Unintended Timeliness

Saturday

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Being a devotee of Nietzsche I scorn timeliness and view untimeliness as a philosophical virtue, but a link to this forum from the Early Modern History blog alerted me to the unintended timeliness of my post about The Agricultural Paradigm. In that post I had particularly mentioned the influence that Christopher Hill’s book The World Turned Upside Down had had on my thought. On 24 June 2010 the Times Higher Education Supplement published a piece on Hill’s book, which R.C. Richardson called “arguably his finest work and one that was both symptom and engine of the concept of ‘history from below’.”

Christopher Thompson of the Early Modern History blog responded to Richardson’s appreciation of Hill’s work, differing in his estimation of the relative place of Hill within his academic milieu. Richardson called Hill, “for a time the dominant figure in the recent historiography of the ‘English Revolution’ of the 17th century,” and Thompson responded that Hill was an important figure but not the dominant figure, and in this context he mentioned Hugh Trevor-Roper. While some of this debate is strictly intra-academic, I was interested that Thompson mentioned Trevor-Roper in this connection, as he is among my favorite historians, and his essay on the early modern witch craze has been at least as influential on my thought as Hill’s work, and probably more influential. I remember so clearly how, when I was visiting Belgium in 1990, I picked up a copy of Trevor-Roper’s essay in a used book store in Brussels and read it on the plane back to Oregon.

Early modern history is a goldmine of ideas, and great scholars like Hill and Trevor-Roper (as well as more eccentric but easily as interesting figures like Carlo Ginzburg), have much to offer the contemporary mind that they have discovered in the period. Academic historiography is of little interest to me in and of itself, but anyone who reads this forum will discover that I will take ideas wherever I find them, and that historians like Hill and Trevor-Roper are as likely to turn up as famous philosophers, poets, strategists, and natural scientists. To make an idea live again is a gift not to be slighted, and the academic historian who can do so can live as much in the present as in the past. The Purity of Hill’s scholarship is compromised by his Marxism, but it is also his Marxism that influenced him to focus on radical ideas often overlooked, and this gives to Hill’s work an immediacy and an excitement that contributes to the ability of making ideas come alive.

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Note added 03 July 2010: Nick Poyntz of the Mercurius Politicus blog has written an interesting piece on Christopher Hill citing the posts that I cite above, as well as this post.

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