Vol. 18 No. 21 · 31 October 1996
pages 23-24 | 2462 words
Rolodex Man
Mark Kishlansky
- Liberty against the Law: Some 17th-Century Controversies by Christopher Hill
Allen Lane, 354 pp, £25.00, April 1996, ISBN 0 7139 9119 4
- The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of 17th-Century History by Alastair MacLaclan
Macmillan, 431 pp, £13.99, April 1996, ISBN 0 333 62009 7
It is becoming difficult to remember how influential Christopher Hill once was. When E.P. Thompson dedicated Whigs and Hunters to ‘Christopher Hill – Master of more than an old Oxford college’ he was recognising Hill’s stature as a historian, academic and public figure. From his perch as Master of Balliol, he presided over the education of future mandarins and exerted an influence on the intellectual life of Britain. His work, which roamed over more than two centuries of England’s past, transcended his specialisation. He trained a stable of accomplished historians, but his impact on students of literature and general readers was just as great. His textbooks, Century of Revolution (1961) and Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1967), dominated in the schools.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 23 · 28 November 1996
From Alex Callinicos
Mark Kishlansky complains that Christopher Hill ‘has been immune to criticism – a habit of mind that has caused much misery in our century’ (LRB, 31 October). Well, if the criticism Hill’s work has encountered were all of the quality of Kishlansky’s shabby attack who could blame him for ignoring it? The insinuation that refusing to follow the tide of historiographic fashion is morally equivalent to sending dissidents off to the Gulag Archipelago is typical of a critique which proceeds by insult and innuendo rather than by anything resembling careful argument.
Kishlansky’s considered judgment is that Hill’s work is ‘precisely anachronistic and profoundly unhistorical’. He considers it a telling point against Hill that ‘Milton may have been a republican, but he was no democrat.’ This will hardly come as news to those who have read the books – notably Milton and the English Revolution and The Experience of Defeat – in which Hill explores the political dilemmas faced by those Commonwealth-men whose distrust of the people led them to advocate the dictatorship of the ‘elect’. Hill’s historical work, Kishlansky assures us, has been ‘swept away by changing fashions or subsequent investigations’. The priority given to fashion here is revealing. Kishlansky admits to feeling some nostalgia for the time at the end of the Sixties when Hill’s influence on historians was greatest. Now, however, he regards Marxism and ‘the history of the dispossessed’ as vieux jeu, and excoriates Hill for stubbornly refusing to acknowledge this. Invoking fashion to settle the merits of any intellectual inquiry is, quite simply, worthless.
The test most worth applying to Hill’s work, as to that of any historian, is whether it continues to pose questions suggesting fruitful lines of research. There is, for example, an interesting discussion to be had about the interrelation between his work and that of Edward Thompson: arguably The World Turned Upside Down (acknowledged even by Kishlansky to be Hill’s ‘masterpiece’) helped set the agenda for Whigs and Hunters and Thompson’s later work on the 18th century. Considerations of this kind could provide a starting-point for a serious appraisal of Hill’s contribution to our understanding of Early Modern England. Kishlansky’s clumsy and resentful piece suggests he is incapable of providing such an appraisal.
Alex Callinicos
University of York
