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 subsequent leftists have repurposed its title, drawn from an English ballad of the mid-1640s, and it has passed into the mainstream as a catchphrase for sudden, disruptive change. The socialist songwriter Leon Rosselson even converted Hill’s book back into a ballad — evidence that as 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 shows, 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. 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.