All Knees and Elbows Of Susceptibility and Refusal

by Tom Roberts and Anthony Iles

This pamphlet is a sketch of some elements of what might constitute a 'history from below'. In it we have assembled quotations from esteemed historians, their lowly subjects and sometimes even their critics. Here, Thompson's phrase, 'all knees and elbows of susceptibility and refusal', from which we have made our clumsy title will help us express the necessary awkwardness of affecting transformation by writing history. For there are many attractions for the would-be radical historian here, but also obstacles and 'traps' of interest too. Firstly, we will attempt to reconstruct what is 'history from below' before we explore some tensions inherent in such a project. The phrase 'history from below' is the product of a group of French historians known as the Annales school. It is their description of an approach to subjects and areas previously considered historically unimportant. In England this approach was taken up by a group of Marxist historians who developed a set of methodologies and a world view at odds with the existing Marxist and historiographical orthodoxies.

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

Within the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic - the ideology of the propertied class - there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success 'might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic. In "The World Turned Upside Down" Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless' men, the outbursts of sexual freedom, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs.