“Who ARE these guys?!” Politics, Passions, Peculiarities, and Polemics in the Historiography of British Communism
Reading John McIlroy’s and Alan Campbell’s dissection of recent writings on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) by Kevin Morgan, Nina Fishman, Andrew Thorpe, Matthew Worley, and others reminds me of a scene in a cinematic classic, one of a handful of Hollywood’s last unique and great ‘‘Westerns,’’ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As Newman and Redford, train robbers with a conscience and a populist sense of the poor’s right to the ample and ill-gotten gains of the rich, try to elude those who want them captured and brought to bourgeois justice, they are pursued, relentlessly, throughout the western hemisphere. In spite of some imaginative efforts and a willingness to seek out escapes to what must have appeared to them ‘‘the ends of the earth’’, Newman and Redford cannot shake those who are ‘‘on their trial.’’ Looking down from a mountainous perch, and seeing once again that they are being meticulously ‘‘tracked,’’ Newman turns to Redford and says in exasperation, ‘‘Who ARE these guys?!’’ Morgan, Fishman, Thorpe, and Worley must ask themselves the same question. The team of McIlroy and Campbell have turned from being their collaborators in the writing of Communist history into something of a nemesis. The historiographic impasse that has developed in Britain parallels that which has long exercised an influence in the United States, pitting so-called ‘traditionalists’ (liberal anti-Communists who accent the institutional history of the Party and understand its politics, determined in Moscow and narrowly conceived, to be the prime consideration in their commentary) against seeming ‘revisionists’ (New Left-inspired advocates of the relative autonomy
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of