Witch Hunt

Although almost nobody has been prosecuted for witchcraft since the eighteenth century, people are often accused of it today if we can believe Daniel Barenboim, John Bercow, Jair Bolsonaro, Novak Djokovic, Paul Gambaccini, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Luis Rubiales, Alex Salmond, Donald Trump, Jacob Zuma or the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.¹ Over the last three or four years, all these people have complained (or the complaint has been made on their behalf) that they are the victims of a ‘witch hunt’. What do they mean by it?

One thing they mean, clearly, is that they are innocent of whatever it is they are being accused of. In England, witchcraft ceased to be a crime in 1735 because by then there was an emergent consensus, at least among the parliamentary class, that it does not really exist. After that date, alleged witches might still be prosecuted, but only for fraud.² Within this consensus, calling my accusers ‘witch hunters’ implies that they cannot possibly be right because my alleged crime is illusory. The tactical usefulness of the term is therefore obvious: it saves going into a lot of tiresome and perhaps contestable detail. Considered as a simple defensive move, however, it pays for its logical conclusiveness by its lack of referential force. If it is indeed universally acknowledged that witchcraft is non-existent, then for just that reason counter-accusations of witch hunting are universally understood to be metaphorical. So the bare naming is not enough: I must also convince my audience that the metaphor is applicable and appropriate. To see how that is done, we need to consider the other half of the phrase.

As far as I can tell, nobody talked about witch hunting until long after it had stopped happening. The expression appears very rarely before the nineteenth century, and when it does, it means something else. For example, a religious tract of 1618 denounced ‘witch hunters’, and a sermon published in 1657 was severe on ‘witch-hunting Atheists’, but a quick inspection of the contexts makes it clear that both these writers were referring to people who seek out witches not in order to punish them but in order to commission them to cast spells.³ The fact that the expression was intelligible in that sense suggests that in seventeenth-century English the meaning it has today is not merely unattested but impossible: ‘witch hunters’ could hardly be applied to the witch's persecutors if it was already understood to denote her clients. It is striking, then, that academic studies now routinely use it to refer to the former. Even historians who are careful to define and subdivide the term ‘witch’ in the light of early modern usage nevertheless deploy the modern concept of a witch hunt without introduction or qualification.⁴ It seems that although the expression was unknown to the hunters themselves, its meaning is obvious to everyone now.

In other words, the semantic content of ‘witch hunt’ includes not only the phenomenon but also a historically distinct attitude towards it: a retrospective viewpoint is built into the word. This viewpoint is moreover a superior one: by giving the practice a name it did not give itself, we imply that we understand the witch hunters as they could not understand themselves. To themselves, they may have appeared as concerned parents or ministers of religion or officers of the law, but to us they are hunters—an instance of the most primitive and animalistic phase of human society. This sharp dichotomy between the description and what it describes is a trace of the cultural moment which arguably launched the term beyond historiography and into the general Anglo-American language: the moment above all of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which was first performed in 1953 and is still quite often invoked when a modern (political) ‘witch hunt’ is in question.

Miller after all was using the historical remoteness of seventeenth-century Massachusetts as a polemical device. The audience were invited not only to watch the behaviour of a long-expired theocracy, but also, at the same time, to read it as a characterisation of present-day anti-Communist hysteria. This encounter of ancient and modern is at its most pointed in The Crucible, but the same conjunction features in several almost contemporary texts: witch hunting is combined with romantic comedy in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning (1948); belief in demonic possession is psychologised in Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudoun (1952, dramatised as The Devils by John Whiting in 1960); in William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) the choirboys turn into ‘hunters’ and eventually perpetrate a panic-stricken and murderous exorcism. No great critical ingenuity is needed to understand this cluster of witch-hunting narratives. All produced within a few years of the revelation of the death camps in 1945, they are haunted by the image of terrifying reversion to a dark age of irrational fear and hatred. Conversely, their authorial ideology is the secular progressivism of the post-war UN: human rights, enlightened pragmatism, the elimination of atavistic nationalism. ‘Witch hunting’ in this context is not just a code word for McCarthyism: it is a metonym for all that we hope, not quite confidently, to have consigned to the superstitious past.

At any time since the 1950s, then, to say that I am the victim of a witch hunt is to lay claim to what might be called the cognitive high ground. It puts my accusers in a place which is darker, less civilised and more naive than the place from which I am observing them. The force of such positioning draws of course on shared assumptions—not on the best historical scholarship necessarily, but rather on what everyone knows about witch hunts. This knowledge includes three intertwined but separable strands which seem to me to connect with current political usage.

The first strand is the idea, strongly implied by the metaphor of a ‘hunt’, that the prosecution of witches was an irregular collective activity rather than a proper judicial process. Fry's play, for example, gives the impression that its offstage witch hunters form a deluded crowd, in contrast with their intended victim, who is a witty, self-aware individual character. The process in The Crucible is more orderly than that, but more than once in the course of the play, Salem's descent into hysteria and delusion is marked by a coup de théâtre in which articulated argument gives way to the choric outbursts of the girls. The individual voice is drowned out by the cries of the group. In scenes like this, ‘witch hunt’ signifies something close to ‘lynch mob’: a bad community is shown turning on a single victim, who therefore attracts sympathetic identification. This narrative has been vividly exploited in recent politics: for example, both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have faced accusations which emerged from institutionally complex processes—parliamentary committees, departmental enquiries, panels of investigation and the like—and have used this to suggest that they are being personally hunted down by a self-appointed confederacy. In this sense ‘it is a witch hunt’ means that a particular human being is being pursued by an inhuman pack. The individual, like John Proctor or Golding's Simon, is aware of the truth, while the pack, over-excited, egging one another on, know not what they do.

Secondly, if witches do not really exist, it readily follows that one must look elsewhere for the real cause of witch hunting. Historians have variously attributed it to institutional misogyny, or communal tensions, or the upheavals of the Reformation.⁵ The process that destroys the hero of The Devils is a mixture of sexual hysteria and political opportunism. In The Crucible almost all the characters engaged in the prosecutions have ulterior motives: Abigail is after power and revenge, Putnam is increasing his landholdings, Danforth is defending the authority of his court, and so on. Writers in this moment of post-war enlightenment are not much concerned to imagine a genuine belief in witchcraft itself: the allegation is always a cover, whether cunning or unconscious, for something else. This implication of duplicity carries into political usage. When the Labour left protests that the leadership's interpretation of party membership rules amounts to a right-wing witch hunt, or the Estonian Prime Minister dismisses attacks on her business connections as ‘a witch-hunt by the opposition’, the import of the term is that the other side's insistence on legality is a fake, and that they are using the ostensible issue to further an undeclared agenda.⁶

Thirdly, it is widely believed that those accused of witchcraft were invariably found guilty. One of the things everyone knows about witch hunts is that suspects were thrown into water. If they floated, it was attributed to diabolic agency and they were executed; if on the other hand they sank, then they drowned. There is not much historical truth in this story, and if it carries conviction none the less, it is because of its perfect Catch-22 structure; everyone recognises the black humour of the inescapably closing trap. The same feeling feeds the dramatic power of The Crucible: the court in the play interprets every protestation of innocence as a sign of obduracy in sin, so the only way the accused can defend themselves is by confessing their guilt. Thus when, for example, Zac Goldsmith joined many other Conservative MPs in applying the term ‘witch hunt’ to the Commitee of Privileges investigation of Boris Johnson, he specifically meant that ‘there was only ever going to be one outcome’.⁷

To complain that I am the victim of a witch hunt, then, is to go well beyond the mere contention that the accusations against me are false. I am also saying that my accusers are a mob, that they are acting in bad faith, and that they are overriding the elementary principles of justice. And I am saying these things all the more persuasively because I am not advancing them as formal allegations; rather, they attach themselves to my adversaries on the basis that everybody knows what a witch hunt is. It is interesting in a way that all three strands are historically inaccurate. For most of the early modern period, it seems, witch trials were conducted by individual judges in accordance with official procedures, accusations were brought by people who genuinely believed that witches could and did pose a danger to the community, the water test was dismissed by many authorities as an ignorant superstition, and persons accused of witchcraft were quite often acquitted.⁸ None of these qualifications alters the fact that over the relevant centuries thousands of people were cruelly killed for a crime of which they cannot possibly have been guilty. But they do between them suggest that ‘witch hunt’, as a contemporary term of political abuse, is rooted in a caricature of the practice to which it alludes. This is not surprising: it is as a caricature that the expression is effective.

One further divergence from the historical record gives us a sidelight on the uses of the caricature. In the early modern period, most of the people who were executed as witches were women, and most of the women were poor, old, alone or otherwise socially marginal. Sometimes men were condemned, and sometimes people, of either sex, from higher social strata; but on the whole the typical victim of a witch hunt was female and unprivileged. It is therefore startling to return to my opening list of the contemporary public figures who have complained of being the target of a witch hunt and note that every one of them is a man in a position of institutional eminence. I could have included another, yet more extreme instance of this reversal: in March 2023, the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, was questioned by a US Senate Committee about his company's tenacious resistance to unionisation, and he was defended by a Republican member of the committee who described the hearings as a witch hunt. In this case, then, the role of victimised old woman was played by one the most powerful business executives in the world. What that irony suggests is that the opportunity to accuse one's accusers of witch hunting has itself become a prerogative of power. The counter-allegations I have traced (that the supposed offence is illusory; that the attempt to bring it to book is an effect of mob psychology; that the accusers are concealing their true motives; that they are violating the basic principles of justice) boil down, in this newly brutal context, to a single, simpler statement: rabble like you have no right to question the conduct of a person like me.