Search Results

After Charles I's execution, England became officially a ‘Commonwealth.’ But discussion continued: what did a ‘commonwealth’ mean? England's new order and Cromwell (even as Lord Protector) were described by Milton and others with reference to Exodus and Judges. As more radical political alternatives were proposed, Diggers, republicans, and Fifth Monarchists all looked to the Hebrew Bible and Jewish precedent. Gerrard Winstanley's proposal for getting rid of property was grounded in his reading of the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew prophets. The republican James Harrington looked to the biblical Jews and the commonwealth established by Moses in the wilderness. Fifth Monarchists like John Rogers wanted to reform England's judicial system by reinstituting Mosaic law. Winstanley and Rogers looked to Moses, Amos, and Isaiah, emphasizing that justice must not ‘respect persons.’ Reforms would make England the restored Israel Isaiah described.

This chapter examines the ways in which narratives drawn from British history are represented across a range of films of the period. Paying particular attention to the films Cromwell and Winstanley (set during the English Interregnum), the chapter explores how far the past comes to inform the present in 1970s British films. It is also argued that these films allow for contemporary political tensions to be worked through in the British past. Attention is paid to the types of historical stories being told in these films, and to the ideological implications of these stories. Attention is also paid to the formal qualities of these films - the ways in which they choose to tell their stories.

Radicalism is at the heart of Christianity’s foundational documents in the New Testament. This chapter is an attempt to embrace the various contributions to the subject contained in this book. First, the interpretative lens of ‘Contraries’, a central theme of William Blake’s thought, is used to explore the dialectic between Desire and Reason, to understand the tension between the quest for perfection and compromise and the way in which this dialectic informs biblical hermeneutics, particularly the Pauline corpus and the Gospel of Luke. Secondly, the career of Gerrard Winstanley offers the opportunity to understand the character and context of radicalism. Finally, the recognition of the secular character of the Christian response is crucial. Leaving the gift at the altar and working for peace, reconciliation, and justice with all humans, irrespective of faith commitment, characterize the public theology of one of the major examples of radicalism in modern Christianity, liberation theology.

This chapter contrasts the ways in which Hobbes and Winstanley construe the relationship between sin, politics, and the state of nature. They are mirror-images each of the other. For Hobbes the natural condition of conflict over property leads to the artificial construction of civil society and civil government. For Winstanley it is civil government’s obedience to the interests of property that is the cause of conflict and enmity between people. In both casse, religion plays a role, in Hobbes in Erastian subordination to the absolute power of the sovereign, in Winstanley in restoring original peace through the abolition of all property. It is argued that both are one-sided inversions of their opposites and that a true Christian politics is to be understood in terms of the last enemy, which is not sin, but death, and therefore in terms of the martyr as paradigm.

This chapter discusses the life of Gerrard Winstanley, who was an active Digger. Gerrard Winstanley was 34 when he arrived in Cobham, and 39 when he led the Diggers on to St George's Hill. Winstanley set up independently as a cloth merchant in the London parish of St Olave Old Jewry. In September 1640 he married Susan King of St Martin Outwich, the daughter of a London barber surgeon. By late 1643, Winstanley was on the verge of bankruptcy, and before the end of the year he had ceased trading and had left London for Surrey. Winstanley's time in Cobham is often presented as one of abject hardship, with him being reduced to the status of a labourer herding cattle for his neighbours. By his own account he suffered from the strains of war after his move from London to Cobham, because of the burthen of taxes and much free-quarter.

Recent writing about human rights history focuses on the twentieth century. But in the 1640s and 1650s a handful of English contrarians campaigned for human rights by expanding on the language of ‘birthrights’ derived from theology and law. These campaigners did not invent human rights, nor can we place them in an intellectual genealogy leading to human rights today. Nonetheless, they began to imagine some key elements of modern human rights: as inherent and universal, inalienable and nonderogable. Such rights claims of the mid-seventeenth century offered a position from which to challenge the presumed primacy of sovereigns and their laws. The human rights of Gerrard Winstanley and his Digger companions differed from our own, resting as they did on a unique approach to biblical exegesis and on a mystical rationalism that modern historiography has a hard time explaining. Winstanley’s ideas focus on the community rather than the individual and are deeply concerned with human flourishing they are unconcerned with laws and international institutions of the kind we now associate with human rights. Understanding these ideas reveals the human rights we do not have, especially for their insistence on universal access to food, clothing and shelter, the enjoyment of which Winstanley believed was entailed on all humanity by divine will.

This chapter investigates further animal surfaces to understand the world of animals. It emphasizes the works of Olly Williams and Suzi Winstanley, which offer a surface for human-animal exchange where humans and animals trade marks. It looks into how their works discern and promulgate the cultivation and enculturation of animals within human culture. It considers also how their works describe the animal surface, the living flesh, as well as the surface of the animal world as they go to contact zones of animals. It investigates Martin Heidegger’s argument that animals are “poor in the world” because they have no substantial interiority and thus no place for philosophical thought; and how Olly and Suzi’s projects provide a test case for breaching the divide between human worlding and the “poor in the world”.

This chapter explores the outer edges of puritan religiosity during the 1640s, examining different species of “anti-formalism” that emerged in the period. First, it reconstructs a strain of thought maintaining that “forms”—or contestable niceties of doctrine and discipline—should be subordinated to godly solidarity, a position that came to sit near the center of the emerging “independent” coalition. The chapter then analyzes more extreme pietistic variants, which called into question the validity of all “forms” or religious observances—even to the point of denying the existence of any true church on earth. Attempts are made to explain how and where these disruptive modes of piety came into being, and likewise to assess their impact by charting the spread of such ideas into the heart of the parliamentarian coalition. While such formulations were at root religious, they sometimes had deep political and social implications, which are gestured at here.

Johannine theology exerts a wide influence on a broad group of antinomian writers and mid-seventeenth-century English separatists, including the Familists, Diggers, Quakers, and a range of English mystics and spiritual enthusiasts. This chapter looks closely at the embrace of the most dualistic and eschatological passages of the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle by the English radical tradition. After an outline of the distinctive qualities of this Johannine political theology, the chapter turns to the antinomian influence on two radically different English poets, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan. If Crashaw shows antinomian leanings despite his embrace of Laudian fundamentals, Vaughan emerges as something of an anti-enthusiast in his more politically topical poems of Silex Scintillans.

This chapter examines discussions of rights in the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, focusing in particular on the Putney Debates and on the ideas put forward shortly afterwards by Gerrard Winstanley and his fellow Diggers. A key issue in the Putney Debates was the extension of the right to vote to men without property. That was also important for the Diggers, but in addition they argued for the right of all to direct access to the means of subsistence. The earth was a common treasury for all, wrote Winstanley, and could not justly be turned into a particular treasury for some.

Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) has been claimed as a major contribution to Shakespearean analysis and political and cultural thought. Chapter 8 gives a fuller view of what Schmitt was aiming at and why, giving more attention than has hitherto been accorded to his predicament in post-war Germany. For Schmitt, Hamlet was a primal image of the condition of the post-war world and of his own place, or rather displacement, in it. As a portrayal of the ‘unhappy Stuart’ James I, Schmitt’s Hamlet also stands for ‘the schism that has determined the fate of Europe’. This schism extends to the ‘torn’ Germany of 1848, Europe in 1918 and ‘the whole Western world’, as Schmitt claimed in 1956. Hamlet symbolizes the larger eschatological scheme of Schmittian history and Schmitt’s own role in Germany’s recent past—as he himself saw it—trying to prevent the worst but failing.