English Radicalism, 1550–1850

by Edited by Glenn Burgess , Matthew Festenstein

• ISBN13: 9780521800174
• ISBN10: 052180017X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-03-05
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

An exploration of the place of radical ideas and activity in English political and social history over three centuries. Its core concern is whether a long-term history of radicalism can be written. Are the things that historians label 'radical' linked into a single complex radical tradition, or are they separate phenomena linked only by the minds and language of historians? Does the historiography of radicalism uncover a repressed dimension of English history, or is it a construct that serves the needs of the present more than the understanding of the past? The book contains a variety of answers to these questions. As well as an introduction and eleven substantive chapters, it also includes two 'afterwords' which reflect on the implications of the book as a whole for the study of radicalism. The distinguished list of contributors is drawn from a variety of disciplines, including history, political science, and literary studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction Glenn Burgess and Matthew Fenenstein

1. A politics of emergency in the reign of Elizabeth I Stephen Alford

2. Richard Overton as a milestone of English radical history: the new intertext of the civic ethos in mid-seventeenth-century England Luc Borot

3. The 'radicalism' of the English Revolution Glenn Burgess

4. Later Stuart radicalism, 1660 90 Richard Greaves

5. The revolution as speech-act: on not performing the British revolution Ian Hampsher-Monk

6. Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s Mark Philp

7. The 1790s and the emergence of British radicalism Gregory Claeys

8. Henry Hunt's peep into a prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt Margot Finn

9. Jeremy Bentham's radicalism Fred Rosen

10. Religion and the emergence of radicalism in nineteenth-century England J. C. D. Clark

11. Empire, radicalism and reform, 1815 32 Miles Taylor

Radicalism revisited Conal Condren

Radicalism reassessed J. C. Davis.