute to the improvement of society. And he wrote to the communist party
leadership, I think, in 1949, saying, I know this is a smallish backwater of
activity, but it's the one where I can make a difference. And he juxtaposed it
directly with what he'd done leafleting at the factory gate, campaigning and by-elections
and so on. But he felt that, as a posh guy with a posh Oxford accent, what he
could do for the movement was to develop a radical past on which people could
draw in thinking about the present and charting a radical future.
You've kind of mentioned that, you know, to suppose about what drew him to history
in the English past, but why, particularly, was the English Revolution? What
was it about the English Revolution that appealed to him? And how did his, you
know, how did his kind of communism and his Marxism affect how he viewed that
particular struggle, particularly in that early period? Yeah. So I think it was
taken for granted at the time, and he used the term, ironically, that England
was the top nation until the First World War.
Bradick: And the understanding that was to understand the first bourgeois
state, the state that had the first bourgeois revolution, the first industrial
revolution, the first urbanized mass society. So it wasn't a sort of little
Englander patriotism that made him concentrate on England. It was thought that
it was the first bourgeois society, and understanding how the first bourgeois
society evolved and came about and became supported by, you know, all the
structures that support a bourgeois society. You were learning something important
for the history of the whole globe. And so he spent a lot of time arguing that
the seventeenth-century crisis in England was a bourgeois revolution, and a
precursor to the better-known bourgeois revolution in France.
And that was one of his major academic concerns was to establish the view that
we should view the seventeenth-century crisis as a bourgeois revolution. Why
did he do that's one set of one kind of answer to your question, but another
one is that his departure from Methodism was associated with a strong view that
bourgeois culture was experiencing its death throes. And, if you wanted to
understand what would come next, you needed to understand the birth of
bourgeois culture. And he understood that not just as the institutions of
economy and society, but also the way that bourgeois culture shapes the family,
shapes the transmission of property, gives us, social roles that are necessary to
sustain the structures of a bourgeois life and how those bourgeois expectations
of us as individuals are ultimately really constraining. They're inventions of
the human mind, but we experience them as cages.
And he felt a deep sense of personal alienation in the 1930s. So there are
these various ways in which you wanted to understand the origins of bourgeois
alienation from ourselves, bourgeois structures, the behaviour of bourgeois
states only fifteen, twenty years after the war to end all wars were about to
pitch, obviously, on route to yet another one that would be even more
destructive and awful. And it was the madness of bourgeois civilization in the
thirties and its dissatisfactions that made him interested in the origin
interested in the origins of bourgeois society, and he thought they lay in
England in the seventeenth century. So it mustn't be a kind of narrow
patriotism. It's a real thought that, for this for that question, England was
the place to study.
That, you know, if you're looking at the kind of origins of the bourgeois
British state, British society, that's very different from what I think most
people, if they've approached Hill. They've approached the world, and the world
has turned upside down. Here's a kind of great book on, from the late sixties.
Is that right? Seventy-two.
Seventy and, you know, which looks at the kind of bubbling undercurrents of
radicalism, religious, political, social, yeah. In that revolutionary moment,
you know, the moment that kind of bourgeois England emerges, there's also this
kind of undercurrent. You know, what drew him to that? And, you know, what were
the conclusions that he drew from it? Did that change his view of the
revolution generally or of the kind of that period?
Braddick: Well, it so here's a problem for the biographer. He never said. And
when he did, I'm fairly sure that he weeded out his papers. I think I
know that he weeded out his papers and didn't want people like me, you know, poring
over them after he'd gone. So there's a difficulty in actually answering the
question, but the the reconstruction I do in the book is to say that he had
always been interested in personal liberation and alienation and his Marxism
was ultimately a humanist Marxism about how a fairer society would set us free
as individuals to flourish in ways that are healthier than are demanded by a
bourgeois society.
So I think that had been his concern from very early on, but he didn't get
around to writing it because he got sidetracked into explaining the origins of
the bourgeois revolution in England, which I think was not in retrospect
where his interest lay, but it was critical to his heart the whole architecture
of his life that there was a bourgeois revolution. And so, World Turned Upside
Down is now his most-read book, but in the eighties, probably his most
influential book. Well, no. This isn't quite true, but as influential in the
eighties was a book called The Century of Revolution, published in 1961, which
set out the case for the bourgeois revolution in the whole cultural sense. So,
I think he turned he turned to, and the world turned upside down.
And in the early seventies, he was commissioned to write that book. There are
there was an enterprising publisher behind it. But I think it allowed him to
say something that had been on his mind, really, for forty years. And another
interesting point in writing the biography rather than just the history of his
work is that in those years, that was the high point of student rebellion in
Oxford. And he was in his day job having to deal with radical figures including
Alex Callinicos who, Edward Heath visited the college, and Callinicos and Simon
Sedgwick Gell were now allowed to say, I think, I'm being recorded, Allegedly,
allegedly, two people went into the common room where Ted Heath was going to be
entertained and wrote fuck Heath on the wall, you know.
And they were sent down and so on. So, he was dealing with this and occupations
and rent strikes. So, radicalism in Oxford was pale back in Paris with Exeter
and Essex, and certainly LSE and pale by comparison to Paris. But still, as the
head of the college, he had to deal with this. And, it's very interesting that
in his day job, he was kinda holding the line for college respectability and
saying you really mustn't say rude words about the prime minister while he was
writing The World Turned Upside Down.
And literally, there was a fantastic exchange over the condom machine that the students
had installed without the permission of the senior members of the college. And
the senior members then said, You’ve got to take it out because it's an offense
to our moral sensibilities. And anyway, you can buy condoms in Norwich now,
it's not very far to travel. And the students took it. And anyway, it had to be,
they said we can take it down, but the London Rubber Company can't come and
collect it for a while.
And they said, right. We'll take it, and it will go in the dean's room until
the London Rubber Company can collect it. And Dean and Hill had to represent
all this with a straight face, saying, you know, it's a moral offense to some
members of the college to have a condom machine. They're available elsewhere.
And on the other hand, he's writing the world turned upside down, which is all
about this tremendous effusion of sexual and other forms of personal
liberation.
And, it was dramatized on the South Bank by Keith Dewhurst as an, you know,
example of radical theatre and theatre that could change the world. And it was
put on by a company that was famous for living a, you know, a liberated life
and, allegedly. And so Hill was completely in favour of all this liberation.
Although I think he thought, you know, some student politics were a bit, you
know, tokenistic and gestural politics rather than substantial politics. But
basically, he was behind it all.
But in his day job, he was having to maintain the respectable front. And I
think it's critical to his personality that he did it. He felt, I, you know, I
have this duty. This is my role. This is my job.
It's not me. It's the job I have to do. But really, there's a me off stage
that's interested in all this liberation stuff. Yeah. Sorry.
Very long rambling. No. No. That was fascinating. I think, you know, I think
it's a testament also to the book itself.
So your chapter on Balliol. I didn't think I'd be so interested in the internal
politics of Balliol, your college, but it Yeah. You know, it is kind of fascinating
and shows a lot about Hill as a person as well as a writer. I think you get
from that. I also wanted to ask about, you know, he left the communist party in
'57.
Braddick: Yeah. Not with some of the others, EP Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and
others who left the year before, directly after or around the events of
Hungary. This was about inner party democracy. It was a year later at the
special congress, right, in '57, that he left. I was quite in quite involved,
right, with the congress held internally at the communist party about the
question of democracy.
Right? But before that, he was very involved with the communist party historians’
group. Yeah. I want to ask about you know, this is an incredible collection of
historians who shaped the study and the writing of history in mid-century
Britain. Ralph O Samuel, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, and Yeah.
Chris Piel and others, and many others. You know, what was it about the
communist party that, you know, first of all, kind of nurtured or allowed these
historians, right? But what also what did their what did those historians get
from both the group of historians around the communist party, or the communist
party itself?
Braddick: Yeah.
The party had turned in the late thirties to a kind of Popular Front strategy
that they should build a progressive alliance for change and abandon a kind of class-based
conflict. And the only way to achieve change was through class conflict. And what
it allowed us to do was build a progressive alliance alongside the core
revolutionary ambition. And it trended towards a ref a reformist ambition. And
that made it easier for intellectuals.
And so in the late thirties, Margot Heinemann has a very nice chapter on this.
The communist party developed a culture strategy, radio, TV in the post-war
period, drama, art, visual art, literature, and history to try to build a
progressive consciousness and to give people resources to develop a progressive
consciousness. And so there is a relatively free hand then for writers and
artists to pursue their creative individualism within the service of the party.
It was a very creative moment, and some great writing and great history came
out of it. And so there's a cultural committee, and then the culture committee
had us, effectively a subcommittee, the historians group.
And the historians group was set up with two aims in mind. One was that AL
Morton had written a classic history of the people's history of England, and it
was being revised. And the party wanted to give him advice on how to revise it.
And the second thing was that Hill had written in 1940 a kind of manifesto for
his view of a bourgeois revolution that had caused controversy about whether it
was properly Marxist or not. And so the second focus was to discuss whether
Hill's account of the bourgeois revolution was properly Marxist. And it sounds,
you know, terribly sort of restrictive thing, you know, as if the dogma is
going to be imposed. But actually, it was an open question about how Marxists
should think about the bourgeois revolution and how Marxists should think about
sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century England. And it attracted a
generation of people who were turned off by an extremely conservative
university curriculum and school curriculum that was the story of kings and
queens and the doings of great men and, had a kind of liberal continuity to it,
that nothing ever unpleasant had happened in Britain, and no change had ever
required any unpleasantness. And, we're not like the foreigners. So there was
this attempt to recover a kind of radical history of the British past and the
way that ordinary people had shaped the conditions of their lives and how
understanding the radicalism of ordinary people would help you understand the
British past, but it also give the radicalism of ordinary people a present and
a future.
So there was a kind of progressive ambition behind it. But it was quite an open-ended,
quite open. And the key thing for the party, I don't know if you were going to
ask me about this, the party regarded such issues through the lens of
democratic centralism. The idea being that you had a democratic discussion
until a line was reached, and then the line became the line, and you fell in
line with the party line. And on all these issues, rigorous debate was thought
necessary so that the party could develop a line.
So that lots of people misunderstand, I think, the role of the party here. They
think the party was commissioning a history from these people. But actually,
the party was trying to foster a debate about Marxists that would lead to a
line that the party could then adopt. And democratic centralism was exactly the
issue in '57. And, you know, we'll talk about that later, I suppose.
But in the early post-war period, it was giving these people a lot of freedom
to think about how they might reconfigure an understanding of the British past.
But they were very concerned that it should meet academic standards. It wasn't
simply party-political history. It was that it should be rigorous history,
better than liberal history, living by academic standards more rigorously than
liberal history, and thus be better history and give a good basis on which
Marxists could think about the present and the future.
You've kind of alluded already to his influence,
particularly in the kind of sixties and seventies, right? You know, he was you
know, there were plays put on of his history books, you know, his books were
taught widely across the curriculum. I think at a kind of level, looked at, you
know, the three universities were kind of the defining or one of the defining kinds
of interpretations of the English revolution at the time. And what was that
like for him to be, you know, he was a very private man. He was very kind, you
know, he was, you say quite shy, quiet, you know, he wasn't, very false. What
was it like for him to have been this?
And, also, I suppose, what was it like culturally to have this kind of, you
know, the dominant narrative of this pivotal moment in history to be one that
was explicitly a Marxist reading?
Braddick: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think he was extremely
private and modest, and I think he felt he was putting himself at the service
of his readers. You know?
I'm, you know, I don't think he, I don't think there was much ego
involved in being such a big figure for him. I think it was that he, you know, I'm
being of help here. And that was important for him because he wanted to be
helpful, and he came from a family of Methodist activists in York. Some of whom
had been very active in charity. You know, we might think of their activism
differently now, but the missionaries and some people wanted to change the
world.
So I think it was really important for him to feel useful in the world, and I
think he took that seriously, took that responsibility seriously. And I think
it was also a tremendous relief because in the early fifties, in particular,
well, in the late thirties and then again in the early fifties, communists
found it very hard. Communist men party members and Marxists at large found it
very hard to get university employment. And several people had jobs and lost
them, and it was thought to be political. And Hill was always on their side.
And he said to one confidant in the fifties that he or in the sixties that he
only kept his job because Balliol, you know, Balliol just doesn't care what the
outside world thinks. You know, he's one of our chaps. So, he benefited from
Oxford's privilege, and I think he took all that quite seriously. And at the
very end of his career, he worked in the Open University, where lots of former
comrades had ended up because they had been pushed out of universities in the
fifties. They'd gone into adult education, gone into the Workers' Education
Authority, and that had been the obvious place to recruit people for the OU in
the seventies.
And so the CPGB was reunited, really, in the Open University in the eighties.
But there were very few. Kiernan wrote to him. Kiernan had a job in Edinburgh,
but Kiernan wrote to him saying there's no point in going for x or y job
because, you know and and Rodney Hilton or Hill's very first article was
published under a pseudonym. And Hilton said that was because if you knew this
was in '38. And Hilton said if he'd published this with his name on that would
have, you know, it would have been a serious problem for his career.
That's when he first set out a Marxist interpretation of the seventeenth
century. So he was, I think, conscious of his privilege and anxious that he
should make that privilege a benefit to other people. And he wrote letters. I
can't remember who it was, but he wrote in defence of someone who'd lost a job.
I think it might have been that Arblaster was not given a job at Manchester,
having been there for two years.
I think it was Anthony Arblaster. But he anyway, he wrote to him and said no. I
remember writing this. I'll just tell you what he says. He says, it's
outrageous that a heretic should be debarred from doing their job because of
their heresy alone.
You know, show me that by being a heretic, I'm doing the job badly, then you've
got a case. But you cannot dismiss people simply for their heresy. And I think
he felt tremendously protected, and he felt a real responsibility to the wider
movement, as, you know, the guy in a position. Yeah. He goes in the seventies
from that, you know, position of, you know, being at the top of his field.
In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work.
Right? You know, it's kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it's a
fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in
particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a
political moment in Britain.
Braddick: The Thatcherite, yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill
incredibly.
Yeah. And it hit here also I I don't want to talk about me, but I entered the
story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book
that my elder brother and sister read Hill at A level. I didn't. And when I
went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger
than my elder brother. But when I went in '81, we were given Hill, as this is
the wrong idea.
So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened
quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it's taken a long time to
disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to
be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear
it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to
disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill's work, which are
genuine. So, I think there is a generational effect in history writing.
Each generation does better work than its predecessor, and that is certainly
true that Hill, and particularly his economic history, doesn't cut the mustard
anymore, you know, and you wouldn't do economic history the way Hill did it. So,
for a long time, it was difficult to say that sort of thing without being
identified with a political program against the kind of history he was trying
to promote. So, one aim of the book is to try to disentangle history from
politics. And my view is that, you know, if history is simply writing your politics,
why do history? Why not just state your political position?
And if history isn't a test of your politics and isn't making you think and
examine your politics, then there's no point in doing it. But in the eighties, I
talked about the Education Act and the national curriculum and how the battles
over that were directed particularly against this progressive history, and
people should be taught the greatness of Britain. And, you know, all this
nonsense about slavery, we should forget about that and talk about democracy
instead. In the national curriculum, the national curriculum was forming people
for the next stage. So, it's exactly the politics that he'd set out to
challenge.
And he was at the heart of those political debates, saying, Mrs Thatcher knows
nothing about history. You know, this is just, authoritarian state trying to
input trying to mark its homework. But at the same time, people who were
actually on the left and quite sympathetic to left-wing causes were saying, you
know, some of these books don't work very well, and we should be doing this
work differently and a bit better. So, at the time and coming back to what I
said to start with in '81, when I started, I was confronted with this, and I
couldn't unpick what was going on here. Whether I was being told Hill was wrong
because I was being taught by Thatcherites, or am I being told that Hill is
wrong because you can do this another way better?
And that's but it it it so that's sort of a personal way of putting it. But
what happened to him in the eighties was that he became conflated with a
general attack on leftism and progressivism, the values of the sixties, the
world turned upside down, and dismissals of Israel did come from there. But
also, from a, you know, academic critique that we should do this differently
and better. Yeah. I always find it interesting that Hill was the one who kind
of bore the brunt of that.
Yeah. Whereas someone like Hobsbawm, who remained in the party, never you know,
there was you know, it was very much kind of still accepted. There still is, I
think, in the kind of establishment, yeah. In a different way. Yeah.
Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn't know. I know I'm going to name drop here. I know Sir
Keith Thomas a bit. And I didn't realize there was a higher honour than being Sir
Keith Thomas, but in fact, there is, as being a companion of honour.
And I knew it because Keith Thomas became the companion of honour at the same
time that Elton John did. And then Hobsbawm was a companion of honour. You
know, it's the highest thing the establishment can do for you. And I find I do
find it hard to judge because one of the things that got him in trouble was
that he never although he said to the party, I'm renouncing Stalinism, and I'm
not renouncing you because you're Stalinist, he would give comfort to the
capitalist press by saying it to the capitalist press. He would never sell out
his former comrades by doing it in public.
So he had this repentance, but it was a quiet repentance. And he was beaten
with that through the eighties and nineties. Unrepentant Stalinist, you know.
Ferdinand Mount said, having an unrepentant Stalinist as Master of Balliol, you
might as well have a recently convicted paedophile. He said that you know.
And he wasn't an unrepentant Stalinist either. And somehow, Hobsbawm escaped
that. Hobsbawm stayed in the party. He was, I don't know, quite how he did it,
except that he's less concerned with the national story. Yeah.
He's not in those national curriculum debates. He talks about Europe in his
early career, then he's a global historian. It's less offensive to an
establishment view of the British character, yeah. Then Christopher Hill said,
you know, it hasn't always been, respectful and deferential and, you know, and
people haven't always just abided by the rules of the game that they're given.
And I suppose by undercutting the story of the English revolution, you are
implicitly or explicitly even kind of undercutting the story of the British
establishment.
Now this is, you know, this is the kind of start of where we are now. There's something
kind of by going directly there, you're kind of going to the roots of this.
Right? Yeah. Yeah.
So this is my kind of interest actually, but the eleven years in the post-Roman
history of Britain, where we had a republic, and we call it the interregnum,
the period between kings. And it ends in a restoration, although what was
restored was nothing like what had been overthrown. So, there's this meta-narrative
that's just kind of drilled into us by the very naming of the events. And, to
undercut that is to undercut the position of the establishment, I think. So, I
think he'll, I mean, he probably couldn't have complained actually because he
wanted to undercut.
He wanted to be a threat to the establishment. He wanted his writing to
destabilize these comforting stories. But then in the end, you know, when the
boot was firmly on that foot, I mean, he did suffer, I think. So I think, you
know, if he kind of suffered that kind of revisionist moment, seems we're in a
different moment now both I mean, politically, may maybe not actually, but
intellectually in terms of the study of English revolution, I think we're in a
very different moment now particularly than the eighties and nineties where it
was at its kind of peak. Yeah.
And I think that was a factor in you coming to this book now? And also, I
suppose, how is and how should we think about Hill's work today? You know, how
is it received in the field, and how should we, as kind of general readers, or
how should we approach Hill's work?
Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn't know Chris Hill, but I'm
no Chris Hill.
Whatever that John f Kennedy quote is. I mean, I wouldn't compare myself to it
at all, but in terms of, you know, importance or influence. But I do want to
try to get a post-hill story going about the English revolution because for
forty years students have been taught not that, not that, not that, not that.
And I sense an appetite among the students I teach, not many nowadays, but for
a more constructive, progressive engagement with the seventeenth century and
the events of the seventeenth century. So I think there's a moment coming.
I don't think I'm not sure I can deliver. I can pose the question, I hope,
about what we should say about all this. I am writing a book about the 1650s, and
I’m in Oxford. Normally, I suppose.
But, I taught a graduate class in Oxford this year on the Marxist historians,
and there's an appetite among graduate historians. One of the students said to
me, we're the generation of no alternative, you know, and they're looking back
to this generation of progressive thinkers, not just in, history, but, you
know, progressive art and they've they're interested in Frankfurt School and
how you can have an authentic culture that's not just, commercial stuff
squirted down the Internet at you. And they're returning to Hill more than the
new left, actually, interestingly. But Hill and Hobsbawm, Thompson in
particular, are fascinated by it. I realize I've written about the wrong
Marxist historian.
But there, they're looking for inspiration not to reproduce and recapture that
moment, but for inspiration that might lead them to the birth of a new moment.
And I feel we desperately need it, you know. The left hasn't had a game to put
up against the rise of the light. And yeah. So, I think that there's an
appetite for it.
And the English Revolution. Historical consciousness about the English Revolution
could be part of that. But I'm afraid I know, it's beyond me to provide it. I'm
afraid. Yeah. But I do hope that, you know, this brings people to heal to
the question and prompts people to think about what the new line new hope could
be.
I was thinking about this, particularly this kind of political moment and the
political moments that you say he was kind of responding in his work to this
political moment. My favourite work of Hill's is the experience of defeat.
Yeah. You know, which I think sadly feels very, very kind of relevant again
now. You know, it's about the kind of experience of Milton and other
revolutionaries after the Restoration.
You know, what happened to them? I don't want to ask you necessarily about
that, but do you have a favourite work of Hill's? What is the one that you
would know, you want to return to if you still feel the kind of pull?
Braddick: I've become so, I would like to say
about that, though. He, Bunyan, was really important to Hill very early in
life, and it comes from his Methodism.
And there's a lot of fair talk about in a book in the media, as the war was
breaking out. And he wrote love letters daily to a woman from the barracks, and
they're very moving. And they reveal a lot about his views on love, marriage,
authenticity, sex, and politics. Because she was a liberal, he kept correcting
her politics. Marriage didn't laugh.
But overshadowing him was the thought that he was going to die. And he reached
Bunyan in that moment, too. And the thing in Bunyan he drew on was, he said it
then, and he said it again in the eighties. We dare not despair. We betray our ideals.
We betray our ideals if we despair. So the one thing we must not do is despair,
and it's struggle which will keep the faith alive and keep the ideals alive. So
all that is, I was going to use the word elegiac for that, but it's very it's
poignant, isn't it? And it's about his own experience and so on. But there is
at the core of it this thing, okay, young uns, the one thing you mustn't do is
despair.
Yeah. My favourite book, I’ve become very interested in, he actually, this is
relevant to his affair with Sheila Grant Duff, who was very conventionally
bourgeois and thought that since she was in love with another man as well as
Hill, she shouldn't sleep with Hill. And Hill thought she shouldn't be hung up
on these bourgeois values, and he didn't mind. So he urged on her the
importance of leaving Andrew Marvel's ode to his coy mistress, you know, with the
thought that they were going to die. And, you know, why give in to these
bourgeois values?
You know, we must run before the sun. But it made me very interested because he
said it was that poetry that first led him to the English Revolution. It's
people living in a society, whose values they feel uncomfortable with. And I
like that writing of his. He read at the time he read T.S. Eliot in particular,
and Eliot was expressing the sense of personal alienation that you have to live
within these bourgeois expectations, and they do violence to who you are. And
Hill got very interested in that dynamic in seventeenth-century literature. And
so I like the Milton book, because he's talking about the conflicts that Milton
feels, in the society in which he's required to live and how that does violence
to who he is. I don't know if that's my time of life, but I've been more drawn
to that kind of he. he was interested in what's often said about him is that
he's a determinist and he's not interested in people, but it's untrue.
You know, he's very interested in the experience people have of dislocation
from that society. And that's the writing I've become more interested in. I,
ironically enough, started my career writing about the state and transformation
and so on. And I've ended up writing a biography, and it's similar. Hill got
more interested in subjectivity, I think, and the conflicted subjectivities we
have as a result of the structures in which we live. So that's my answer.
Yeah. That's a great answer. I think you've probably been talking enough.
Comment by Christopher Thompson
I have been very puzzled to read the transcript of Michael
Braddick's interview at Housman's Bookshop in London earlier this month. It was
part of the process of promoting the biography composed by Braddick (All Souls
College, Oxford) and was, I suspect, given in front of an audience sympathetic
to Hill's beliefs and career. What appears to me to be a problem in the talk is
the connection drawn between the appearance of 'revisionism' in early to mid-17th-century
historiography and the rise of Thatcherism in British political life. The
criticisms of Marxist and Whig historiography associated with Conrad Russell,
John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and others came into print in the mid to late 1970s
under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
Russell's essay on Parliamentary politics was published in
1976, as was John Morrill's book on the Revolt of the Provinces. Kevin Sharpe's
edited volume of essays appeared in 1978. None of them could remotely be
described as apostles of Thatcherism. Nor, indeed, could the essays that were
to be found in The Journal of British Studies and the Journal of Modern History
across the Atlantic in 1976 and 1977, respectively. One of Lawrence Stone's
most distinguished postgraduate pupils at Princeton at that time told me
relatively recently that Stone had been unaware - 'blindsided' was his word -
by developments in the United Kingdom. In Hill's case, despite the origins of
'revisionism' amongst former and current Oxford University-trained historians,
he had been completely unaware of the developing reaction against his soft
determinism and Marxist preconceptions. Well before the Conservative victory in
the 1979 General Election in Britain, Hill and Stone had ceased to make the
historiographical weather. Dismissing 'revisionism' as a form of antiquarian
empiricism, as Stone did, or repeating the analytical claims of the 1960s as
Hill tried to do, simply did not work. Both had been sidelined by then.
Housman's Bookshop interview extract earlier this
month.
In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different
reaction to his work. Right? You know, it's kind of belated in some ways, but
it, you know, it's a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that
moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so
closely with a political moment in Britain.
Braddick: The Thatcherite, Yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill
incredibly.
Yeah. And it hit here also I I don't want to talk about me, but I entered the
story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book
that my elder brother and sister, read Hill at A level. I didn't. And when I
went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger
than my elder brother. But when I went in '81, we were given Hill, as this is
the wrong idea.
So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened
quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it's taken a long time to
disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to
be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear
it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to
disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill's work, which are
genuine. So I think, there is a generational effect in history writing."
