Study Questions for Christopher Hill, "A Bourgeois Revolution?"

  1. Why do you think Hill begins with three quotes, and what do you think is the relationship between them?
  2. What are stereotypes that people hold of Marxist scholars? (51)
  3. Why does Hill find it necessary to define the notion of a "bourgeois revolution" along with "consciousness"? (51)
  4. What caused the English Revolution of 1640, and was it "willed" (i.e. consciously put in motion by the English bourgeoisie)?
  5. On page 52, Hill says, "by 1640 the social forces let loose by or accompanying capitalism...could no longer be contained within the old political framework except by means of a violent repression."  Explain this statement and the effects on Charles I's ability to govern.
  6. What's the difference between the French Revolution and the English Revolution, according to the reading?
  7. How united was the landed ruling class in the sixteenth century (1500s) and into the seventeenth? How did the divide between those who were unwilling to think of looking for "popular" help and those who felt they could "use" it spread to a chasm? What were some results of that divide?
  8. What was the "Self-Denying Ordinance? (53)
  9. On page 53 (his page 115), Hill says, "Whatever the original intentions of Parliament, other wills took over from 1642-43."  What were those wills? Gentry or commoner?
  10. What "transformations in the English political and social scene" had occurred by 1660 to help stimulate the development of capitalism? (53-4)
  11. What set the stage for the development of capitalist agriculture? Put another way, how did the agrarian revolution contribute to the accumulation of capital?  What were the affects of the Navigation Acts?
  12. On page 55, Hill claims that while after 1660 the gentry continued to dominate the society and state there was a different social context.  Explain.
  13. Why did enclosure become a "patriotic duty"?
  14. Why could neither Charles II (1660-85) nor James II (1685-88) hope to succeed in creating the strong monarchy of their father Charles I? Why could society "not be put back into the hierarchical straitjacket of the 1630s"? (55)
  15. What forms of radicalism transformed and unsettled society from the 1640s on? What were the "regrettable social and political consequences" of the repression of radicalism?
  16. Hill asserts that the Long Parliament of the Civil War cannot be seen as refuting Marx's conception of the bourgeois revolution.  What does this mean? (57)
  17. What really mattered at the time of the English Revolution?
  18. If the Long Parliament did not make the Revolution, what did it do?
  19. In what ways does Hill try to systematically salvage Marxist theories of bourgeois revolution? (57-60)
  20. Can bourgeois revolutions be different from each other? How?
  21. What is the test of revolution?
  22. What is the significance of the following statement? "Nobody, then, willed the English Revolution: it happened." (62).  How does this statement reflect a Marxist interpretation of revolution? How can a lack of willing something be fueled by social forces?
  23. Despite his adherence to a Marxist framework, does Hill move beyond Marxist conceptions of property, capitalist development or even "bourgeois revolution"?

EP Thompson, "Patricians and Plebians"

  1. What, according to EPT, is the traditional story of paternalist England? What does paternalism mean, anyway? Patrician? Plebian?
  2. What was the "characteristic complaint" throughout the eighteenth century? (65)
  3. In what ways was the "mobility of labor...manifest"?
  4. Define "transitory" and list the three prominent features of this phase. (66-7)
  5. Explain EPT's argument that the insubordination of the poor was an inconvenience rather than a menace.
  6. EPT seems to suggest that there were two levels of cultural hegemony in the relationship between the patricians and plebs: one which was overwhelmingly successful and one which was less so.  Can you explain this position?
  7. What does EPT mean when he compares the gentry's position to "public theatre"? How does he connect this to ways in which the gentry withdrew from society?
  8. Go to an online dictionary and define "Erastian."  This knowledge will make EPT's discussion very clear (69-71)
  9. In what ways did the Church (meaning the Church of England--Anglican Church) lose "command over the 'leisure' of the poor..."
  10. When EPT says on page 70 (his page 393) that the Reformation and decline of Puritan presence left a separation between polite and plebian culture, how does he "fit in" with Marxist theory?
  11. Explain this statement: "the materialism of the eighteenth-century rich and the Erastianism of their Church were met by the materialism of the poor."
  12. If a plebs is not a working class, what is it? (71-2)
  13. Why does EPT guard against reading back from a mature nineteenth-century working class into the eighteenth century? What problems would arise?
  14. Earlier, EPT said the gentry's actions could be considered public theatre, and later (p. 74) he describes the crowds actions as countertheater.
  15. Examine the three characteristics of popular action.
  16. EPT seems to suggest at his conclusion that the theater of law was not enough to maintain cultural hegemony--in fact that cultural hegemony was imposed, in the end, by violence.  What does this do to Marxist ideas about hegemony? Class relations?