THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

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  • イギリス革命
  • イギリス カクメイ

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The English bourgeois Revolution is a long process begun with the Long Parliament in 1640 and was given a finishing touch by the so called Glorious Revolution. Owing to its conspicuous religous character, the first and decisive step in 1640-60 had long been mistaken for a purely religeous one. But thanks to the works of Dobb, Hill, Lavrovsky and Sapruikin, it is almost unnecessary to-day to add any explanation about the fact that the revolution of 1640-60 was the main part of the English bourgeois revolution.<br>However, some important questions seem to be remaining unsolved. How the development of capitalism in the classical form was possible in England on the basis of this premature and compromising bourgeois revolution, whereas the classical bourgeois revolution in France rather retarded the capitalist development there? In the history of thought, the Enlightenment as a typical bourgeois thought appeared in France under the ancien régime and disappeared amidst the bourgeois revolution by death of Condorcet, while the English Enlightenment was born from the pen of Hobbes amidst the revolution and developed into the classical political economy almost without interruption. This peculier English way of capitalist development in thought and society needs to be studied in detail. The revolution begun with the Scottish presbyterian movement against Charles I, was fought by the English Presbyterians assisted by the Independents and Levellers, and ended in compromise between the Royalists and Presbyterians. In short, it was fought on the level of the Presbyterians. In spite of this fact, thinkers of the English Enlightenment were more or less critical toward the Presbyterians. Examples are Hobbes, Fielding, Smith etc. The triangular relation among the revolutionary group (Independents, Levellers, etc.), the Presbyterians the thinkers of Enlightenment may be the central point of further analysis. Each of these three sections developed and changed its character through action and reaction. It might be possible to say the Enlightenment absorbed certain radical ideas of the first section while criticizing the second. The seemingly uniterrupted process of capitalist development in England contains a certain number of stages or elements distinct from each other. The present writer cannot keep from feeling that Hill's recent interpretation of the revolution as a process of resistance and triumph of the natural rulers is a postMarxian version of traditionalism.

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