On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

There has not been a time since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in which so many radically irreconcilable views of the seventeenth century have been competing for acceptance. Certainly, the impact of marxism and of the social determinism inherent in the great controversy about whether the gentry were rising or falling (or neither), and what difference it made anyway, was disruptive; but these disruptions occurred within the framework of a generally-accepted whig paradigm. Was marxism ever anything more than whig history with statistics? The answer is perhaps no, though it was frequently less, lacking statistics where they surely ought to have been. Seventeenth-century historiography would seem to exemplify well Lawrence Stone's thesis that dissatisfaction with social and economic determinism has resulted in a return to narrative history.' Looking back we might see marxism and other social determinisms as attempts to modernize the whig paradigm,2 and our predicament as the result of the failure of these attempts at modernization. To grasp the pattern underlying recent revisionist work on the early Stuart period we need to look briefly at this failure. This will give us some idea of what 'revisionism' is intended to do (and what it does in fact do). The chief characteristic of the work done in the I950s, I960s and early I970S (whether from the marxist perspective of Hill or the sociological perspectives of Stone and Zagorin) was an attempt to graft onto a basically whig political history some sort of social dimension. The problem with this was not that no satisfactory or meaningful links could be made between society and politics. Rather, the links that could be made were coming to be seen as over-reliant on reductionist assumptions. Once the essential emptiness of reductionism was recognized, the return to narrative (in Stone's very loose sense) became inevitable. This point is a simple one: if it is accepted that politics can never be 'reduced' to something else or explained totally in terms of some other thing, then it becomes necessary to treat it, at least in part, on its own terms as an activity with