Investigations of a Dog

And now the return of my series of posts about English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution(s) historiography. Today I’m considering Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution. Published in 1999, this is one of the most recent examples of old-school Marxism. If you’ve read any of my previous posts on causes and allegiance you’ll know that I’m not really a fan of Marxism, but I’m trying to see the good as well as the bad. I’ll always have a certain amount of respect for him simply because he’s always been prepared to offer a clear, succinct, and empirically testable definition of “revolution”. It’s surprising how unusual that is for a historian of this period.

At first sight the title of the book might seem a bit anachronistic. Manning explains that he defines conservatives as the right and radicals as the left, and that he is particularly interested in the most radical people, who went further than mainstream anti-royalists in advocating such things as redistribution of wealth. He is obviously imposing an arbitrary taxonomy onto the past which wouldn’t have been understood at the time, but aren’t we all? Perhaps lumping all of the most radical groups and individuals into a single category labeled “the far left” partly undermines his argument that people shouldn’t be put into boxes and that class and beliefs were fluid rather than fixed (p. 47).

This book is a general survey rather than the result of detailed original research. The sources cited are mostly secondary works, along with some contemporary pamphlets. As far as I can tell the footnotes do not mention any manuscripts at all. You don’t have to be a document fetishist to see this as a limitation. The archives are full of unexplored opportunities. Concentrating only on what has been published in print closes down an awful lot of possibilities. For example, early-modern court records are full of poor people saying things that they weren’t supposed to say, and the fact that they were punished afterwards can’t erase the fact that they said it. The most glaring omission is when Manning mentions that plans for a Fifth Monarchist revolt were carefully recorded in a manuscript journal, but doesn’t cite the manuscript.

While this book shares Christopher Hill’s weaknesses when it comes to archival research, Manning’s style of writing is very different, being much more analytical than Hill. This makes his work more sensible but less enjoyable to read. Overall the book is very useful as a succinct summary of what had been written about class and radical ideas up to 1999.

The main focus is on the later 1640s and the 1650s, so much of it is not very relevant to the project I’m working on, which is mainly about how war broke out in 1642. Manning sees the revolution as a long process rather than a single event. Although he puts the most important changes in 1648-49, he also considers the First Civil War to be the beginning of the class struggle which led to revolution. He has relatively little to say about allegiance because he seems to assume that there was nothing to it other than class consciousness (although he sees class as fluid rather than fixed). Therefore he completely fails to explain how Charles I got together armies which could fight against the oppressed masses for nearly 4 years and come close to defeating them. Pointing out that revolutions often begin with alliances between different classes (pp. 14-15), Manning insists that the presence of members of all classes on the parliamentarian side does not disprove the idea that the First Civil War was a class war. It’s not clear how he would deal with the possibility of members of all classes being present on the royalist side too, because he doesn’t mention it at all.

On the parliamentarian side there is plenty of evidence of temporary alliances between different groups with different aims, and of conflicting interests between groups and individuals of different social and economic status. For example, my work on horse requisitioning suggests that the House of Lords was much more interested in protecting the status and property rights of peers than the House of Commons. The real problem is that none of these groups can be shown to represent an entire class, or even a majority of a class (and in the Marxist interpretation classes are very big and general things). Manning says that “opposition to Charles I and the royalists brought together a few aristocrats, some gentry and merchants, numerous farmers and artisans as well as labourers”. That’s likely to be true if you look at the absolute numbers of each group who were active in the parliamentarian war effort, but possibly not as a proportion of their classes. This could be restated as “a minority of peers, a minority of gentry and merchants, a minority of farmers and artisans”. Manning has done nothing to refute John Morrill’s argument that most people didn’t want to fight in 1642. He hasn’t even mentioned it.

That’s about all there is that’s directly relevant to what I’m working on, but I also want to discuss some more general problems with Marxist approaches to this period.

Gender is a big problem which Marxism doesn’t seem to be very well equipped to deal with. Women are likely to be one of the biggest oppressed groups in most societies in most periods. While poor people of both genders would make up the biggest oppressed group in 17th century England, women of all classes would probably come in second (yes, these groupings are very arbitrary and hide a lot of diversity, but I’m trying to engage with Marxism here). Manning doesn’t seem very interested in gender relations, briefly citing De Ste Croix, who wonders whether women should be counted as a class but decides that they shouldn’t, before sweeping the whole issue under the carpet (p. 19). I think counting women as part of their class misses an awful lot. Elite women might have had more wealth and power than poor women, but they were hardly equal with their husbands, fathers or brothers.

Manning’s denial that the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure leads to economic determinism isn’t very convincing (p. 36):

The Marxist conception of an economic base and an ideological superstructure may slip into, or be misinterpreted as, a crude economic determinism, but this is due to omitting the crucial intervening factor of class relations, which are formed by economic conditions but which give rise to ideology via the medium of class consciousness and class struggle

Isn’t this the same thing? Adding more jargon might make it harder to understand, but it still ultimately seems to mean that economy leads to ideology. If the economic base forms class relations which are based on economic inequality, and if class consciousness is an awareness of that inequality, and class struggle is an attempt to eliminate inequality, how does ideology arise from anything other than economic conditions?

I think Manning is right to argue that religion and politics can’t be separated because the Bible provided inspiration and justification for radical ideas such as redistribution of wealth. However, I’d go further and suggest that religion and political ideology are just parts of culture, and that all parts of culture are inseparable. I don’t think we should ignore class consciousness, but maybe we need to look at it as a cultural construct which isn’t necessarily determined by the economic base. If, as Trotsky said, revolutions are caused by changes in states of mind (p. 32) then maybe we need to pay more attention to culture. Although Manning fails to defend the base/superstructure model (perhaps because it can’t be defended?), he does seem to be sincere about not being an economic determinist. The meat of this book is very much about what people thought (or at least about what they wrote). I think paying attention to radical ideas is definitely a good thing. Manning makes a good case for not ignoring radicals just because they were an unsuccessful minority. We need to remember that even the most dominant ideologies can never be totally hegemonic. The “far left” failed to destroy the patriarchal order, but they could still imagine, talk about, and attempt its destruction. I think Manning is right to rescue the Levellers from the sanitization of other historians and recover their potential for violence.

I also think he’s spot on when he calls Margaret Spufford “myopic” for insisting that there is no radical political subtext in the popular story of Thomas Hickathrift (p. 72). The symbolism could hardly be more heavy-handed if the giant had a sign around his neck saying “I represent the upper classes”. Some revisionist historians went out of their way to deny agency and political consciousness to the poor. Their focus on consensus and deference was suspiciously similar to the seventeenth-century elite’s protesting-too-much insistence on the naturalness of the established order. It seems strange that Conrad Russell pursued such a conservative agenda in his historical writing when he was so progressive in real life. However, Brian Manning seems to occupy an opposite extreme, desperate to find the origins of socialism in the 1640s. He’s half right when he says that concern of the oppressed is the “seedbed of socialism” (p. 37) but concern for the oppressed is also a characteristic of liberal humanism and postmodernism. All three ideologies take very different directions from that starting point. For example, Manning argues that “a ruling class which was self selected on the basis of birth and wealth was more undemocratic than one self selected on the principle of ‘godliness’ without respect to birth or wealth” (pp. 120-1). The prospect of an undemocratic self selected theocracy would be truly horrifying to most liberals and postmodernists, and probably to most socialists too! The attempt to find embryonic socialism also leads to a privileging of some points of view over others which seem to have been equally (un?)popular at the time. He cites examples of poor people fantasizing about inverting the social order and ruling over the former elite as well as visions of true equality, but tends to focus on the latter (p. 38).

Ultimately we don’t have to worry about Marxism too much any more, because the best historiography from Revel, Riot and Rebellion onwards has broken out of the Marxist vs Revisionist dialectic. Historians as diverse as David Underdown, John Adamson, Andy Wood, John Walter, and Jason Peacey are not just synthesizing false extremes to arrive at a false centre. They have found completely different ways of looking at things.

Finally I want to point out another false dichotomy: that between socialism and capitalism. From a green perspective they don’t look very different because they both assume that man (and woman, to a lesser extent) has a natural right exploit all non-human animals, vegetables and minerals. While some millenarians saw an end to devouring fellow creatures (p. 118), most of the radical tracts which Manning cites are unquestioningly anthropocentric. For example, one Leveller tract asserted that “All men being alike privileged by birth, so all men were to enjoy the creatures alike” (p. 50). The Quakers believed that god had given the earth “to the sons of men in general” (p. 53). Winstanley imagined a time when “there shall be no barrenness in the earth or cattle, for they shall bring forth abundantly” and even that there would be no more “unseasonable storms and distempers” (p. 58). This is in direct contrast to the homily of obedience which insisted (perhaps a bit too desperately) that god had put thunder and lightning into “a most excellent and perfect order”. Seventeenth-century England was so far from consensus that even the weather was ideologically contested.

1. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks, London, 1999).
2. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).