ABSTRACT
In The World Turned Upside Down, the great British historian Christopher Hill addresses the transformation that took place in the seventeenth century in England. This was a century of revolution—two revolutions, to be exact, in 1640 and 1688, which never really succeeded in completely overturning established power but did destroy the prevailing forms of social and economic authority and utterly changed everyday life in the countryside and city alike. The enclosures in England meant the end of the old system of land tenure and the rise of the new system of individual capitalist farming as well as corporate farming, which was far more advanced in England than it was in North America. Its consequence was that it produced the English working class and the modern phenomenon of unemployment and underemployment. Ideas have an autonomy that is irreplaceable by education about the past, education about technique, education about method.
