Challenge hill biography of christopher

Challenge hill biography of christopher: Christopher Brian Hills (April

A fascinating portrait of a remarkable scholar. A splendid biography. Braddick reveals Hill as a profound historical thinker and a vital voice in contemporary discussions of the English Revolution. Shopping cart Your cart is empty. Personal life [ edit ]. Selected works [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. Retrieved 6 October Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed.

Oxford University Press.

Challenge hill biography of christopher: Christopher Robert Hill (born

January Retrieved 29 June Subscription or UK public library membership required. The Guardian. Retrieved 28 September ISSN Retrieved 7 May The Independent. London: Verso. ISBN The London Gazette Supplement. Retrieved 30 June References [ edit ]. External links [ edit ]. No historian could have overthrown this orthodoxy on his own, so clearly Hill had caught the mood of the times, and he was followed by a large group of younger scholars, including many of his own pupils.

Nor could any form of doctrinaire Marxism have had such an effect, a point underlined by the fact that very few of those who admired his work had ever toyed with Marxist theory. After retiring as Master of Balliol he worked as a visiting professor at the Open University. There are few activities more cooperative than the writing of history.

The author puts his name brashly on the title-page and the reviewers rightly attack him for his errors and misinterpretations; but none knows better than he how much his whole enterprise depends on the preceding labours of others. There were, we may oversimplify, two revolutions in mid-seventeenth-century England. The one which succeeded established the sacred rights of property abolition of feudal tenures, no arbitrary taxationgave political power to the propertied sovereignty of Parliament and common law, abolition of prerogative courtsand removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property - the protestant ethic.

There was, however, another revolution which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the Protestant ethic. The object of the present book is to look at this revolt within the Revolution and the fascinating flood of radical ideas which it threw up.

History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.

Challenge hill biography of christopher: Marxist historian whose radical interpretation

The Levellers were better understood as political democracy established itself in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England; the Diggers have something to say to twentieth-century socialists. Now that the Protestant ethic itself, the greatest achievement of European bourgeois society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is at last being questioned after a rule of three or four centuries, we can study with a new sympathy the Diggers, the Ranters, and the many other daring thinkers who in the seventeenth century refused to bow down and worship it.

The undoubted dominance of Christopher Hill in the history of the English Revolution may be attributed to his prolific record of books and articles, and his continuous engagement in debate with other historians; to the breadth of his learning, embracing the history of literature, the law, science, as well as religion and economics; to the fact that his work set the agenda and the standard to which all historians of the period had to address themselves, whether in support of or opposition to his methods and interpretations; but above all to the inspiration he drew from Marxism.

The English Revolution took place in a culture dominated by religious ideas and religious language, and Christopher Hill recognised that he had to uncover the social context of religion in "challenge hill biography of christopher" to find the key to understanding the English Revolution, and as a Marxist to ascertain the interrelationships between the intellectual and social aspects of the period.

Christopher Hill spent his life seeking to persuade people that the English Revolution was a decisive event or, as he titled his last book, England's Turning Pointand he succeeded. A brilliant, often sardonic wit, an incisive mind, and a deeply compassionate person, he was the finest product of the British radical tradition, and he did more than anybody to establish Marxism as central to that tradition.

It is hard to accept that there will no longer, year by year, be a new book by Christopher Hill, enlightening, stimulating new thoughts, and no doubt something to quarrel with. Christopher Hill, who has died aged 91, was the commanding interpreter of 17th-century England, and of much else besides. As a public figure, he achieved his greatest fame as master of Balliol College, Oxford, a post he held from until Yet it was as the defining Marxist historian of the century of revolution, the title of one of the most widely studied of his many books, that he became known to generations of students around the world.

For all these, too, he will always be the master. It would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that Hill created the way in which the people of late 20th-century Britain - and the left in particular - looked at the history of 17th-century England. As he never tired of pointing out, some of the themes he illuminated so richly had already been explored by left-wing scholars in the s.

But fromwhen he published his tercentenary essay, The English Revolutionhis own voluminously expanding and unfailingly literate work became the starting point of most subsequent interpretation, even for those who rejected his method and conclusions. No historian of recent times was so synonymous with his period of study; he is the reason why most of us know anything about the 17th century at all.

He was, EP Thompson once said, the dean and paragon of English historians. Hill was born in York, where his father was a solicitor. His parents were Methodists, a fact to which he attributed his lifelong political and intellectual apostasy. Though his life was to be the embodiment of a secularised form of dissent, his high moral seriousness and egalitarianism surely had roots in this radical Protestant background.

Galbraith, in particular, was to remain an immense influence. Hill's association with Balliol was to continue, with only brief interruptions, from his arrival as an undergraduate in until his retirement as master 47 years later. Academic honours regularly fell his way, starting with the prestigious Lothian prize inand continuing with a first-class degree in and an All Souls fellowship that winter.

But he was a successful rugby player too, the scorer of a famous cup-winning try for Balliol. Even more lastingly, he had become a Marxist. Exactly when and why this happened is uncertain, since Hill was always notoriously inscrutable about discussing his personal life. He challenge hill biography of christopher claimed it came about through trying to make sense of the 17th-century metaphysical poets, but although he read Marx as an undergraduate, the moment of his conversion to communism is elusive.

His contemporary, RW Southern, once teasingly remembered "a time when Christopher was not in the least bit leftish", but Hill was an undergraduate during the period of the great depression, the hunger marches, the New Deal, Hitler's rise he visited the Weimar Republic before going up to Oxfordand the first favourable impact of Stalin in the west.

He was a regular attender at GDH Cole's Thursday Lunch Club, where, as he once put it, "I was forced to ask questions about my own society which had previously not occurred to me. Certainly by the time he graduated, Hill had joined the Communist party. Inhe spent a year in the Soviet Union, during which he was very ill, but also formed a lasting affection for Russian life - and a somewhat less lasting one for Soviet politics.

After Moscow, he had two years as an assistant lecturer at University College, Cardiff, before returning to Balliol as a fellow and tutor in modern history. Inhe was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, before becoming a major in the intelligence corps and being seconded to the Foreign Office from until the end of the war.

This was, to put it mildly, an intriguing period, about which he rarely let fall much detail. Then, inarising out of intensive debate among a group of Marxist historians, who included Leslie Morton, Robin Page Arnot and - particularly influential on Hill - Dona Torr, came the decisive The English Revolution The essay was originally published as one of a collection of three reflections the others were by Margaret James and Edgell Rickword.

Hill's contribution, which was subsequently published alone, was a no-holds-barred assertion of the revolutionary nature of England between andand an assault on the traditional presentation of these years as an aberration in the stately continuity of English history. The book, he said, "was written very fast and in a good deal of anger, [and] was intended to be my last will and testament.

The discussions surround- ing Hill's essay also produced, inthe Communist Party Historians Group, an association he regarded as "the greatest single influence" on his subsequent work. It also generated the path-breaking collection of documents, The Good Old Cause, that he edited with Dell in The active, year involvement with communism, which also led to his short biography, Lenin And The Russian Revolutioncame to a crisis after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in Along with many in the CP, Hill had become disenchanted with the party's lack of democracy and its reluctance to criticise the Soviet Union.

Both issues came to a head in the late weeks ofthough his own break did not come until the following year. The English Revolution, 4. Lenin and the Russian Revolution 3. Milton and the English Revolution 4. Reformation to Industrial Revolution 3. Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution: Revisited 4. The History Book Goodreads Librari Never too Late to