An exploration of the place of radical ideas and activity in English political and social history over three centuries. Its core concern is whether a long-term history of radicalism can be written. Are the things that historians label 'radical' linked into a single complex radical tradition, or are they separate phenomena linked only by the minds and language of historians? Does the historiography of radicalism uncover a repressed dimension of English history, or is it a construct that serves the needs of the present more than the understanding of the past? The book contains a variety of answers to these questions. As well as an introduction and eleven substantive chapters, it also includes two 'afterwords' which reflect on the implications of the book as a whole for the study of radicalism. The distinguished list of contributors is drawn from a variety of disciplines, including history, political science, and literary studies.

Introduction Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein; 1. A politics of emergency in the reign of Elizabeth I Stephen Alford; 2. Richard Overton as a milestone of English radical history: the new intertext of the civic ethos in mid-seventeenth-century England Luc Borot; 3. Radicalism and the English Revolution Glenn Burgess; 4. 'That Kind of People': Late Stuart Radicals and their manifestos: a functional approach Richard Greaves; 5. The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications Gregory Claeys; 6. On not inventing the English Revolution: the radical failure of the 1790s as linguistic non-performance? Iain Hampsher-Monk; 7. Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s Mark Philp; 8. The 1790s and the emergence of British radicalism Gregory Claeys; 8. Henry Hunt's peep into a prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt Margot Finn; 9. Jeremy Bentham's radicalism Fred Rosen; 10. Religion and the emergence of radicalism in nineteenth-century England J. C. D. Clark; 11. Joseph Hume and the Reformation of India 1819-33 Miles Taylor; Afterwords: Radicalism revisited Conal Condren; Radicalism reassessed J. C. Davis.