Christopher Hill felt that enlightenment liberalism had failed in the 1930s in the face of the Great Depression and apparent anarchy in international relations. For him and many others Marxism offered the most satisfying intellectual response, perfecting enlightenment thinking about progress and offering a way to chart a course for the future. This generation identified the USSR as a new kind of society: not just the state with cleanest hands in the crises of the 1930s, but a model for future economic and social development. From this optimism, and identification with international communism, was born the Communist Party of Great Britain Historians’ Group, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s attempted to work out a new Marxist understanding of the past that would fit Britain (in particular) for the future. Faith in the USSR collapsed in the middle and later 1950s however, severing the connection between Marxism and the Party, and key figures in the Historians’ Group subsequently took rather different paths, although often acknowledging their debt to this formative period.
This Group is of interest to those studying the history of ideas and historiography in the twentieth century, and is also important for understanding the trajectory of many fields of historical scholarship in the post-war period, since key figures in the Historians’ Group have exercised such an abiding influence in their fields.
