Michael Braddick, "Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian" (Verso Books, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Ashley
Episode: Michael Braddick, “Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian” (Verso Books, 2025)
Date: December 22, 2025
Guest: Mike Braddick (Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford)

Episode Overview

This episode features historian Mike Braddick discussing his new biography of Christopher Hill, the renowned Marxist historian of 17th-century England. The conversation dives deep into Hill’s intellectual evolution, his methodological ambitions, and his complex relationship with Marxism, literature, and the historical profession. Braddick’s work seeks to recover not just the limitations, but also the ambitions of Hill’s radical reimagining of the English past.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Genesis of the Book & Hill’s Enduring Influence

[01:46–03:01]

• Braddick reveals that his engagement began as an attempt to “clear historiographical ground” for his own research on the 17th century.
• Hill’s work is portrayed as inescapable for anyone dealing with this period because of decades-long scholarly debate around his interpretations.
• What started as academic groundwork soon became an exploration of Hill’s rich and remarkable life.

“I really wanted to have a better understanding of what Hill was trying to do and not simply the limitations of what he did ... I then discovered that it’s just a really interesting life.” — Mike Braddick [02:39]

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2. Early Biography: Methodism, Moral Seriousness, and Literature

[03:01–08:37]

• Hill’s upbringing in Methodism is central: Braddick emphasizes the “moral seriousness” and sense of hope for societal improvement that Hill carried from Methodism to Marxism.
• The influence of literature: English public schools fostered abstract thinking through literature rather than philosophy, shaping not just Hill but contemporaries like Hobsbawm and Thompson.

"He thought that by writing he was intervening in the present and helping to shape paths to a different future ... And I think that kind of seriousness comes from his Methodism." — Mike Braddick [03:37]

• Hill’s turn to Marxism was not through economic critique but through a search for a theoretical system offering hope and purpose stronger than literature did.

"...he found a disjunction between the things he’d been brought up to believe in ... and the world of depression England ... and his first move was to try and understand that through modernist literary authors ... but he found that unsatisfactory ... So he moved through literary modernism to Marxism.” — Mike Braddick [07:32]

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3. Humanistic Marxism & Focus on Class

[08:37–12:22]

• Hill’s Marxism, Braddick contends, was essentially humanist—less about political economy, more about human flourishing and critiquing societal structures enforcing bourgeois values.
• Hill believed England was uniquely positioned as the first “bourgeois society”—his English focus, while internationally minded, refigured exceptionalism.

"He wants a casteless society ... It’s a terrible irony that he thought that’s what the USSR was offering..." — Mike Braddick [10:38]

"He thought England was the first bourgeois society ... It is an English exceptionalism refigured as the first bourgeois society." — Mike Braddick [12:01]

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4. Historiographical Methods: Sources, Class, and Revolution

[13:57–16:31]

• Hill used new sources, especially cheap print from the 17th century, to access wider social viewpoints, but initially still worked within established constitutional paradigms.
• Over time, Hill’s work shifted from political and constitutional focus to individual experiences during periods of social and cultural conflict.

"He engaged with the print stuff much more than previous historians, because he was interested in the world outside the court... it was primarily about the role of class in each of those constitutional resolutions." — Mike Braddick [14:16]

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5. Materialism vs. Idealism: Revisionist Debates

[19:53–23:31]

• Hill critiqued both the idealist tradition (SR Gardiner) and faced subsequent revisionist critiques accusing him of “materialist determinism,” especially regarding religious radicalism.
• Braddick defends Hill, claiming his aim was to link ideas to their social bases, not to erase the role of conscience or ideology.

"He didn’t believe ideas worked independently of power of their social basis ... you have to explain what the social and political influence of that idea rests on." — Mike Braddick [21:13]

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6. Religion, Capitalism, and Methodological Distinctions

[23:31–25:43]

• Compared to Weber and Tawney, Hill focused less on individual psychology and more on which social groups were receptive to Puritanism.
• He argued that capitalism helped create conditions for Protestant ethic, inverting the chronology of prior theorists.

"Hill operates much more on the basis of a group—which groups in society are receptive to Puritanism and what is it about their way of life that makes them receptive?" — Mike Braddick [24:28]

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7. Debates within the Left: Determinism and Social History

[29:03–32:45]

• Braddick examines Hill’s disagreements with contemporaries like Peter Laslett (Cambridge Group), stemming from Laslett’s demographic determinism regarding the nuclear family as the social base.
• Also notes a broader tension in social history: should historical focus remain on transformative politics, which Hill favored, or move toward long-term social structures, as with the Cambridge group.

"Hill didn’t like the determinism ... They argue the nuclear family predominated, and from that all other social relationships flowed ... Hill did find that reductive..." — Mike Braddick [29:23]

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8. Marxism, the Soviet Union, and Hill’s Reputation

[32:45–37:29]

• Braddick reflects on Hill’s political commitments, including an anecdote about his medical care in the USSR as a metaphor for perceived 'deafness' to Soviet critiques.
• The episode explores how Cold War politics and the Thatcher era politicized academic critiques of Hill, often associating critique of Hill with critique of Marxism itself.
• Braddick advocates dissecting these layered critiques and understanding Hill in both academic and political terms.

"For a lot of Hill’s career, the critique of Hill was a critique of Marxism rather than a critique of Hill’s way of understanding this particular problem ... I’m trying to separate it at a moment where we’re in another culture war." — Mike Braddick [36:23]

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9. Hill among his Peers: Hobsbawm, Hilton, and the Establisment

[38:54–45:33]

• Braddick contrasts Hill’s treatment with Hobsbawm and Hilton, noting Hill was often attacked more harshly, arguably because he wrote a radical history of England—a national, not global, focus—and held establishment positions.
• Hill’s “insider-outsider” position, especially as Master of Balliol, amplified public scrutiny compared to those able to retain a self-image of outsider (e.g., Hobsbawm).

"He did repent [his Stalinism] ... His Stalinism was a bit shocking. ... Hill was really consistently under attack, critical attack, whereas Hobsbawm ... became a national institution..." — Mike Braddick [40:01]

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10. Limits of Hill's English Focus and Total Historical Ambition

[45:33–54:47]

• Hill was equipped to write comparatively—he read multiple languages and published on the Russian Revolution—but his main focus remained tightly English, influenced by his upbringing and Oxford’s academic culture.
• Braddick discusses Hill’s ambition for a “total history,” which tried to unite intellectual, economic, and political analysis, and laments the later siloing and specialization of historical disciplines.
• He questions whether Hill's aversion to explicit theory limited his adaptability and flexibility, especially as the New Left emerged.

"All the way through his career he said, the thing about Marxist history is this total history, everything connects to everything ... the ambition to connect them and think what it all amounts to is an important one." — Mike Braddick [53:32]

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Memorable Quotes

• On Moral Seriousness & Marxism:
  "He wasn’t just an academic historian. I don’t think he ever saw his work simply as kind of moving academic pieces around on the academic chess board." — Mike Braddick [04:56]
• On Sources and Class:
  "He ended up using quite different sources, and he read a lot in the cheap prints of the 17th century ... It was primarily about the role of class in each of those constitutional resolutions." — Mike Braddick [14:16]
• On Revisionist Critiques:
  "I think it’s a mischaracterization of him to say that he’s not interested in individual conscience and ideas and so on ... he was clearly opposed to idealism and he wanted. But he was also clear that he wasn’t a materialist." — Mike Braddick [21:34]
• On the Totality of History:
  "The thing about Marxist history is this total history, everything connects to everything. And I think that's a good thing for us to think about." — Mike Braddick [54:43]

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Notable Timestamps

• [01:46] — Origins of Braddick’s interest in Hill
• [03:37] — The role of Methodism in Hill’s intellectual formation
• [08:37] — Early Hill and "humanistic" Marxism
• [12:22] — Hill’s choice of England as his focal point
• [14:16] — Sources and class analysis in the English Revolution
• [21:03] — Hill’s methodological response to idealism and revisionism
• [24:20] — Contrasts with Weber and Tawney on Protestantism and capitalism
• [29:03] — Disagreement with Laslett and the demographic determinism debate
• [32:45] — Separating Hill’s politics from his historical practice
• [40:01] — Hill, Hobsbawm, and the politics of historical reputation
• [45:33] — Hill’s limited comparative perspective
• [53:06] — The legacy and lessons of Hill’s unified historical approach
• [54:57] — Closing thanks and reflections

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Conclusion

Ashley and Mike Braddick’s conversation offers a nuanced and compelling portrait of Christopher Hill as both a product and a critic of his times—an historian driven by moral seriousness and ambition for total history, yet marked by the constraints of method, politics, and professional context. Braddick’s biography draws out the moral, intellectual, and political tensions at Hill’s core, offering much to historians and general readers alike interested in the ongoing battles over history’s meaning and methods.

Transcript

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[New Books Network Host]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Ashley]

Welcome to the podcast. Our guest today is Mike Braddock, senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, will be discussing his book Christopher the Life of a Radical Historian, published by Verso in 2025. So welcome Mike.

[Mike Braddock]

Thank you very much for inviting me.

[Ashley]

So I thought we might begin with the genesis of this book, and I was curious if there was one aspect or aspects of Hill's life and work that sparked your interest in writing a book about him. Yes.

[Mike Braddock]

Myself, I'm trying to make sense of the mid 17th century crisis in Britain and England in particular. And it's hard to do that without taking a position on Hill. And people have been taking a position on hill for about 40 years now, and it's hard to see past the established debate. And some of Hill's work that I was interested in didn't really fit the characterization of the that you get in the standard discussion of the state of the field. And so I really wanted to have a better understanding of what Hill was trying to do and not simply the limitations of what he did to try to and I've ended up trying to recover the ambition of Hill's work, if not his particular answers to the questions he posed. But it really started out as that kind of historiographical ground clearing for my own work. But I then discovered that it's just a really interesting life, actually, which I'm sure we'll talk about.

[Ashley]

Great, thank you. So you don't only do a historiographical ground clearing, but you go all the way back to his childhood and his birth. So I thought we might begin with some of the early biography. And you begin not with Marxism, but with Methodism.

[Mike Braddock]

Yeah.

[Ashley]

And you tease out a not very obvious connection of how one leads to the other. But I wonder if we might begin with asking you, what do we miss if we ignore this Methodist background to his upbringing and family?

[Mike Braddock]

I think there's a great seriousness, moral seriousness about his work. He thought that by writing he was intervening in the present and helping to shape paths to a different future than the one that seemed to be laid out. And I think that kind of seriousness, moral seriousness, comes from his Methodism. And I think the crisis of his Methodism left him looking for an intellectual system that offered the same kind of moral seriousness about social change and social reform. So I think it's really important for understanding what he thought he was doing by rewriting history and also how he found hope in the past for understanding the present and shaping the future. Penny Caulfield actually wrote about him. Penny's a historian herself and his niece, and she drew that connection actually between Methodism diagnosing a kind of moral. A better moral society, but also holding out the promise of its eventual achievement. And I think in the 1930s, Hill identified the same source of promise in Marxism that a proper Marxist analysis would shape a better future. And so he wasn't just an academic historian. I don't think he ever saw his work simply as kind of moving academic pieces around on the academic chess board.

[Ashley]

Something else that comes across as indispensable in his early experience in this book is his engagement with literature. And you write about his reading of a number of authors and you tie that into a broader diagnosis of alienation and dissociation in the modern world. I wonder if you could say a bit more about how that part of him builds on the one that you just talked about.

[Mike Braddock]

Yeah, he had a very literate education. He was born into a bourgeois, provincial bourgeois house and went to a fee paying school where they were educated in the great European tradition. And one thing that Eric Hobsbawm said about his contemporary English raised, British, raised historian colleagues was that they got their abstract thinking from literature, not philosophy. The English public schools didn't teach philosophy, but they did teach literature. And that's where not just Hill, but Rodney Hilton and E.P. thompson, another very literary historian, first got their interest in abstracts, refraction on the human condition from literature. So I think that's really critical for Hellenes, critical for actually the problem of diagnosing his Marxism, because he never diagnosed it in quite the kind of philosophical terms a biographer might want. He never really lays out the conceptual framework of his Marxism. That's all kind of implied in a more literary presentation of abstract ideas. So it's important in that, at that level, I think he lost his faith in methodism sometime between 1931 and 1935. It's not easy to tell how or at what point, but he first turned to literature for answers about how to be serious about the world. And at the time, the key authors were Elliot, Auden, Spender, Joyce, the modernist movement, who were all very critical of the world around them in the way that Hill was critical of the world around him. But he didn't find that political diagnosis satisfactory. So he found a disjunction between the things he'd been brought up to believe in, bourgeois politeness and civility and charity and all those things, and the world of depression England and provincial York, which was the scene of a. The setting for a famous social survey revealing the depths of the Depression. And his first move was to try and understand that through modernist literary authors writing about their alienation from the world around them. And it was through. But I think he found that unsatisfactory, as I say, because it didn't have the element of Marxism, which was predicting a resolution in the future. And so he moved through literary modernism to Marxism, I think. But particularly with this issue of the disjunction between what you're being brought up to believe and expect and what you're actually observing in the world around you.

[Ashley]

Before jumping into some of his work as a historian, I just wanted to follow up a bit on what this early biography might tell us about his Marxism. You connect it specifically with the humanistic Marxism, and there probably is something a bit tricky about pinning down what the humanistic is in humanistic Marxism. And I just. Yeah, I wonder how you think we might go from this early development in Hills as a young thinker to what we might be able to say about humanistic Marxism in particular.

[Mike Braddock]

Yeah. And he said in a later interview that his first encounter with Marxism, I think he says it was his first encounter, was capital. And he tried and tried to read capital, but it just didn't work for him. And so it wasn't the critique of bourgeois political economy that convinced him about Marxism. It was more, as he put it, the historical and philosophical writing. And I think he read Engels too, on the family, and I think the thought that grabbed him, he doesn't ever quite say this, but is what kind of society would encourage human flourishing? And it's one where the expectations of bourgeois roles associated with capitalism don't force you into unnatural postures. And it is in his life, his biography, you can see he's not particularly tied to monogamy. He's not tied to family. He thinks family and property lie at the root of many problems in social structure and life chances. And so it's more about a society in which people can flourish free of the expectations of a class structure. So I think he wants a casteless society and he's not so interested in political economy. It's that a classless society would allow us to be ourselves fully and freely. It's a terrible irony that he thought that's what the USSR was offering, but he did sincerely think that the USSR offered a. A new model society in that way. So it's not really about capital and political economy. It's more about family, property, bourgeois values, individual nourishing. So as a broad distinction, you can say it's about human flourishing rather than the structures of the economy. And therefore it's a kind of humanist Marxism. Yeah.

[Ashley]

So speaking of class, I mean, that seems to suffuse from the beginning his approach to 17th century England. The way that he is depicted in the book. It seems that he's on the one hand reacting against a certain kind of English exceptionalism in Whig constitutional history. That's kind of gradualism with modeling through as the modus operandi. But in a way, the focus is retained on England as well. Yeah, I don't know if that constitutes a new kind of English exceptionalism or something else, but I guess the question is, for Hill, as a young historian, why England? In both senses of why did he choose to focus on 17th century England? And also why, in his view, was 17th century England the site of this first bourgeois revolution?

[Mike Braddock]

Yeah, so he saw the crisis of the 30s as the crisis of bourgeois culture. And he thought the liberals had no answer. The liberals just threw up their hands in despair, he says, and one response was return to a kind of pre Enlightenment faith. Many people converted to Catholicism or returned to a kind of Christian withdrawal from the world and a hope for a future beyond this world. And he thought, rather than these two alternatives, liberal despair or a regression to an age of faith he saw Marxism as a future, but behind all that lay a view that this was the crisis of bourgeois culture. And so he wanted to understand the origins of bourgeois culture. And he thought England was the first bourgeois society. And I keep using the term England. He did mean specifically England, not Scotland, warehouse and Ireland. It was in England that bourgeois culture took root. And so it is an English exceptionalism refigured as the first bourgeois society. But it's not a nationally constrained exceptionalism, because then every society becomes bourgeois society. So there is an internationalist vision behind this concentration on England, which the Whigs don't have. Well, it'd be a bit unfair on them, but the Whigs tend to think that England is not only exceptional, but better.

[Ashley]

And the way he arrives at this very different view of the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, is that basically about reading very similar sources as orthodox constitutional historians, but from a different lens, or does he end up using quite a different set of sources?

[Mike Braddock]

He ended up using quite different sources, and he read a lot in the cheap prints of the 17th century. So one of the big material changes of the 1640s was a collapse of censorship, which meant that much more appeared in print, and you can gauge a much wider range of opinion after 1640 than before 1640 through print. So he did engage with the print stuff much more than previous historians, because he was interested in the world outside the court. But he was working. And I think this is a limitation on the first phase of his work is he worked within a paradigm that had been set by the constitutional historians that if you wanted to understand English history, you understood the constitutional moments. And he kind of accepted that as the framework and then tried to give a different explanation for each constitutional moment. And it was partly a matter of sources, and as you've already mentioned, it was primarily about the role of class in each of those constitutional resolutions. He said in a review of some constitutional history that he read in the 1930s, before he published himself, he said that this is all very interesting, this constitutional history, but behind constitutional settlements, the social power, and what we really need to understand is which classes are determining these constitutions. So the first phase was not so much new sources, although he did use new sources. It was more thinking about a constitution as a balance of social and political forces, rather than a kind of neutral institutional setting from political life.

[Ashley]

And when would you say it? That, if I understand correctly, his development. When would you say, is there a transition from understanding social and economic forces as shaping constitutional arrangements to a historical interest in the life within social and economic forces as political factors kind of in and for themselves.

[Mike Braddock]

And they're both present early on. And I think the second where he's interested in the divided hearts and the experience of people trying to make sense of a new emergent bourgeois culture that comes to dominate his work. But it is present from the very start. And I think this might not be exactly right, but I think his first, if not one of his first, if not his first publication, was an article about Andrew Marvell, the poet. And seeing in Marvel, Marvel's poetry characteristically has binaries in tension. And he kind of read that as almost a dialectic in a period of social and cultural conflict. And he was writing that article, I happen to know, in 1940. So although it didn't appear until later, it was one of his very first pieces. But most of his published work earlier is more constitutionally focused how do these constitutional ruptures occur? And most of his later work is about this more in social and cultural history and the experience of the birth of a new society as seen through the prism of individual experience.

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[Ashley]

C mintmobile.com and if we zoom out for a second, it seems like one of the big, big methodological threads that he's trying to develop is, is a materialist analysis of history which he develops against a certain kind of idealism of Christian Revolution in S.R. gardner and an earlier generation. It seems that he's sandwiched between that earlier we might call idealism and then the revisionist generation after him that accuses him of not taking seriously conscience in terms of religion and, and that he might therefore not be able to capture what is powerful about radical religion? I mean, this is somewhat fast forward a little bit, but how do you think he would have, how do you think he would have responded? Or how do you think he would respond to those later accusations that kind of make him seem like awkwardly sandwiched between generations that took kind of quote unquote ideas kind of other on terms.

[Mike Braddock]

I, I think he so I know I should say I never met him, but I think he probably would have felt it was an unfair accusation and I would sympathize with him in saying that. I think it's a mischaracterization of him to say that he's not interested in individual conscience and ideas and so on. I think he was very clear in his own mind that he didn't believe ideas worked independently of power of their social basis and to try to explain the triumph of a new ideology like neoliberalism simply as it being a better idea than the old ideas, was just not a historian's way of carrying on and not a plausible explanation. You have to explain what the social and political influence of that idea rests on. And so his work was against SR Gardner, who said that Pureanism, in emphasizing the individual conscience, eroded a constitution that rested on king and bishop. And he said that's true, but Puritanism had social roots and political roots, and he wrote a book about the opposition to the established church, showing that it was an economic and a cultural and a social institution, and that purans were attacking the whole lot. So I think he was clearly opposed to idealism and he wanted. But he was also clear that he wasn't a materialist. It wasn't that Puritanism was unimportant. It's that you couldn't understand Puritanism without understanding its material base. What he's been criticized for is being a materialist, a determinist. And I think you can find in his writing materialist and determinist moments. But as a matter of method, he was committed to not being materialist, actually. So the sandwich you set out is this SR Gardner idealism and then a Hill materialism and then a reaction against that materialism and revisionism. And that's certainly true, but I think it's a little unfair on Hill's ambition and on a lot of his work, although it is easy to find examples where he is. He does appear to be materialist or determinist. That wasn't his ambition.

[Ashley]

So if I can zoom in on a specific set of debates that he was engaged in. So, like others before him, like Max Weber and R.H. toney, he was interested in the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. There's a debate on level of chronology in terms of which preceded which. And I understand that Hill pushed back against this earlier view to say. And Hill's view was that in fact, capitalism preceded and created some of the conditions for a Protestant ethic to flourish. In addition to this chronological disagreement, would you say that there were significant methodological differences between him and the other two?

[Mike Braddock]

Yeah, I think Hill is more interested in the. Well, to put it the other way, I think Weber and Tawny both work on kind of individual psychology. What makes a puritan, and then what makes a puritan become capitalist? It's kind of a mechanism within the individual psychology. Tawny then relays that to social groups, but I think their core interest was individual psychology, whereas Hill operates much more on the basis of a group which groups in Society are receptive to Puritanism and what is it about their way of life that makes them receptive to Puritanism? And to unpick it one level further, as he does in some of his publications, Puritanism, if you see that as a variety of Calvinism, why does Calvinism become Puritanism in the English form? It's because of English social conditions. And so I think there is a methodological difference. It's not absolute. But Hill is more interested in the social conditions than the individual psychology of faith. And I think that does the revisionists have picked up on that, that he's not really explaining the individual conscience in the way that revisionists have then gone on to do.

[Ashley]

The comparison with Weber makes me think about how historians use ideal types for empirical analysis. And in the case of Hill, given the differences you just explained, I'm curious about his self consciousness as a historian. Would he have operated with the understanding that he was using a somewhat different set of ideal types to make generalizations from the other two? Or was there some potential naivete about they use their ideal types about individual psychology, but I don't use ideal types.

[Mike Braddock]

Now we're shooting in the dark a bit here because he was very averse to explicit reflection on method. I mean, my impression is that it's more the latter, that in that sense he's an English pragmatic tradition of letting your own engagement with the documents give rise to your argument. Not trying to test a thesis against the documents. But clearly he does that. I mean he tests a Marxist framework against the documents all the time. But I think he would have seen himself as operating more pragmatically. And in later interviews he, he said, people said, does anything you ever read change your framework? And he said well, yes, of course it does, and I wouldn't do it if it didn't. And you know, I don't know what else to say about that. But his framework didn't shift very far. But I think he would have seen himself as not an explicit theorizer who then went and tested against the evidence. I think he'd have seen himself as in dialogue with the evidence and his arguments arising from that dialogue. It's a subtle difference, but I think it is different from a Weberian ideal type approach.

[Ashley]

I mean this discussion makes me think about determinism in his own practice as a historian. But that, as you said, is fully speculative. So I think I'll just note that and go back to determinism as a factor in history writing, which do have some evidence for so in the book, you explain why it is very tricky to associate Hill with determinism because it was so important for him that people could change their world in a dialectical way. I wondered if we might use as an example of drawing out the specificities of this worldview and approach in zooming in on his relationship with Lazar and the Cambridge group in particular. There may have been other disagreements, but it seems like this is one nugget of disagreement in terms of Lazet's use of past registers to construct the history of the household in a way that has since become orthodox. But at the time was a new development, and Hill and Lazet seemed to sit on different sides of a fence. And I wonder if you think it would be fair to characterize that fence as something to do with determinism.

[Mike Braddock]

Yes, I think it is. That whole thing was a puzzle for me when I encountered it, because when I was a student, Laszlo and the Cambridge group was seen as a progressive force because it was history from below and social history, and it was opposed to. The then dominant figure in Cambridge, where I trained was GR Elton. And Lazlett and the Cambridge population group were a critique of that high political administrative history. But I think Hill didn't like the determinism. Basically, they argue that the core of Laszat's work was that the nuclear family predominated, and from that all other social relationships flowed. So there was a concrete material base for all sorts of social infrastructure and cultural belief and practice. And Hill did find that reductive and said he found it reductive, but it was overlain, I think, also by some of the political implications. Lazlet was a labor figure, you know, kind of traditional old labor character. And some of those characters in the Cold War conditions were very anti Marxist. And I think that that was a part of it. There was a mutual distrust. Hill saw in him kind of anti Marxist, and Lazar probably saw. I don't know, but Lazar probably saw Hill as a undermining the left with his views in Cold War conditions. I don't know if that's true, but I think there's a. Definitely a Cold War context for the divisions on the British left in Cold War conditions overlay some of the difference. And that comes out in Las Lid painting a very conservative picture of English society and in particular saying there was only one class in English society and that was the gentry, because everyone else lived in these parcelized nuclear households in deferential relationships. And class consciousness was not possible. And Hill obviously was just opposed to that view of the English past and characterized it as romantic Toryism and so on. But I think there's a political as well as a mythological division there.

[Ashley]

I wonder if there's a third thing too. Just as you're speaking. I'm wondering also whether there is a disagreement over the substantial focus that a historian should have on 17th century England. And I'm thinking back to the earlier point about constitutional history and how Hill is trying to complicate our picture of it by bringing in social and economic forces, but that the constitutional still remains important. It doesn't go away, whereas there's whether. I wonder whether he fears that that element might go away and politics as we know it no longer features in this kind of demographic approach.

[Mike Braddock]

Yeah, that never occurred to me before, but I think that's right. Lazarus own work and the work that came out of the Cambridge group subsequently has not been interested really in political transformation in the old sense. And it's been much more about long term economic and social change in the roots of industrial revolution, not political revolution. And I imagine Hill didn't like that either. It's not a thought I'd ever had, but thanks for it. But yes, I think that there's something going right back to where we started. I think Hill wanted to foster and as you've said, foster a sense that people can make their own history. And the picture Laszlo paints is one where that's really not true, actually.

[Ashley]

So coming back now to the 20th century from the 17th, one of the ambitions in this book is to disentangle some of the politics and the history in Hill's life and work. And I guess the big picture question is, I'm curious where you think that ended up at the end of the book and specifically the relationship between his Marxism and his relationship to the Soviet Union. There is an anecdote that is very entertaining, if nothing else, about his ear, his operation on an ear infection in the Soviet Union, which we might think of as a metaphor for a certain deafness to critiques of the ussr. So at the end of writing this book, at the end of the book, to what extent can this 20 something year relationship and fondness for the Soviet Union be extracted from his work as a historian? Or to what extent do we have to keep it in the frame of who he was and what work he did?

[Mike Braddock]

I think so the critique of his work really took off in the mid-70s and rose with the breakdown of the Buzzkillite consensus in the mid-70s and a rejection of a pattern of post war politics. And then the rise of a cultural renewal on the right, and that cultural renewal being associated with conventional national values and so on. And Hill's work was at that point very influential and was offering a completely different view of the national past. So the critique of Hill's work was definitely politicized, in my view. I mean, people disagree with me, but I think the way that Hill's work became politicized changed in the 70s and 80s, but there was an underlying. That there was a genuine academic critique. And one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is separate the two and understand what is wrong with Hill's work as we now understand it from the kind of Thatcher and Lake Cold War critique of the Marxist left. And they were definitely connected, in my opinion, in the 80s. And I think we can now. I'm finding I'm teaching a little bit in this area now, and I'm finding people more able to do that, to see it as a more neutral academic exercise and not a denunciation of Marxism, because I think for a lot of people, for a lot of Hill's career, the critique of Hill was a critique of Marxism rather than a critique of Hill's way of understanding this particular problem and maybe wishful thinking. That's where I'd like to get us. Because the way hill wrote the 17th century still exercises such a profound influence. It would be good if we could say something other than I don't like Marxism about it. And it may be possible. But on the other hand, we are in another moment where the British past is highly political, and mentioning something that's factually true but politically unpleasant is seen as disloyal in some way, drawing attention to some feature of the British past that doesn't serve a current political purposes, somehow unpatriotic rather than just honest. So I think we're still in a. Or we're again, in a period where the British past is becoming highly contested in purely political ways. They're not empirical disagreements. And in the slave trade, no one says there wasn't one. They just say we shouldn't talk about it so much. And that's political. That's not an empirical question, is it? So I'm not sure I'm really answering your question, Ashley. But in the 80s, that moment, the academic critique of Hill got drawn into the Thatcher, the politics of the Thatcher culture, cultural program. And I'm trying to separate it, but I'm trying to separate it at a moment where we're in another culture war. It seems limu emu and Doug here we have the Limu Emu in its.

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[Ashley]

One of the things that the book does to contextualize some of these issues is to situate Hill within a generation or peer group of other Marxists as well as other historians, including not limited to, but including those in the Communist Party's historic group such as Hobswom and Thompson. And you make some observations about commonalities that also differences in their reception, reputation and how they are ready. Whether it's about just shelf life of various ideas but also about the reputational consequences of certain decisions in relation to the Communist Party or just broader statements of intent. What would you say looking at this him comparatively with these other peer figures tells us about his specific both his approach as a historian and his fate as a historian.

[Mike Braddock]

Yeah, he was referred to as an unrepentant Stalinist and that's not true. I mean he did repent, but he suffered and more than him. Lots of his comrades had suffered in the 40s and 50s because of their communism and he didn't want to give comfort to to his former persecutors, I think. So he wouldn't. He gave plenty of denunciations of Stalinism in the party around the time of the Hungary crisis and led a kind of attempt to de Stalinize the British party and left when the attempt to destalinize failed. So it'd be. It's really unfair to say he didn't repent his Stalinism, but his Stalinism was a bit shocking. It's really hard to read some of this. He was a true believer in the 30s and 40s and early 50s. But he did repent and he repented at least as much as Eric Hobsbawm. And Hobsbawm stayed in the party for reasons we could talk about. But Hobsbawm didn't suffer the same kind of critique and in fact ended up as a companion of honour. And I think it's because Horsbawm wrote about Europe and the globe, not about Britain. Basically, I think Hill was rewriting the national story from a Marxist perspective and that became less and less popular through the Cold War years for mythological reasons, but also political reasons. And yeah, I think that's the, that's what really did for him. After retirement, Hill was really consistently under attack, critical attack, whereas Hobsbawm in retirement became a national institution. And I think there's another contrast with Hilton, who left the party with Hill at the same moment but rejoined the party later. But again, Hilton doesn't attract the same kind of hostility for his Stalinism, which I think was equally sincere. I think Hobson was probably never a Stalinist, actually. I mean he, he was less, his Marxism was less tied to the Soviet Union and was more philosophical and Germanic and came out of an anti fascist mobilization and interwar Austria. So there are different kinds of Marxists and that might be part of the explanation for Hog Spawn's kind of treatment. But I think it's really the difference about what they write about, whether they figure.

[Ashley]

I wonder how much significance you would attribute to an adjacent, but yet another factor, which is the ways in which these figures were insiders and outsiders in relation to the British establishment, not only in what they write, but also how, how they see themselves. So Hill being the master of Baydel College and kind of an Oxford figure, and Hobsbawm, as you say, it seems inaccurate to think of him as a complete outsider because he was celebrated in many ways, but he was somehow able to maintain a self image as an outsider. And that may have to do with the writing too. But I wonder whether this, this proximity to the establishment, which one might have thought could have Protected Hill actually exposed him more.

[Mike Braddock]

Yes, I think that's probably true as well. I hadn't thought about that either, so thank you again. But I think that's true. It definitely protected him in the 50s and he said that. But during the mid-50s, lots of communists lost their positions and found it hard to get into jobs at all. And Hill was very grateful to Balliol for protecting him in that environment. But I think it did expose him after he became Master. In particular, whereas Hawthorne lived this more metropolitan, urbane life, a jazz critic and teaching at Birkbeck, you know, mature students and evening classes, it's a much less establishment life. I think that's probably true. Yeah.

[Ashley]

Yeah. I mean, I think the. The comparison between Hill and Hobsbawm makes me go back again to the why England? Question. Because the history of England and Britain features quite differently for these two historians. And I guess I was a bit surprised reading this book to see how rarely Hill ventured beyond English history explicitly. As you said earlier, there is an internationalist dimension and set of motivations to why the English past is important. But at least at first glance, one might have thought for 20th century. For the 20th century British left that aspects of the non British past might be just as important as aspects of the British past. And I would be curious to hear the extent to which he'll actively recognized that and thought that and whether there are clues as to how his focus on the English past might or might not dovetail with other forms of historical consciousness to form a larger repository on which the modern British left should draw on.

[Mike Braddock]

Yeah, I think he certainly was equipped to. He read. He was a bud linguist and he read in French and German, I think Italian and Russian. And he translated from Russian and was interested in. He wrote a book about Lenin and the Russian Revolution and translated Russian scholarship into English. So he was certainly equipped to range more widely. But his points of reference, as you say, are very narrow. He compares Cromwell to Napoleon and Lenin. He compares 1649 to 1789 and 1917 and some of his work on Calvinism. He compares England with Geneva, so Calvin's Geneva with Elizabeth's England. And why the Calvinism looks different in the ways that he was interested in it. So he did have the comparison in mind, but it was very narrow and I'm not aware of him ever really commenting on that. It's really narrow because he never published on Scotland and he only published on English views of Ireland. He never published on Ireland, although they were all under the same monarch. So he's very definitely An English historian. I think part of it is the explanation I gave to start with that the English Revolution is different from what happened in Scotland and Ireland in the same period and is of global significance because it's a model for other states later. But I suspect there is a kind of. He was slightly caged by his background and upbringing, that they were brought, as he said, he was brought up to think that England was a peculiarly important place. Top nation until 1929, he used to say. And he taught in Oxford where English history was the core of the curriculum and specifically English, not Scottish and Irish. And so his professional formation and his background didn't give him much reason to think of writing history other than English history once that's what he'd plumped for. But he did know well and as I say, his book on Lenin and the Russian Revolution is very skewed in an anti Trotskyite way. But it was quite influential, it went through three editions, it was very well regarded. History, Russian Revolution. So he's fully capable of thinking about other things. So again, in the absence of anyone putting the question to him and writing the answer down, I don't really know the answer to the question, but I think that there is probably something about the assumptions of Oxford at the time and what the curriculum was about and what subjects were studying and what weren't. Hmm.

[Ashley]

I thought we might move towards a conclusion by talking a bit about what it means to engage with Hill's ambitions for kind of a total history unifying history. Reading him today, one of the challenges, it seems, is that he is averse to overt theoretical discussion. As you mentioned, you do connect him to more theoretical thinkers at various points, like Antonio Gramsci or for example, this earlier discussion about authenticity and flourishing could be connected to all kinds of other thinkers. But he doesn't do that explicitly. So the reader in this case, you had to do that. In addition to it being a challenge for a biographer, I guess I thought to pose it quite brazenly and see how you reflect. Do you think he would just straightforwardly have been a better and more significant historian if he had been more theoretically explicit, or do you have a more nuanced view of that question?

[Mike Braddock]

I think all of us benefit from reflecting explicitly on our assumptions and challenging ourselves. And my feeling about him in some of his response to the critiques at the end of his career was that he wasn't very self reflective actually. And this averseness to thinking about his method had made him settle on a method and stick to it. And so one thing I'd say there is that he's much better than me at reading literary texts. I mean, he, he gets much more out of literary texts than I do. And it's really, for me, enriching to read Milton or Marvel or with Hill. But when he comes to the contradictions and tensions in their writing, he always goes for class as the explanation. And I think if he'd tried to theorize that and say that everyone's contradictions in their literary expression are always class based, he might have been forced to think about some of the things that were happening on the New Left, for example. So one of the things that's puzzling about him is that he had all the incentive to move to the New Left, as AP Thompson kind of did, depending on what you think about a Thompson. But Hill didn't. And he stuck with this very class based analysis. So I'm talking about me, not him really. But I think it would have helped him to think about his conceptual and theoretical position more because I think he might have shifted more if he'd done it because there is a rigidity in the end about, you know, I don't want to put readers off reading Hill. I wrote the book with the opposite intention. But there is, in the end, he always plumps the same way when it comes to what is really going on here. The answer is always class. And I think if you read some of the New Left rightists, they're just much more flexible in explaining that sort of tension in people's worldviews.

[Ashley]

One other dimension of his unifying ambition is to cut across approaches and disciplines of history that might easily have been compartmentalized and are indeed often compartmentalized today. Which leads me to asking what resources of any you think he might offer for an age in which historical inquiry has become more specialized and more siloed, which has its benefit, but also certainly makes it difficult to have any sense of the total view. The challenge is, I suppose, perhaps at face value, he might look like he's someone from a few generations ago, which he is. So the exact methods and the way he reads horses might not be what's desirable or feasible today. But if we go a bit deeper, how can he speak to the possibilities of a more unified kind of historical inquiry going forward?

[Mike Braddock]

That's a really tough question. I mean, I think I ended up admiring the ambition. And he wrote, and I can't remember exactly when, but in the 80s he wrote in, there was an interview where he said, increasingly intellectual historians do intellectual history divorced from any other aspect of life. Economic historians don't have any ideas in the work. It's all material. And he pointed to some examples of work that he thought was making the connections that needed to be made. But it's back to your previous question. He didn't really offer you any guidance on how to do that systematically, what are the connections we need to make and how do we do it? So he doesn't really offer a prescription. But the situation he described in that interview has, in my opinion, got even more marked that people can lead conduct whole careers now in highly technically specialized historiographies that don't really engage with historiographies that are right next to them. And the ambition to connect them and think what it all amounts to is an important one, I think, for history. But I haven't been able to extract from Hill the model for how to do it. But all the way through his career he said, the thing about Marxist history is this total history, everything connects to everything. And I think that's a good thing for us to think about.

[Ashley]

Well, perhaps an idea for the next book. On that note, I think we'll wrap up there today. Thanks, Mike, for being on the podcast. It's been a pleasure.

[Mike Braddock]

Thank you very much.

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