Texte de Peter Linebaugh et Marcus Rediker à propos du livre de Michael Braddicks sur Christopher Hill, The Life of a Radical Historian.
Christopher Hill was one of the most prolific and influential historians of the 20th century. He was also the product of two specific eras of political and social change: the Old Left’s communist and working-class movements of the 1930s and ’40s, and the New Left’s liberation and countercultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s.
At the end of the former, in 1940, Hill wrote The English Revolution 1640, which provided a class analysis of the bourgeois revolution against feudalism and charted a lifetime of scholarship ahead. In the middle of the latter, in 1972, Hill published another book on the same period, his most profound and lasting work, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. A social and intellectual history of religious radicals who pioneered the modern ideas and practices of democracy and equality, it was also a book that explored a commoners’ “revolution within the revolution” that, although it failed, nonetheless represented a deep origin story for the history of modern radicalism. Both books, inspired by the movements of their time, helped create the breakthrough that we have now come to call “history from below.”
