English Society, 1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime

by J.C.D. Clark

This classic work of recent historiography broke the hold of the "old guard" on this key period of English history. It has now been extensively rewritten, and in its updated form reinforces its arguments with new evidence and addresses some of the historical preoccupations of the past fifteen years.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, British Literature, 18th Century, 17th Century, Christianity

596 pages, Paperback

First published November 27, 1985

About the author

Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark is the Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History Emeritus at the University of Kansas. He received his undergraduate degree at Downing College, Cambridge and prior to his move to Kansas in 1996 he taught at Peterhouse, Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford.

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

JCDC is a pill, but he's an erudite, ridiculously well-read and often persuasive pill. He's been advancing a revisionist thesis about English historiography for a very long time, with sometimes mixed results. He came in for a lot of grief earlier in his career for his sharp attacks on the work of J. H. Plumb. But the fact is that elements of Plumb's work had long been chipped away at by generations of historians. Clark was, perhaps, the least charitable and last of the lot, which got him into a lot of hot water at one time. He also has traveled into academic precincts where his conclusions were, at best, controversial, and at worst, unsupported (am thinking here in particular of his now semi-retracted claim that Samuel Johnson was a nonjuring Jacobite). His malodor sometimes leads Clark to be dismissed or sneered at out of hand. But he knows a great deal and much of what he has to say has merit. The second edition of his English Society builds on much of his earlier work and advances his central arguments about the long eighteenth century—a term he has wrongly been credited with inventing. (At best, he helped popularize it—literary scholars had been trading in the terminology well before Clark made it front page news with historians.) The main ideas that Clark advances have to do with the essentially perdurable nature of the Anglican settlement yoked to the evolving political hegemony following the Glorious Revolution. He is convincing in his demonstration of the importance of religion throughout the period. If his sometimes yoking this era to the term associated with France (ancien regime) rankles, well, he sure does have a lot of evidence on his side. And this rather monumental, extremely well-sourced volume seems to go out of its way to avoid a fair amount of the sniping (even in the footnotes) that has previously appeared in some of Clark's work. The other main agenda here has to do with undermining the so-called Whig Interpretation of History. And, again, this volume seems largely successful in this endeavor, if, by doing so, one understands the work to be an attack on the smoothing over of how reform came about when and how it did. Clark's work suggests that 1830-2 are less a calm evolution than a sudden collapse and on the evidence marshaled here the case seems convincing. The carping against Marxist historians that has also been a hallmark of Clark's career seems well-leashed here as well. There's no love lost between Clark and the school of Hobsbawm, Hill and Thompson, but there are far fewer brickbats than one might expect given previous hostilities. In short, this feels like a measured, calm, thoughtful volume that rests less on special pleading than on the quantity and quality of evidence presented. Have not read nearly enough of the primary sources relied on here, so can only give provisional assent to the general argument. Whether one likes it or not, Clark's book presents a monumental edifice that requires careful reading and examination to decide the extent to which it will stand and replace prior views of the period under consideration. The initial scholarly reviews were measured. Am curious (and don't know) what the subsequent years have produced within the field to support or undermine Clark's work.

[Michael Hattem · Rating 3 out of 5]

If there is a central "why" question in J.C.D. Clark's English Society 1660-1832, it is actually more of an assertion wrapped in a question. That is: "Why has every other historian of eighteenth-century Britain gotten it so wrong?" Perhaps the most striking aspect of the book is Clark's sheer ambition (and boundless ego). At the most fundamental level, Clark is attacking the entire historiographical arc in which the long eighteenth century––a term and periodization he helped popularize––lays claim to the emergence of modernity. He believes historians have fundamentally misunderstood the character of English society in the eighteenth century. Rather than being a period whose narrative is one of an increasing secularization of society with a marginalized, ineffective Church of England, Clark’s long eighteenth century is one in which the Church was a central factor in the development of English society, which itself was marked by the High Church "Anglican model of hierarchy." Clark argues that the persons and ideas which scholarship has focused on were actually extreme and unrepresentative of the broader society. Locke and the commonwealthmen were extremists; Hume was a failed centrist (or reconciliator). Lockean contractarianism and natural rights are merely historiographic red herrings that have disguised "the dominance of the Church and dynastic legitimism." Politically, he argues that the ancien regime in England lasted into the fourth decade of the nineteenth century ending only with the Reform Act. Hence, the eighteenth century did not witness the triumph (or even nascence) of modernity. Instead, it comes off as something of a holding period. Clark's main goal in this book has not been to explain change over time so much as to assert the reverse.

Clark's book is distinctly contrarian. Indeed, it seems less designed to answer a question than to refute other's interpretations. One of the most recurring phrases in the book is: "It is now clear…" In a very real sense, it could have accurately been titled, Why Everything You've Always Thought About the Eighteenth Century Is Wrong. Clark's Language of Liberty applied a similar treatment of colonial America and the American Revolution, characterizing the latter as primarily the result of constitutional and religious conflict. In doing so, Clark dismissed two of the most dominant interpretations in the historiography of the Revolution (republicanism/ideological and neo-progressive) of the last 50 years out of hand. Unfortunately, because Clark's book is defined by its opposition to previous interpretations, it is hard to judge its historiographical value without being better acquainted with either those interpretations or the minutiae of eighteenth-century English political history.

[Nandini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst I fundamentally disagree with much of Clark's argument, this book has to be commended on a number of elements. The extensive research on such a huge period of history is admirable - even if it is framed within the narrow boundaries of Church, Aristocracy and Monarchy. I think the most valuable element of his research is the discussion it has initiated - the opinions of Hoppit, Speck, Davis and Porter are particularly interesting. Clark's contextualisation of this period in a European context is, on the surface, commendable - however he seldom draws these European comparisons as Jeremy Black points out. Moreover, the title is misleading; if 'English Society' = Monarchy, Patrician culture and religion than where does the rest of the English population feature? For Clark, it seldom does. This book was both infuriating and thought provoking. I would not recommend reading it over a short period of time as I have had to however (5 days), perhaps I would have enjoyed it better if I had had time to properly absorb and process his arguments.

[JR Roach · Rating 4 out of 5]

An undeniably brilliant but frustrating book. Clark's ambition is to depict England in the long 18th century as a confessional church-state - defined by Anglican high-church political theology, which in turn sanctified a hierarchical, monarchical social order. This is what Clark calls the "Protestant Constitution" defined by Test and Corporation Acts marginalizing the civil and political status of dissenters and an unreformed Parliament managed by monarchical and aristocratic patronage. In doing so, he is keen to dispel any attempts to understand England in this period as modernizing, enlightened, secularizing, or industrializing. Rather than abide these historical anachronisms, the book is a recovery of Britain's (elite) self-image and understanding.

In restoring a central place to political theology in this era of British history, Clark is undeniably justified and successful. Integralists and post-liberals (often Catholic political theorists) would do well to understand how decisively Anglican churchmen upheld a political social order that abided no church-state separation against familiar but marginal figures like Locke or Hobbes or the legions of Dissenters and free thinkers Clark spends more time analyzing. However, Clark cannot hide his sympathies for this explicitly reactionary social order - the writings of high churchmen invariably receive long and sympathetic treatment, while Clark goes out of his way to minimize and disparage the personality of reasoning of opponents of the regime. As a result, one comes to question the fairness of Clark's portrait and to suspect that in his desire to exalt Anglican high-churchmanship he minimizes and occludes other strains of political and religious life.

This in turn points to Clark's central failing - his inability to give a satisfying account of the end of the Protestant Constitution. Clark is keenly aware of this problem, but his historiographical method and polemical revisionism deprive him of the conceptual tools to explain how Catholic Emancipation, the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (giving Dissenters full civil and political rights), and the passage of parliamentary reform in a brief period from 1828-1832 come to pass at all. Having exalted on the old order on the basis of its ideological cohesion and political strength, and having thrown out any appearance of longer term social and economic change within this period, he's forced to resort to an unconvincing total focus on contingent high political maneuvering to bring his story to an end. Clark is undeniably right that we cannot assume any kind of slowly building demand for these changes over the course of the century - and he quite rightly draws attention to the ebbs, flows, and downright disappearance of these political causes at times, but by minimizing the role of the masses in this story the genuine fear among elites that drove the passage of parliamentary reform appears downright inexplicable. And one is left with a deep sense that while Clark has significantly added to our understanding of this era, he's not giving us the whole story.

[Zo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Densely laden with quotations from various church members and politicians of 18th-century England who I had no familiarity with, making it slow going at times, but nonetheless an interesting read for its overarching thesis: that in the "long" eighteenth century leading up to the "reform" bill of 1832 (which was the first step to widening the franchise in England), English society is often mischaracterized as secular, modernizing, oriented around class politics, and applied many other adjectives from more modern circumstances. When in fact, the old, extremely hierarchical, and religiously founded, order of church and monarch was an accepted political fact of the time, and political debates mostly centered around narrower religious infighting about about how that church-state order should operate. Discussion of democracy was mostly off the table, people didn't actually care about John Locke -- the most radical movements of the time were always religious in nature (socinianism, arianism, deism). Clark then argues that only in 1828-32 when a rising tide of dissenting religious politics passed bills to repeal religious tests for who could hold political office and to emancipate Catholics did those same religious dissenters really back a broadening of the franchise.

I am in no position to evaluate Clark's argument, which apparently is very controversial amongst historians, but he does do a good job of presenting reams of evidence about the centrality of religious debates over the nature of the monarch in the 18th-century. Though, he never really explains why there was a slowly rising tide of religious dissent and atheism, and why it came to a crux in 1832. He rejects explanations based on the industrial revolution given revisionist accounts of its degree of "revolution", but it seems implausible to me that the industrial revolution was not at least *part* of the story, especially given the appropriate coincidence in timing. Anyway, I don't think I am really the right person to be reading this book due to my lack of broader historical understanding of the period, but I did really enjoy his evidence about how "natural rights" and "social contract" theorists were dismissed by the people actually in power over most of this time frame.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impressive revisionist account of the "Long Eighteenth Century", challenging in particular the whiggish account of 1688 as revolutionary. Instead, Clarke highlights Tory Anglican motives and involvement as central.

The book is as bold as the title is bland. A better choice would have been "The Enduring Restoration". Clark demonstrates brilliantly how the essential traditions of constitutional government were established in the Restoration of the monarchy, and how these proved far more important than subsequent alterations. It demonstrates how the constitutional liberty was not a product of revolution, but at root a bold move against it.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Accidentally read the 1st edition, rather than the second and revised one. Oops.