ORIGINS: FROM ‘RADICAL REFORMERS’ TO ‘RADICALS’

‘Radicalism’ was a specific ideology, first coined in England in the 1820s to express a fusion of universal suffrage, Ricardian economics and programmatic atheism. As such, it was only one of a range of new doctrines conceptualized at that time. Yet the history of radicalism, liberalism, socialism and conservatism has been equally obscured by two processes, themselves integral to the historical evolution of nineteenth-century ideologies. First, each began with a fairly clear and novel set of meanings which became diluted as more and more attempts were made to appropriate the original position and to steer it in new directions: so a term which was at its outset specific became steadily more imprecise and plural in its content. Second, the favoured term was projected backwards in time, and a spurious genealogy was invented in order to invest a newly coined doctrine with an air of timeless validity. The most notorious capitulation to this need to find retrospective validation was perhaps Alexander Gray's book The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin, but when first published in 1946 this exercise did not seem illegitimate. Gray was himself no hagiographer, and was not consciously attempting to celebrate what he recorded: his book is evidence of the wide acceptance of assumptions about the timelessness of key categories. Only recently have such assumptions begun to be discredited.

The terms ‘radical’ and ‘radicalism’ were the main beneficiaries from this process of retrospective projection, and their timelessness was accepted into academic discourse.