English Radicalism, 1550-1850

Glenn Burgess is Professor of History at the University of Hull. His publications include The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought 1603-1642 (1992), and Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (1996). Matthew Festenstein is Reader in Politics at the University of Sheffield. His recent publications include, with Michael Kenny, Political Ideologies (2005), and Negotiating Diversity (2005).

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.

Introduction Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein; 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. Radicalism and the English Revolution Glenn Burgess; 4. 'That Kind of People': Late Stuart Radicals and their manifestos: a functional approach Richard Greaves; 5. The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications Gregory Claeys; 6. On not inventing the English Revolution: the radical failure of the 1790s as linguistic non-performance? Iain Hampsher-Monk; 7. Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s Mark Philp; 8. 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. Joseph Hume and the Reformation of India 1819¿33 Miles Taylor; Afterwords: Radicalism revisited Conal Condren; Radicalism reassessed J. C. Davis.