The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down, Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published by Temple Smith in 1972, is a landmark scholarly history examining the radical religious and political sects, Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists and others, that flourished during the English Civil War and Interregnum. Its authority rests on Hill's standing as one of the most influential twentieth century historians of seventeenth century England and the book's wide and lasting influence on the field's understanding of the period's radical fringe. Its limit is that Hill wrote from an explicitly Marxist historical framework that some later historians have argued overstates the coherence and social depth of these radical movements, so its interpretive claims about the movements' broader significance are best read as one highly influential scholarly argument rather than as an uncontested consensus.