Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism by James Simpson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism by James Simpson Clare Costley King'oo James Simpson. Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. xv, 444. $35.00. It is an oft-repeated axiom that the Protestant Reformation inaugurated the modern liberal era in the West. In abbreviated form, the story, derived largely from nineteenth-century "Whig" historiography, goes something like this. When Martin Luther dared to assert that salvation [End Page 411] was effected by faith alone (sola fide), and that theology and ecclesiology were to be judged by the Bible alone (sola scriptura), he inspired a radical religious movement that would rapidly unfetter Europe from the repressive, fraudulent bondage of the medieval Church. By encouraging individual parishioners to read the Scriptures on their own, and by simultaneously suggesting that the devout—as members of a nonhierarchical priesthood of all believers—had a personal duty to evaluate every Christian creed and convention against biblical standards, Luther permitted, perhaps even facilitated, widespread dissent from established dogma. In conflict with the long-held authority of the papacy, the intellectual ground was thus prepared for the cultivation of modern liberalism, with its affirmation of individual rights (for example, the right to consent to governance) and its concomitant emphasis on individual responsibilities (for example, the responsibility to participate in the democratic process). James Simpson's new monograph, Permanent Reformation: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism, challenges every major assumption behind this narrative. In eighteen thought-provoking chapters (organized into seven parts), Simpson looks afresh at both the origins and the outcomes of the Protestant Reformation. His principal body of evidence comprises the literature of England, both polemical and imaginative, produced from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, or, roughly, from the reign of Henry VIII to that of Charles II. This substantial and varied literary archive, Simpson demonstrates, tells an unsettling tale. Though it is frequently avowed that modern liberalism descends in a direct line from the Reformation, an honest analysis of the literature of the time reveals that the genealogical relationship between liberalism and evangelicalism (Simpson's preferred term for Protestantism) might be better understood as a collateral one. Far from fostering liberal principles, Simpson stresses, the evangelical reasoning developed by Luther and his fellow reformers (Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, William Tyndale) advanced a stark authoritarianism in theology and politics—an authoritarianism that in one way or another shaped the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Bunyan. Moreover, to acknowledge the authoritarian tendencies of sixteenth-century Reformation theology is to recognize that the proto-liberalism that emerged in the closing decades of the seventeenth century (evident, for instance, in the political philosophy of John Locke) was formulated in complete antithesis to the dominant [End Page 412] evangelical outlook. Modern liberalism, Simpson suggests, should not, therefore, be viewed as the anticipated, legitimate heir to the Reformation, but rather as Protestant Christianity's unexpected, and somewhat rebellious, younger sibling. In addition to positing that evangelicalism and liberalism share an adjacent, sibling-like relationship (and thus an inevitable sibling-like rivalry), Simpson makes a second, larger, but more provisional, claim about the recursive structures of assertion and denial in all modern revolutionary contexts. Here, he borrows the phrase "permanent revolution" from Marxist theory (with an explicit nod to Leon Trotsky), using it as shorthand for his model of continuous reformation-in-refutation. Simpson proposes that it takes a minimum of 150 years for the fallout of any revolution to settle. With regard to the momentous upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, that period began, he submits, in the early sixteenth century, when Luther first endeavored to redesign Christian salvation, shunning the conciliatory customs of the Roman Church (such as the sacrament of penance) in favor of a soteriology based solely on divinely gifted faith. It ended a century-and-a-half later with the outright rejection by proto-Enlightenment thinkers of the many difficult social and psychological consequences of that Lutheran substitution. Herein lies the irony: precisely because evangelical discourse...