The English People and the English Revolution Revisited

Abstract

��� Revolutions accelerate historical time. In so doing, they raise important questions about how far the political forms and ideas informing them are created by the experience of revolution and how far the dislocations of power disclose ideas and forms predating the experience of revolution. This paper examines these issues through the prism of popular politics in the English revolution. It argues that previous attempts to carve out a role for popular politics, both those based on Marxist readings and those against which these were directed, were secured by privileging only a section of the people as politically conscious and by importing a restrictive definition of ‘the political’, now challenged in both social theory and current political practice. It analyses the preceding tradition of protest in early modern England to demonstrate that this provides evidence of a popular political culture, before going on to sketch how revolutionary events interacted with that culture. Knowledge of the inherently political nature of prerevolutionary popular agency and its engagement with the politics of the state helps to raise in a more acute form the problematic of the transformatory role of revolution. 1