Christopher Hill and Peter Laslett

Peter Laslett

The historiographical disputes of the 1950s and 1960s have largely been forgotten in the intervening period. The debates of those years have ceased to be the focus of scholarly attention. But one that has stuck in my memory is the highly critical review that Christopher Hill wrote for the journal, History and Theory, in 1967 on the book by Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, published two years earlier. Laslett's conclusions based on the research of the then recently established Cambridge Group on the History of Population (CAMPOP) were highly unpalatable to Hill as he made clear in his lengthy analysis. The idea of a "one class" society was obviously anthema to Hill. Laslett's friend, J.H.Hexter, made a comparable asault on Hill's arguments and methods in The Times Literary Supplement in 1975.

I did wonder if there was any pre-history to these exchanges and came across Laslett's review of the anthology of sources edited by Hill and Edmund Dell, The Good Old Cause, in The Economic History Review for 1952. It was quite a brief account of the sources compiled by Hill and Dell in support of the hypothesis that, in the 1640s and 1650s, one social class had been driven from power by another. Laslett took the view that this argument had been advanced with rigid consistency supported by slanted headlines and an obviously weak presupposed sociology with its wearisome over emphasis on conflict and struggle. The selection of their evidence had been dogmatic and led to an uglier distortion than the Whiggish predilections of S.R.Gardiner. No response to this indictment by Hill or Dell at the time has yet come my way. But I do ask whether this is where the later disputes between the two men had their origin.