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Kaye 2000
Kaye 2000
To cite this article: Harvey J. Kaye (2000) Fanning the Spark of Hope in the Past:
the British Marxist Historians, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and
Practice, 4:3, 281-294, DOI: 10.1080/136425200456976
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/136425200456976
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Rethinking History 4:3 (2000), pp. 281–294
Harvey J. Kaye
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
We have assembled in this extraordinary international congress, on the eve
of a new century, to assess this past century’s historiographies and to delib-
erate where we should take our beloved discipline. In particular, I have been
asked to speak reectively of the British Marxist historians.
Yet before I do, I must pause to ask: how should we pursue such assess-
ments? Beyond the essential scholarly objectivity, and beyond the desired
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Rethinking History ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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282 Harvey J. Kaye
reservations about, if not scorn for, Furet, because of his alignment with con-
servative forces.
But consider this: Furet – who in his youth had stood on the left, but after
1956 had moved steadily rightwards – did not accept that humanity was inca-
pable of imagining and pursuing anything more progressive than capitalist
democracy. To his credit, he did not subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s (1992)
audacious thesis about the ‘End of History’ or Margaret Thatcher’s bold
assertion, parroted today by politicians right and left, that ‘there is no alterna-
tive’. Furet wrote:
The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and
no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying
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Whatever reservations I might have had, I say ‘Three cheers for Furet!!!’.
Of course, historians cannot themselves conjure up a political vision for
the Twenty-rst century, democratic or otherwise. Neither Furet nor I would
allow for such a thing. However, I think Furet would have agreed with me
when I say that historians do have much to offer to democratic thought and
politics.
Ruling classes and governing elites have always rightly feared history and
persistently tried to control knowledge and understanding of the past. In this
way they have hoped to persuade those whom they have dominated that the
way things are is the way they ought to be or, at least, the only way they can
be. The powerful have forever sought to set limits to memory, consciousness
and imagination in order to instill a worldview that proclaims ‘resistance is
futile’.
Though I hate to link them together in the same sentence, I have in mind
both the receding century’s totalitarian regimes and not merely a few of its
more liberal ones. Most of us in attendance here may not be trapped in an
Orwellian nightmare. But who among us would deny the need for vigilance?
Even now we should heed the warning of historian Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi:
In the world in which we live it is no longer merely a question of the decay of
collective memory and the declining consciousness of the past, but of the
The British Marxist Historians 283
however tragic and ironic the dialectic of history, the creation of polities and
social orders characterized by greater freedom, equality and democracy is
possible. We can proffer no guarantees, no predeterminations or predestina-
tions – just possibilities. And we have a democratic obligation to do so (Kaye
1991 and 1996).
Furthermore, we can advance the historical education of desire – that is,
we can inform popular deliberations and agencies with the experiences, aspir-
ations and visions of those who have preceded us. As the English writer John
Berger years ago remarked: ‘A people or class which is cut off from its own
past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has
been able to situate itself in history’ (Berger 1972).
The words of the German–Jewish critic and Frankfurt School associate,
Walter Benjamin, who tragically succumbed to despair and committed suicide
in the Pyrennes while trying to escape the Nazis, continue to summon us. In
Theses in the Philosophy of History, Benjamin wrote:
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past
who is rmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy [the
ruling class] if the enemy wins. And the enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
(Benjamin 1991)
remind us that, however daunting our own task, we surely face less horric
circumstances.)
Those then-young men and women perceived the British Labour Party to
be incapable of adequately addressing the crisis of capital and the threat to
freedom and democracy. Seeking a more radical alternative, they joined the
Communist Party while still at university, hoping to contribute to working-
class struggles and the making of socialism.
War interrupted their studies and campaigning, and many of them served
in combat roles in the British Army. Returning home in 1945 to complete
their degrees and secure teaching posts, they came together in the Commu-
nist Party Historians’ Group, eager to foster and popularize a Marxist
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that the critical refashioning of British history had to entail more than empha-
sizing political economy and class. It had to involve, as well, the recovery of
the experiences of the ‘common people’.
In A People’s History of England (published in 1938), Morton led the way
in ‘democratizing’ the past. His text extended the bounds of those who were
to be included in the historical record and it made that record accessible to a
popular readership. (Even today – with all its faults – A People’s History
affords a model of popular history writing from which we could learn)
(Morton 1938).
Though Dona Torr herself often defended orthodoxy, she fervently chal-
lenged her comrades in the Group to reject economic determinism and fatal-
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Americans say, ‘history from the bottom up’. The French Annalistes may have
originated this approach; but the British Marxists turned it in a more critical
direction.
Given their interest in class struggle, the British Marxists – especially
Victor Kiernan – did not fail to attend to the powerful and propertied (for
example Kiernan 1980 and Kaye 1988, and also Thompson 1975), but they
especially committed their energies to reappropriating the lives and agencies
of the labouring classes – peasants, artisans and workers.
Marx himself had called attention to the suppression of working-class
history. On one occasion he stated: ‘I know the heroic struggles the English
working class has gone through since the middle of the last century; struggles
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not the less glorious because they are shrouded in obscurity and burked by
middle-class historians’. And in a paragraph we have come to know by heart,
E. P. Thompson declared his and his comrades’ historical ambitions:
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’
handloom weavers, the utopian artisan, and even the deluded followers of
Joanna Southcott from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and
traditions may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may
have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy.
But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not.
Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and if they were
casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.
(Thompson 1963: 12)
They revealed not a narrow history of ideas originating in the heads of intel-
lectuals, but a history of popular ideology standing in dialectical relationship
to the traditional history of politics and ideas. Alongside Magna Carta we
now encounter the Peasant Rising of 1381 calling for an end to overlords.
Outside of Parliament in the Seventeenth century we now witness Levellers,
Diggers and Ranters demanding rights and equalities. In the streets of Eight-
eenth century London, we now hear not just John Wilkes, but also the
common people asserting the ‘rights of freeborn Englishmen’. And in the Age
of Revolution we now behold English Jacobins, Luddites, and Chartists plant-
ing new trees of liberty and cultivating democratic possibilities.
At the same time, the British Marxists established their own ‘intellectual’
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pantheon: John Ball and his fellow radical priests in the late Fourteenth
century; Gerrard Winstanley, John Milton, and John Bunyan in the Seven-
teenth; Tom Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft in the late Eighteenth; and
William Wordsworth, William Blake, William Cobbett, Robert Owen, Ernest
Jones, Karl Marx, and William Morris in the Nineteenth.6
Yet the British Marxists did not leave it at that. They explored the dialec-
tics of ideology and popular protest. Based both on their democratic sensi-
bilities and on what they discovered in the archives, they rejected the Leninist
conception of class formation and politics which emphasized a vanguard or
substitutionist role for intellectuals in leading workers to class consciousness.
The histories they produced reected a richer Gramscian understanding of
the process of class formation and the relationship between intellectuals and
working people.
Through the works of the British Marxists we have come to appreciate the
common people in history not simply as economic agents, that is, as labour-
ers and material providers, not simply as political agents, that is, as rebels
and insurgents, but also as cultural agents, that is, as valuers and visionaries.
In short, peasants, artisans and workers – not only philosophers and theor-
ists – have contributed to the making of our modern conceptions, relations
and practices of liberty, equality and democracy.
Finally, by way of class-struggle analysis, history from the bottom up, and
the recovery of the radical democratic tradition, the British Marxists effec-
tively ‘deconstructed’ the grand narratives of Right and Left. They under-
mined both the Liberal–Whig and the Orthodox–Marxist versions of history.
In the former case, modern English freedoms were comprehended as the
outcome of a continuously unfolding, ever-advancing, evolutionary process
commencing in Anglo–Saxon times. And in the latter case, world history was
conceived of as a pre–arranged series of progressive stages determined by
technological and economic developments (in the fashion of ‘Base & Super-
structure’).
The British Marxists challenged both the cold-war modernizationist and
The British Marxist Historians 289
the cold-war Marxist stories of the making of the modern world, both of
which accentuated and celebrated the ‘role of the bourgeoisie and middle
classes’ in the development of capitalism and liberal democracy. They also
confronted the myths of postwar social science and history, such as ‘peasant
passivity’ and ‘working-class authoritarianism’.
But they did more than undermine, challenge and confront. The British
Marxists excavated and laid the foundations for a new grand narrative of
history. Again, this new narrative appreciates human agency and the funda-
mental role of working people in the making of the modern world, not just
as labourers and material providers, but also as progenitors of and aspirants
for freedom, equality and democracy.
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Clearly, we have to study the past afresh and write our own histories. We
have to develop fresh means of engaging our fellow citizens. And yet, as we
confront the powers, mystications, and illusions of the day, we would do
well to appreciate, if not emulate, the work of the British Marxist historians,
for they possessed the gift of which Benjamin wrote. They redeemed the lives
and struggles of those whose place in the making of history had been
neglected or denied. They revealed the ideas and aspirations which motivated
the diverse movements of the exploited and oppressed. They contested, and
helped to transform, the reigning grand narratives. And, in doing so, they
fanned the spark of hope in the past.
We should try to do as much. La lucha continua!
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Acknowledgement
Notes
1 For radically different views of socialist and democratic possibilities, see Singer
(1999) and Bourdieu (1999).
2 The book instigated a vibrant debate on the question of the transition, reaching
well beyond the Historians’ Group. See Rodney Hilton (1976).
3 Torr edited Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence 1846–1895 (London:
Lawrence, 1934) and authored Tom Mann and His Times (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1956). For a sampler of work produced by the Group in honor of Torr,
see John Saville (1954).
4 For example: Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London: Methuen, 1973),
The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1975),
and Class Conict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London: Hambledon Press, 1984);
Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg,
1958), Society and Puritanism in Prevolutionary England (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1964), and Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford
University Press, 1965); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution
(Oxford University Press, 1959), Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford University Press,
1962), The Crowd in History (New York: Wiley, 1964), Captain Swing with E.J.
Hobsbawm (New York: Pantheon, 1968), and The Face in the Crowd edited by
H.J. Kaye (London: Harvester, 1988); Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels
(Manchester University Press, 1959), Labouring Men (London: Weidenfeld, 1964),
and Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge University Press, 1990); E.P.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963),
292 Harvey J. Kaye
Whigs and Hunters (London: Allen Lane, 1975), and Customs in Common (New
York: New Press, 1991); John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist
Movement (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and The Labour Movement in
Britain (London: Faber & Faber, 1988); Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (New
York: Pantheon, 1984); Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1972 rev.ed.), State and Society in Europe, 1550–1650 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1980), European Empires from Conquest to Collapse (New York:
Pantheon, 1982), and H.J. Kaye, ed., Imperialism and Its Contradictions (New
York: Routledge, 1995). For additional bibliographical references, see Kaye, The
British Marxist Historians and The Education of Desire.
5 For a rather different view of the class question, see David Cannidine, The Rise
and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). It
amazes me that after a generation of Thatcherism and Reaganism, that is, vigorous
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class war from above, historians and social scientists have taken to eschewing the
centrality of class and class conict in the modern world.
6 See George Rudé, Ideology and Popular Protest (1980; University of North
Carolina Press, 1995) and Harvey J. Kaye, ‘Political Theory and History: Antonio
Gramsci and the British Marxist Historians’ in The Education of Desire, pp. 9–30.
Also, see for example: Christopher Hill, ed., The World Turned Upside Down
(1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and
Other Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Milton and the English Revol-
ution (London: Faber, 1977), and A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John
Bunyan and His Church (London: Allen Lane, 1988); and E.P. Thompson, William
Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955; New York: Pantheon, 1977), Persons
and Polemics (London: Merlin Press, 1994), Witness Against the Beast: William
Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, 1993), and The Romantics (new
York: New Press, 1997); and Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People (New York:
New Press, 1998).
7 In particular, one could nd the historians’ essays, commentaries and reviews in
the periodicals New Society, New Statesman, The London Review of Books,
Tribune, and Marxism Today. See David Rubinstein, ed., People for the People
(London: Ithaca Press, 1973) for a collection of biographical and movement
portraits by the historians and others which originally appeared as a series in
Tribune.
8 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld, 1962),
The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld, 1975), The Age of Empire,
1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), and The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991
(New York: Pantheon, 1995). Also, see Eric Hobsbawm, On History (New York:
New Press, 1997), for a collection of his historiographical writings.
9 See Harvey J. Kaye, ‘E. P. Thompson, the British Marxist Historical Tradition and
the Contemporary Crisis’, in The Education of Desire, pp. 98–115. For examples
of Thompson’s most engaged writings, see Writing by Candlelight (London: Merlin
Press, 1980), Protest and Survive, with other contributors (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1980), and The Heavy Dancers (London: Merlin Press, 1984).
The British Marxist Historians 293
References