I’d agree with you that people did things because they wanted to (or for anyone who believes in false consciousness/bad faith/whatever, because they thought they wanted to). But that just leads to the question of why they wanted to. That’s not something I’m going to tackle in the article. I think I’ll have done enough by proving that some people wanted to give material support to parliament but that many more didn’t. The challenge to anyone who wants to get any further is to write all those biographies of all those people who did things, or chose not to do things - that’s assuming we can know the minds of dead people in the past well enough to explain why they did things, which might be expecting too much.

A superficial problem with breaking big events down into individual actions and decisions is that it might provoke accusations of reductionism. I don’t think it is necessarily reductionist, but the reasons for that lead into a bigger problem: complexity. The way that small actions combine into complex events might be too difficult to understand or describe. People’s actions probably influenced each other, so that the causal chains are all tangled up together rather than forming neat lines that we can follow.

I was largely unaware of Keith Jenkins until about a year ago when I happened to sit next to him in a Philosophy of History seminar at the IHR. The speaker (Peter Burke) was quite disappointing, but the way Jenkins took him apart was brilliant. I was left thinking “Who was that man? He’s a fucking genius!”. I eventually found out that it was Keith Jenkins. He seems quite different in writing than in person, but his books are still very clear and engaging compared to a lot of theory.

I enjoy reading Jenkins, but then I enjoy reading E.H. Carr as well - doesn’t mean I actually agree with them though!