A podcast on Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down

Let's travel far from Brighton and the Liberal Democrats's autumn conference to an hour-long discussion of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, a book published in 1972.

I read it just after I had taken A-level History and found it more interesting than anything I had read about the 17th century while studying for that. Somehow it fitted together with Jethro Tull's album Songs From the Wood to form a ruralist, traditionalist strand in my politics that I have never quite been able to expunge.

If Hill was a revisionist historian then Ann Hughes, the guest on this podcast, is a post-revisionist. While she happily admits that his book contains all sorts of good things, she is sceptical of its central Marxist thesis.

The discussion, as the YouTube blurb says, includes these topics:

• Did Hill invent the idea of the English revolution?
• How did the radicalism of the 1960s affect Hill's approach?
• Was Winstanley an anarchist?
• Was the English Revolution the beginning of modernity?

This is worth a listen if you have any interest in the 17th century or the history of radical political ideas in England.

This seems a good place to mention Conrad Russell. He was a romantic in politics, but not in his work as an academic historian - he was certainly another post-revisionist.

Reviewing a book like Hill's, he would be generous: what was valuable in it would be drawn out, but he would move on to express some doubts about it and gently edge the reader back towards more mainstream thinking.