INTRODUCTION

The most obvious functionality of radicalism is that it challenges the status quo, whether in its language, legitimations, objectives, institutions, processes, dispositions of power or achievements – or all of these. These are, after all, the instrumentalities of governance, of rule, and it is, at one end of a spectrum or the other, the transformation of rule which radicalism seeks.

Such an apparently unexceptional statement, or definition, belies the problems immediately confronting the historian. The essays in this collection circulate – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – around two of the most important of these problems or questions. The first concerns the transformation of rule implicitly envisaged by radicalism and the ambivalent status which attaches to it. Is it a question of substance or imagination, of fact or of fiction and might there be continuous histories of either of these? Should radical ideas, groups, movements and actions be depicted as existing in a ‘real’ world and is their history to be juxtaposed in counterpoint with the hard ‘facts’ of political, legal, constitutional, social and economic history? Yet, as an alternative to the status quo, radicalism appears to shift from the real world to the imagined, from reality to ideality, from description to fiction. But, of course, we also recognize that realities are themselves constructed and, in some sense, imaginatively constructed.