Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A politics of emergency in the reign of Elizabeth I
- Chapter 2 Richard Overton and radicalism: the new intertext of the civic ethos in mid seventeenth-century England
- Chapter 3 Radicalism and the English Revolution
- Chapter 4 ‘That kind of people’: late Stuart radicals and their manifestoes, a functional approach
- Chapter 5 The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications
- Chapter 6 On not inventing the English Revolution: the radical failure of the 1790s as linguistic non-performance
- Chapter 7 Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s
- Chapter 8 Henry Hunt's Peep into a Prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt
- Chapter 9 Jeremy Bentham's radicalism
- Chapter 10 Religion and the origins of radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain
- Chapter 11 Joseph Hume and the reformation of India, 1819–33
- AFTERWORDS
- Index
Chapter 3 - Radicalism and the English Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A politics of emergency in the reign of Elizabeth I
- Chapter 2 Richard Overton and radicalism: the new intertext of the civic ethos in mid seventeenth-century England
- Chapter 3 Radicalism and the English Revolution
- Chapter 4 ‘That kind of people’: late Stuart radicals and their manifestoes, a functional approach
- Chapter 5 The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications
- Chapter 6 On not inventing the English Revolution: the radical failure of the 1790s as linguistic non-performance
- Chapter 7 Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s
- Chapter 8 Henry Hunt's Peep into a Prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt
- Chapter 9 Jeremy Bentham's radicalism
- Chapter 10 Religion and the origins of radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain
- Chapter 11 Joseph Hume and the reformation of India, 1819–33
- AFTERWORDS
- Index
Summary
Since the publication of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down in 1972, the radical groups of the English Revolution have continued to attract attention. Some of that attention has reinforced Hill's account, but much of it challenges the terms with which Hill approached the subject. The present chapter attempts to take stock of the results, and to provide the broad outlines of an account that takes seriously the criticisms of the Hill paradigm that have been advanced.
HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE ENGLISH NEO-REFORMATION
It is often said that historians are much more concerned with origins and causes than they are with consequences, effects or ‘aftermath’. It may therefore be worthy of note that we probably have a clearer understanding of the afterlife than of the origins of mid-seventeenth-century English radicalism. Although the full legacy of the English Revolution still awaits its historian, it is possible to piece together a reasonably clear idea about the ways in which subsequent generations remembered (or forgot) Levellers and radicals, and an even fuller knowledge of the subsequent fortune of commonwealth and republican ideas. But historians have never developed even the agreed outlines of an account of the origins of Civil War radicalism, or an agreed way of placing its occurrence in an early modern historical context. Indeed, they have generally avoided asking too many questions about its origins.
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- English Radicalism, 1550–1850 , pp. 62 - 86Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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