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CHRISTOPHER HILL, PIONEER OF HISTORY FROM BELOW  
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Raphael Magarik
May 5, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Christopher Hill’s work on 17th-century England has been
remarkably influential. In books like The World Turned Upside Down, he
recovered the history of vanquished radicals like the Levellers and
the Diggers and linked them to our own time. _

Marxist historian Christopher Hill at his desk on January 22, 1965.,
Hulton Archive / Getty Images

 

Review of _Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian_ by
Michael Braddick (Verso Books, 2025)

Christopher Hill is perhaps the only historian of seventeenth-century
England to retain a popular readership over the last fifty years. Nor
is anyone currently living likely to match that accomplishment.

Hill’s most famous book was_ The World Turned Upside Down_, first
published in 1972. It focused on the Interregnum, the period between
the ouster of Charles I, who was subsequently executed, and the
monarchist Restoration of 1660.

 

Yet Hill’s chosen subjects were not the elite reformers who
anticipated the liberal, bourgeois, and parliamentary England that
eventually prevailed in the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Instead, he
concentrated on vanquished radicals: freethinkers who denied
scriptural revelation, Levellers who urged a broad electoral
franchise, Diggers who tried to implement primitive communism, and
ecstatic Ranters who delivered shocking prophecies, sometimes in the
nude.

The book is still in print. Moreover, many
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subsequent [[link removed]] leftists
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have repurposed
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drawn from an English ballad of the mid-1640s, and it has passed into
the mainstream
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as a catchphrase
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for sudden, disruptive change. The socialist songwriter Leon Rosselson
even converted Hill’s book back into a ballad
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well as being inspired by popular movements and culture, Hill could
inspire them, too.

History From Below

How did he achieve this enduring popularity? Hill wrote lively,
intelligible prose and pioneered what came to be called “history
from below.” He tackled big problems about the causes of historical
changes and found analogies between the seventeenth century and his
own moment.

He did so, as Michael Braddick’s new biography of Hill
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because of the powerfully liberating influence of Marxist thought, and
because he strove to write history in tandem with the struggle for
socialism in his own day. Braddick’s book is well-researched,
readable, and thoughtful. Although I have some quibbles with his final
assessment, it contains precisely the material we need to make sense
of Hill’s work.

Braddick situates Hill in a generation of disenchanted intellectuals,
arguing that he embraced Marxism in general, and the Communist Party
of Great Britain (CPGB) in particular, as much because of a Modernist
sense of alienation as out of specific beliefs in Marxist economic
theory. Hill was born in 1912 to a prosperous and committed Methodist
family. A precocious student, he was recruited to study history at
Balliol College, Oxford.

He thus came of age during the tumultuous 1930s. The Great Depression
was ravaging Great Britain and the rest of the capitalist world.
Meanwhile, the USSR was rapidly industrializing and seemed to be
improving standards of living for ordinary people.

When war broke out between Republicans and the forces of Francisco
Franco in Spain, the governments of Britain and France remained
neutral, with only the Soviet Union providing aid to the Spanish
Republic against fascism. Because of the latter-day polemical uses of
Neville Chamberlain’s policy toward Nazism by American
neoconservatives, we tend to forget that the capitalist countries did
not appease Adolf Hitler and company out of timidity but rather
because they were more frightened of socialism than of fascism.

In this context, the appeal of Marxism seemed rather obvious. Braddick
suggests, as Hill himself maintained in later life, that Hill was
“primed for Marxism . . . by feelings of personal and social
alienation . . . his route into Marxism was humanist, not via politics
and economy.” That is to say, having read the work of writers like
T. S. Eliot, Hill came to feel that Marxism offered an answer to the
modern “disassociation of sensibility” — the palpable modern
mismatch between thought and feeling that Eliot had diagnosed, with
its attendant feelings of existential unease and alienation. For his
part, of course, Eliot had drawn deeply reactionary conclusions from
the same feelings.

While Hill struggled through Karl Marx’s _Capital _(calling it
“pretty tough going”) and dutifully attempted to study history
through the lens of financial records, statistics about the production
of potash, and the like, he never developed a taste for it. What he
got from Marx was rather the impetus to correlate ideas with material
contexts, and the theory that historical change is not a smooth,
consensual movement toward enlightenment, but rather a process driven
by social conflicts and contradictions.

A Humanist Marxism

The older Hill found the idea of describing his Marxism as
“humanist” congenial, as does Braddick. As his view of the Soviet
experiment soured and the possibility of a socialist revolution in
industrialized Europe dwindled, the notion of a “liberal Marxism”
(as Braddick describes Hill’s ideas) came to describe not just
one’s reasons for converting to Communism or one’s intellectual
interests, but also what survived of that Marxism from “the
experience of defeat,” to borrow the title of Hill’s 1984 book
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Certainly, Hill always seems to have understood Marxism as
complementing or perfecting, rather than rejecting, a liberal
tradition of free expression, open debate, and individual exploration.

Regardless of how Hill came upon his Marxism, it helped him to
transform the writing of seventeenth-century English history.
According to the Whiggish narrative that Hill inherited from scholars
like S. R. Gardiner, as Braddick writes, it was “the development of
human understanding and the power of ideas” that drove political
progress. Gardiner had written a fourteen-volume history of the
seventeenth-century “Puritan Revolution,” running from 1603 to
1660.

A masterful scholar, Gardiner was also a high, liberal Victorian (and
personally descended from Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, the
Puritan, Parliamentary leaders in the Civil War). He tended to
celebrate the gradual progress of good ideas, especially religious
tolerance and constitutional norms. By contrast, Hill’s long early
essay, “The English Revolution 1640,” retells this story from a
Marxist perspective.

Writing during the revolution’s tricentennial anniversary, Hill
emphasized rupture rather than smooth development. In 1640, no less
than in 1940, a received worldview seemed radically inadequate. Smug,
exceptionalist English writers often suggested that their country,
uniquely in Europe, had entered modernity without a bloody revolution;
according to this view, the Interregnum was just an unfortunate and
insignificant anomaly.

By contrast, Hill insisted that the Civil War was precisely, in his
words, “the destruction of one kind of state and the introduction of
a new political structure within which capitalism could freely
develop.” Ideas did not prevail merely because they were good, but
because material change created new forces to fight for them. It is
“struggle that wins reforms.”

Hill stressed that the Civil War was a “class war,” one in which a
bourgeois Puritan leadership temporarily allied with radical laborers
against the old aristocracy. When the new elites got what they wanted,
of course, they sold out the radicals. Yet in Hill’s own time, the
industrial proletariat was finally strong enough to complete the
revolution and achieve socialism.

The Experience of Defeat

Or so it seemed, at least for a few, glorious years. By 1940, like a
number of leftists of his generation, Hill had learned Russian and
studied in the USSR. Much of his early writing, some of which appeared
under a pseudonym, sympathetically explained the Soviet experiment to
an English audience. During World War II, he served in the Foreign
Office as a liaison to the Soviets.

Braddick’s book debunks, finally and thoroughly, a nasty allegation
that Anthony Glees made in the 1980s, accusing Hill of having spied
for the Soviet Union during World War II. Braddick shows that Glees
was an incompetent reader of the National Archives who also badly
misunderstood the wartime context. Hill received his job precisely
because he knew Russian and could work with Soviet peers. The British
state thus obviously knew he was a Communist, and its officials kept
him under careful surveillance during and well after the war.

By the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were trying to
destroy Communism altogether, but the position of Western capitalism
had been far weaker during the war. At this earlier stage, Winston
Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt desperately needed the USSR to
defeat Germany, and British public opinion was strongly pro-Soviet. By
the end of the war, in other words, Hill could be optimistic that the
alliance of 1640 between the bourgeoisie and workers had reemerged,
but that this time, the future lay with the fully formed, industrial
proletariat.

He was wrong for two reasons: First, the reality of the USSR was now a
Stalinist, dictatorial nightmare, to which, as Braddick discusses in
detail, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was disastrously
tethered. This situation led the party, and committed intellectuals
like Hill, to take embarrassing positions.

In 1950, Hill lectured on the Soviet Union and, in his own words,
“painted a very rosy picture of the Communist way of life,”
downplaying reports of mass starvation and ignoring the existence of
the gulag. As late as 1953, Hill praised Joseph Stalin as a historian,
writing that the Soviet leader “was a highly responsible leader”
whose views represent the “highest wisdom of the collective thought
of the USSR.” As Braddick writes, with charitable understatement,
“It is hard to know what to make of this paean to Stalin.”

However, as Braddick also shows, Hill understood his own historical
breakthroughs as stemming directly from the example of Soviet
socialism. For one thing, he was drawing on the analytic insights of
Soviet historians of England. More broadly, when Hill’s early
articles on Thomas Hobbes, Andrew Marvell, and James Harrington,
discovered in the thinking of these figures both radical novelty and
tense internal contradictions, they could do so only because of a
Marxist analysis that Hill identified with the party and with the
USSR. Hill’s apologetics for Stalin reflect the uncomfortable
existential truth that Hill’s major innovations were tied to the
Soviet experiment.

If Hill’s assessment of Stalin was wrong, he also did not anticipate
the rapid breakdown of the wartime alliance between the capitalist
West and the USSR and the systematic dismantling of the Communist left
in the context of the Cold War. Great Britain certainly experienced
nothing as vicious or widespread as the American Red Scare. Still, as
the historian Matthew Gerth has shown
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the government of Labour prime minister Clement Attlee clamped down on
Communism at the same time that it was nationalizing key industries
and building the National Health Service.

Attlee’s government branded striking miners and dockworkers as
Communist dupes while creating an Information Research Department to
disseminate anti-communist propaganda and purging Communists from
government positions. Braddick doesn’t give this repression as much
space as he should. He only briefly mentions the denial of an academic
position to Hill in 1949 because of his politics and balances it with
a gripe from the conservative historian Hugh Trevor-Roper that Marxist
scholars ganged up to criticize his writing. By emphasizing the
CPGB’s internal weakness, Braddick gives us the impression that its
decline was inevitable, downplaying the importance of external
pressure as Labour politicians allied with the United States in the
Cold War.

1956 and All That

Regardless of the reasons, the CPGB certainly declined. After the
revelations of Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech”
denouncing Stalin in 1956, the British Communist leadership clarified
its expectation that “intellectuals” (who were contemptuously, if
incoherently, contrasted with real “workers”) should subordinate
themselves to the party. It rejected the proposals of Hill and others,
including his fellow historians John Saville and E. P. Thompson, for
internal reform.

Hill left the CPGB on May Day, 1957. If he initially read the
seventeenth century through the optimistic, orthodox horizons of the
party in its heyday, a second, later strand in his work tried to
grapple with what had gone wrong, and identify what remained of its
legacy.

Other radical writers and academics — many, as Braddick astutely
notes, a decade or two younger than Hill and thus less tied to the
Soviet Union of the ’30s — fashioned what became called the New
Left. Hill, by contrast, seems to have concluded that nothing would
replace the party. He remained broadly, amorphously progressive, and
he never attacked his former comrades, but he plunged himself into
writing and teaching. Eventually, he became the master of Balliol
College, Oxford.

While much of this writing elaborated themes already sketched or
suggested in the 1940s, the freshest material reckoned with what had
gone wrong. Hauntingly and powerfully, _The World Turned Upside Down
_narrates the advocacy, often by people of humble class origins, for
disestablishment of the English Church, freer attitudes toward sex and
marriage, land reform or outright communism, and a democracy based on
a wide franchise.

If Hill’s early account of the revolution emphasized the delicate
coalition between workers and progressive elites, he was now
foregrounding the tensions between the two elements. The book showed
how the sentiments and dreams of common people had so frightened
Cromwell, Ireton, and other Puritan leaders that they had compromised
the cause.

Hill’s subjects were odd folks: Abiezer Coppe, for instance, who
reportedly preached profanity-laden sermons about free love in the
nude. Hill was clearly finding seventeenth-century models for the
sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Such marginal figures
did not always leave extensive paper trails. Moreover, after 1660,
many radicals went underground or retrospectively bowdlerized their
own work.

George Fox, for instance, reimagined the Quakers after the Restoration
as a harmlessly pacifist tendency, even as he wrote women out of the
movement’s early history — resembling, in Hill’s own time, any
number of postwar liberals who conveniently forgot their own earlier,
Communist leanings. To reconstruct this suppressed past, Hill turned
in part to Royalist and conservative propaganda, which tended to focus
on the most radical elements in their Parliamentary opposition.

This method is obviously dubious — a little like watching Fox News
and concluding that Antifa super-soldiers are roaming the streets of
major American cities. But the broad landscape of a society in turmoil
is convincing, even if one squints at the details. Moreover, Hill
announces at an early stage that he is writing about “another
revolution which never happened, though from time to time it
threatened.”

The book thus has a self-consciously fictional quality, which is not
to say Hill made anything up, but rather that he stretched to imagine
the counterfactuals that lay beneath the social surface. Surely, he
did so because he had himself longed for a parallel transformation and
lived through its stifling and death.

Against the Current

After _The World Turned Upside Down_, Hill largely shifted to
popularizing and rehashing his previous work. In the dismal,
reactionary ’80s, he was increasingly embattled. While literary
scholars were drawn to his work, younger historians often approached
it skeptically; the historian J. C. Davis even claimed that Hill had
made the Ranters up.

So-called “revisionist” historians questioned whether the sides in
the English Civil War aligned neatly with socioeconomic classes and
whether the war was fought over big ideas at all. They proffered
instead contingent explanations of historical events as local disputes
between specific elites. Meanwhile, Hill was the target of right-wing
attacks in the press, including the spurious accusations that he had
spied for the Soviet Union.

Braddick weighs Hill’s work judiciously, explaining these
disagreements and, finally, faulting him for not catching up with the
field and mostly ignoring questions about empire, colonialism, or
race. He rarely wrote about women, and his writing about sexuality
never got beyond binaries of repression and liberation. Despite a
growing historiographical emphasis on manuscript sources and private
papers, he also did little archival research, instead relying heavily
on literary sources and focusing on what was in print.

Much of this critique is fair; certainly, many scholars do their
freshest work when they are young. But Braddick seems to me on shakier
ground when he faults Hill for not adapting to newer historiographical
techniques. These were, after all, pioneered by the revisionists, who
found the study of the elite’s private papers congenial to their
skepticism of large-scale historical causation, whether Marxist or
liberal. Was Hill’s continued emphasis on print simply
old-fashioned?

Certainly, it is impossible to claim Hill was being lazy, since, as is
often observed, he seems to have read and retained more of
seventeenth-century English writing than anyone who has ever lived.
Rather, I think, it reflected Hill’s sense that the history he wrote
about had unfolded in, and now belonged to, a public. Thus, as he
liked to insist, the story had to be rewritten for each generation,
because it was itself part of collective, deliberative politics.

After all, the emergence of a print public during the Civil War,
through ideological struggle — the loosening of licensing and
censorship, the explosion of polemical pamphlets, and so on — was
one of Hill’s great, exciting themes. Hill always understood himself
to be writing for ordinary people, alongside scholars, in a
continuation of the democratic print commons born in 1640.

In this regard, a telling detail in Braddick’s book concerns the
journal _Past and Present_, which Hill helped found. Braddick rightly
describes the journal as part of a “great broadening of
historiographical imagination in the post-war years.” In its pages,
British scholarship brushed off its stuffy, dusty antiquarianism,
embracing social history, tackling global and comparative questions,
and more.

Yet the journal was only financially viable because its loose
association with the CPGB attracted nonacademic subscriptions from
party members. The economic dependence perhaps suggests an alternate
reading of Hill’s career arc as a historian, and of his later
work’s comparative staleness. Hill’s scholarship, it seems,
derived its vitality from its connection to a real social movement and
political organization, as Hill first buoyantly analyzed its bright
prospects, then reckoned with its failure and defeat.

Great history books, as Hill himself would have been the first to
suggest, are not only the products of good ideas, rigorous methods, or
broad erudition. Rather, they are made, like history itself, through
participation in collective, social struggle.

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Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University
of Illinois at Chicago.

* Christopher Hill; British History; Marxism;
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