James Simpson. Permanent Revolution

Old myths die hard. The “Whig” interpretation of history, which in the hands of its greatest exponents, such as Lord Macaulay, held that the modern history of liberty and toleration stemmed ultimately from the English Reformation’s assertion of the individual’s right to interpret the biblical text for themselves, may have been slaughtered as a serious scholarly option by Herbert Butterfield back in the 1930s, but its mangled ghost has continued to haunt secular political discourse nonetheless. So at least contends James Simpson in Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism, a breathtaking tour de force of literary and historical analysis that both confirms the basic pedigree—liberalism stems from the Reformation—and contradicts it in the novel twist that liberalism is the misbegotten and unforeseen child of evangelical religion, born precisely in order to discipline and contain it. Simpson’s premise is that early evangelical religion was a revolutionary force, a “permanently revolutionary religion” (28) exactly akin to those later political revolutions—1776, 1789, 1848, 1917—in its forging of a relentless internal logic that demanded complete and immediate transformation of the individual as well as society, systematically marginalized and persecuted those who seemed to stand it its way, and required a complete rewriting of the past, or rather, in Simpson’s own words, “legitimated violent repudiation of the past on the authority of absolute knowledge derived from the end of time” (21).

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