Radicalism in a Traditional Society: The Evaluation of Radical Thought in the English Commonwealth 1649–1660

Abstract

Chapter 2 examines the problems confronting late twentieth-century historiography in dealing with the exceptionalism of a significant body of English radical political thought emerging in the 1640s and continuing into the 1650s. The failure of those ideas to achieve their objectives and the tendency to rehabilitate them by associating them with long-term success stories is explored as is the problematic of assessing radical thought in terms of ‘realism’ and that of viewing them through the prism of linguistic paradigms. Finding these approaches to evaluation wanting, it is suggested that a better basis of assessment might be through the essential function of delegitimation (of the status quo), legitimation of a preferred alternative and the devising of means of transformation from the one to the other. The chapter concludes by examining the implications of this approach.

How do we know if, whilst we are disputing these things, another company of men shall (not) gather together, and put out a paper perhaps as plausible as this? I do not know why it might not be done by that time you have agreed upon this, or got hands to it if that be the way. And not only another, and another, but many of this kind. And if so, what do you think the consequences of that would be? Would it not be confusion? Would it not be utter confusion ? (Oliver Cromwell at Putney, 28 October 1647). ¹

Who made thee a prince and judge over us? If God made thee make it manifest to us; if the people where did we meet to do it? Who took our subscriptions? To whom deputed we our authority? And when and where did those deputies make the choice ?

(Edward Sexby and Silius Titus, Killing No Murder (1657), p. 2)

An earlier version of the paper this chapter is based on was read at the conference of Australasian Historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe in Melbourne in May 1981. I am indebted to Lotte Mulligan, John Salmon, Austin Woolrych and my colleagues Miles Fairburn, Linda Hardy and Knud Haakonssen, for their comments and criticisms.