James Simpson, Iconoclasm and the Cultural Revolution
The standard liberal view is that iconoclasts are somewhere else and them. They are vandals in other parts of the globe who destroy art (e.g. ISIS; Chinese Cultural Revolution). The history of Anglo-American iconoclasm tells a slightly less comfortable story of iconoclasts having been us and here (England experienced a century of legislated iconoclasm of every religious image between 1538 and 1644; it exported distrust of the image to New England). I then turn to perhaps the least comforting instances of iconoclasm, by looking to contemporary “progressive” iconoclasm in the United States, where we see that the iconoclasts are us and now.
James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). Formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, he is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was educated at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. Recent books include Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007), Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019).