Politics and Political Culture During the English Revolution: A Review-Essay

Abstract

In recent years, many of the new directions in research on the English Revolution have taken the form of an attack upon older master narratives, especially those of a Whiggish or Marxist persuasion. Over the past two or three decades, the prevailing climate of work on the 1640s and 1650s has been emphatically anti‐Whig and anti‐Marxist. In other words, it has eschewed inevitability, teleology, and anachronism, all of which have become bogey words and, as a result, there is now much more willingness to see the revolutionary period on its own terms. The vitality and viability of these years are being stressed more than before, and the period emerges in recent writings as more positive, more dynamic, engendering a greater diversity of responses and contributions than in earlier narratives.