What's with the word 'radical'?

The execution of Charles I, 1649

Raymond Williams, in his book Keywords (1976), emphasises the importance of word and phrase meanings in scholarly discussions. His book deals with “vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions.” He describes how he was struck by a word being used in a discussion, and how “the problem of its meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problem it was being used to discuss”. The problems that arise when people do not define their terms were described in a recent blog about the term “neoliberalism”, where the term was being used at times with opposing meanings without explanation.

Blair Worden, a highly regarded expert on the English Civil War, highlights the term ‘radical’ in an interesting review (in the London Review of Books, September 2019) of two books about English Radicalism during the seventeenth century. Worden notes that the term ‘radical’ was used by Christopher Hill in his pioneering books of the 1970s, notably his 1972 book The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, which was a highly fashionable study of radicalism.

Worden points out that term ‘radical’ was not used in the seventeenth century in the sense in which Hill uses it, meaning a view dissenting from the political order of things. He also points out that Thomas Hobbes was as radical as anyone in the period, but is not included in Hill’s collection of radicals. Hill concentrated on small groups such as The Levellers.

So far, I agree. But Worden is a man of rather fixed opinions. The review becomes a rant against Hill, something Worden has done several times before, even though Hill was writing more than 45 years ago. There are many more mentions of Hill in this review than of the two books ostensibly being reviewed.

What is Worden’s complaint about Hill? For Worden, Hill is in thrall to a doctrine that doesn’t fit the facts: 

“The language of ‘radicalism’ enabled Hill to play down differences among his groups and to situate them with an essentially unified ‘culture’ of protest.
“Hill, who saw events as the mere superstructure of history”
“This perplexity did not detain Hill. Taking political and religious dissent to be articulations of a single set of class relations, he [Hill] thought them natural allies.”

Yet one of the books under review is entitled “Radical Parliamentarians”. Clearly Hill can’t have been entirely wrong, then.

 You wonder why the London Review of Books follows this strange practice of giving reviewer X the opportunity to review a book by Y, when in fact we all know that X will write about Z. It might be more helpful to commission a review article, along the lines of “Is Hill still worth reading today”, by someone more balanced.

The close of the review, if I understand it correctly, is about how the American libertarian right has championed John Lilburne as one of their heroes, and praised “Leveller attacks on trading monopolies … as pleas for a free market”.

At this point I noticed how Worden places in inverted commas terms he is not happy about – every mention of the word radicalism appears in this way, as if its meaning were not to be trusted. However, if any term should be distrusted, it is ‘free market’ -there has probably never been a free market anywhere (see, for example, Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism).

Worden suggests, I think, that ‘the British radical pantheon’ [his inverted commas] cannot monopolize radical ideas for the left.  Yet the phrase ‘radical right’ was captured by Raymond Williams in his Keywords way back in 1976. On the one hand, the term “radical” continues in use to the present day (as the book being reviewed demonstrates). On the other hand, the fact that the right-wing has made use of the term “radical” hardly invalidates the term itself. In Justin Champion’s view, in a Guardian interview in 2009, “Blair [Worden] is correct, that the political experiments of the 1650s were defeated … but … once 1649 [the execution of Charles I] had happened there was no turning back.” Worden is unrepentant; he can’t see “what good it did” to behead King Charles I. All this talk about radicalism really comes down to your opinion whether it was right or not to execute the king. 

However, despite Professor Worden's reservations, the word ‘radical’ is clearly still being used in book titles, and no doubt will continue to be used meaningfully by ‘the British radical pantheon’ for a few years yet.