Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution.

Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. By James Holstun (London: Verso, 2000; paperback 2002. xix plus 460 pp. $21).

Polemical books are nothing new to the historiography of the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and in that sense this one is unexceptional. Holstun's book is remarkable, however, in the extent of his assault on both revisionist and postmodernist explanations of that event. Holstun's fundamental criticism of those explanations is that they do not acknowledge that social change was a clearly stated goal of radical revolutionaries. Indeed, Holstun argues that the English revolution was a class struggle, "the struggle among various groups that were endeavoring to maintain or transform the relations of production." [p. 88] In that sense, Holstun sees the revolution as "the first capitalist and anti-capitalist revolution ..." and that "the radical praxis" of working people played a key role in it. [p. ix] By "praxis" he means "goal-oriented action ... action planned, accomplished and reflected upon. It includes both verbal and non-verbal action, and ... the former [does not] always determine the latter." [p. xi] Thus praxis can be located in discourse as well as physical activity, and this is where Holstun finds most of it in the deep analysis of texts that fills this substantial book.

Part I, "Hierarchy and Association," is a 140-page assault on revisionists (he repeatedly singles out Kevin Sharpe, John Morrill, Conrad Russell, Mark Kishlansky, and J.C.D. Clark) and postmodernists (above all Foucauldians and New Historicists), both because they are reductionist. He has no truck with revisionists because of their "effort to purge intention and ideology from historical explanation" [p. 12] and replacing it with contingency and personality, and their acceptance of Russell's sweeping claim that "'social change explanations of the English Civil War must be regarded as having broken down.'" [p. 28] Postmodernists fare no better. Holstun sees this approach as exhausted in a "morass of contingency and power," [p. 137] "constitutionally" opposed to history from below. Neither revisionists nor postmodernists seem capable of or interested in even addressing why social conflicts arise and how and why society changes.

Guided by Jean-Paul Sartre (especially his Critique of Dialectical Reason), Christopher Hill, Jurgen Habermas, and Raymond Williams, Holstun closely analyzes popular praxis in five radical projects. In these projects he finds that the revolution was fundamentally about a conflict between a radical associative praxis opposing the "hierarchical praxis of the ruling class." [p. 7]

The first radical project is John Felton's assassination of the Duke of Buckingham. Holstun argues that Felton's attack was not just a 'motiveless' act by a frustrated or impoverished client, but rather a "rationally motivated act" reflecting "nascent political opposition ... thinking its way slowly toward revolution and regicide." [p. 145] There is some evidence that Felton flirted with republicanism, but it is difficult to see class struggle here (Felton himself was from an impoverished gentry family) and a causal leap to see his action as part of an emerging "alliance of the parliamentary classes with the small-producing extra-parliamentary laboring classes" who shared a "common interest in resisting the absolutist class-state embodied in the person of ... Buckingham." [p. 153]

In his chapter on the Agitators in the New Model Army during the summer and fall of 1647 leading to the Putney Debates, Holstun is on firmer ground. Here he finds in the election of the agitators from the rank and file of the New Model Army "a relatively egalitarian forum" and "an important predecessor to the Enlightenment public sphere." [pp. 194, 195] He takes issue with Kishlansky's minimizing the role of radical democratic ideology in the Army and his casting of the Putney Debates as a traditional search for consensus. Holstun castigates the revisionist position as a one-sided embracing of the grandees' hierarchical vision of collective life as if it were universal, whereas Holstun convincingly argues that it was "a particular strategic rhetoric" pursuing particular political interests resting upon property rights limiting the franchise, a rhetoric that was countered by the radicals invoking natural law to ground the rights of the Army's power to govern itself democratically.

In the next chapter on the Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel, Holstun plausibly situates the prophetess and published author of a radical religious position condemning Cromwell in an emerging oppositional public sphere, but as a voice of class struggle she comes up a bit short. Surely Thomas Venner and his Fifth Monarchist followers would have been better choices for extensive analysis than Trapnel. In Venner's two risings in 1657 and 1661 and in the texts that supported them, A Standard Set up and The Door of Hope, it is rather clear that these Fifth Monarchists more than Trapnel and her followers "took on the role of an organizing oppositional vanguard for small producers and the poor" and revealed "a vision of power from below." [pp. 276, 277]

Holstun's chapter exploring Edward Sexby's republicanism rests on scrutiny of his Killing Noe Murder, an impassioned defense of tyrannicide (specifically Cromwell) and for Holstun, "a significant form of revolutionary political practice." [p. 308] Here Ehud of the book's title makes his appearance, for Ehud was specifically invoked by Sexby because the biblical Ehud killed Eglon, the Moabite who ruled the Hebrews for a time, a tyrannicide justified because Ehud acted as a special instrument of God. For Holstun, Sexby's text is important because if properly recognized for what it is, a radical republican discourse grounded in natural law, it will push Harrington from center stage and force scholars to recognize that republican discourse was not only about "virtue, corruption and authority" as Pocock insists, but also about "property, class, and right."

In the final chapter on the Diggers, Holstun asserts that the "Diggers produced the most important seventeenth-century critique of the [capitalist] transformation of [English agriculture] from the point of view of its victims," [p. 377] and, not surprisingly, uses the texts of Gerrard Winstanley to make his case. One must largely accept at face value Holstun's sweeping generalization that the capitalist transformation of English agriculture came "into its own" during this century, [p. 382] for he supports it here with only two texts about capitalist improvement within the context of enclosure, Wast Land's Improvement by E.G. in 1653, and Walter Blith's The English Improver Improved (1652). In the battle of texts, Holstun sees a conflict between Winstanley's "rights-based model that gave the direct producers some measure of immediate access to the agrarian means of production, and [the capitalist enclosers'] model of absolute property that gave them such access only through the mediation of the capitalist wage-form." [p. 378].

Holstun is certainly not the only scholar making grand generalizations. Holstun's book, on balance, shows that one such as Kevin Sharpe's is less compelling than his: Sharpe "laments the 'tired old Marxist preoccupation with nascent popular movements' ... particularly since 'Land and liberty never became the slogan of the English Revolution; radical millenarianism never infected the poor; the radical groups, especially the most important, never appealed to the poor.'" To which Holstun responds succinctly, "Never, never, and especially never; except, of course, when they did." [p. 422]

James R. Farr

Purdue University