James Holstun – Ehud's Dagger, Class Struggle in the English Revolution
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James Holstun – Ehud's Dagger, Class Struggle in the English Revolution
[Verso 2002] buy new or used at abebooks.co.uk | buy new at amazon.co.uk 
If you use either of these links to purchase this item breviary stuff will receive 5% commission In this meticulously researched, award-winning book, James Holstun details seventeenth-century England's first capitalist revolution, and its first anti-capitalist revolutions, in a stirring project of Marxist history from below. From the author's preface: In an essay on Spenser, Louis Adrian Montrose analyses some subversive statements that an Essex laborer named John Feltwell made about Queen Elizabeth, then comments, "The Rantings of a rural malcontent would perhaps be unworthy of such attention if they did not serve to make a point of larger significance about the relations of power in Elizabethan society." No doubt. But perhaps it's also true that modern theories of power in early modern society aren't worth much attention if they don't make a point of larger significance about ranting rural and urban and vagabond malcontents. Pretty often, these malcontents already have a theory of social power that we may have mistaken for mere ranting. After all, critical reflection wasn't invented last week by academic theorists. And sometimes, if we listen hard, they seem to be throwing their voices—ranting at us from a future that's better than theirs, better than ours, too. In this book I talk about some seventeenth-century malcontents, what upset them, what they said about it, and what they did about it. I argue that the radical praxis of working people played a crucial role in the English Revolution, the first capitalist and anti-capitalist revolution, and that it can help us better understand that struggle and the struggles of our own time. … Contents
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