Of all the great Marxist historians who, after the Second World War, reshaped the way we understood the past, John Saville is the most difficult to assess. He lacked the poetic romanticism of EP Thompson, the Olympian detachment of Eric Hobsbawm or the charisma of Raphael Samuel. His importance, however, is demonstrated by this volume. The editors have assembled a collection of essays that evaluate the man and his work. It is a worthy tribute to a major figure on the British left.
Like many of his generation, Saville, who died in 2009, was radicalised by the Depression of the 1930s and the intellectual impact of Marxism. He joined the Communist Party as a student at the London School of Economics and, after war service, became part of the Historians Group which also included Thompson, Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 led him, like Thompson, to resign from the party . This did not reduce his dedication to politics and he went on to combine work as a socialist intellectual with historical research, sustained by his academic position at the University of Hull. Saville’s generation complained about the top-down focus of history as it was still being taught in the 1950s with its kings and queens and wars. Saville was among the historians who sought to change that situation. His greatest legacy is the Dictionary of Labour Biography, whose volumes he edited for many years (and which is still ongoing). The value of the Dictionary is that it recovers the lives of significant figures on the left and helps us think about the common experiences that shaped different generations of activists.
He also launched the Socialist Register, an annual series devoted to political analysis. He edited the early volumes alongside Ralph Miliband, probably his closest intellectual comrade. Saville frequently stayed at his house, although he would not have been sympathetic to the political trajectory of Miliband’s sons. Like Miliband père, Saville hated the Labour Party and believed the welfare state was an attempt by the ruling class to keep the workers in their place. Even some of his comrades found that hard to take.
Despite a prodigious output, Saville never quite wrote the classic work – comparable, say, to Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class – that many expected. The closest he came was his book on the events of 1848 in Britain which analysed the defeat of the Chartist movement by the repressive power of the state. It remains a major interpretation and one that, as Malcolm Chase shows in one of this volume’s best essays, was coloured by the experiences of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, a good example of the way present day politics can illuminate the past. Saville had a difficult and frequently aggressive personality – not unusual among his generation of Communists – and could be a bit of a bruiser in an argument. I once saw him at a Labour History conference attack the audience because their questions were not sufficiently rigorous. This book, however, gives us two good reasons to respect him. First, it reminds us how he brought intense research to bear on history and his political work. Second, it reveals Saville as an intellectual with a strong international vision. The class struggle happened at a global level, as well as at a national and local level. A difficult man, certainly, but, sometimes, we need people like that.
