Democracy and Revolution: the English Levellers

The reading this week is The English Levellers, ed. Andrew Sharp ; it is also in hard copy in the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (the so-called blue books series). The hard copy has notes that the Internet version currently lacks.

The Levellers were arguably the first organized political party in modern history, and the first democratic party. Led by John Lilburne ("Freeborn John"), Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and others, they first started lobbying for political change in London in 1645-6. A few years earlier, in 1642, parliament had gone to war with King Charles I in defense of the liberties of the English people, and of the established Protestant religion. Parliamentarians believed that the king's policies threatened both religion and liberty. They claimed that England was a limited and mixed monarchy in which the king was bound by the law. Many of them argued against the Divine Right of Kings, and claimed that monarchs get their powers not from God alone, but from the people. One common parliamentarian idea was that the first king had been granted authority by the people in an original contract which defined and limited his power. A king who infringed the contract, they said, could be resisted by his subjects. Hobbes was to turn this idea in an absolutist direction. The Levellers, on the other hand, deployed it to advance democratic objectives.

Most parliamentarians were social elitists and argued that the people - who had originally been sovereign, and who had granted authority to the king - were not the mass of the population, but the wealthy, landowning members of society. In the course of the Civil War (1642-6), different ideas began to spread in the parliamentarian army, especially from 1645, when it was organized on national (rather than regional) lines as the New Model Army. It was in London, and in the army, that Leveller ideas acquired most influence. Many soldiers came to believe that they, and other ordinary people, should be given a share in political power. They had risked their lives fighting against the king (who was finally defeated in 1646), and wanted some tangible rewards. When parliament tried to disband the army in 1647, it marched on London and seized effective power from parliament. The Levellers proposed a new constitution called the Agreement of the People, and this was discussed by the army in the Putney Debates of October -November 1647. Ultimately, only a few aspects of the Leveller program were enforced - the abolition of the House of Lords in 1649, and the introduction in 1653 of the idea that the number of representatives it sent to parliament should be proportional to the population of each region. The English did not begin to put the democratic aspects of the program into action until 1832 and later. The reason for the failure of the movement was that the army high command (especially Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell - earlier a friend of Lilburne) strongly disliked it and ordered the soldiers (who had been bribed into abandoning their radicalism) to crush it in 1649.

Though puritan in religion, the Levellers opposed the intolerance of most puritans and especially of Presbyterians, against whom they allied with the Independents (or Congregationalists). In addition to religious toleration, they also advocated the abolition of monopolies (including trading monopolies, and the professional monopoly of lawyers), and argued that we all possess natural rights (such as equality before the law, and a right to due legal process). Modern left-wing groups have frequently claimed the Levellers as precursors, but arguably they should be seen as libertarians rather than socialists. They were accused of wanting to abolish property or at least equalize (or "level") property holdings (hence "Levellers" - the name their enemies used for them), but they always denied the charge, and they can be seen as supporters of the interests of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, rather than of ordinary people (most of whom were illiterate, and could not have read the Levellers' pamphlets).

The Levellers were pamphleteers, and not systematic philosophers. So their ideas are scattered through their writings and not presented in any very organized form. Perhaps begin by reading their most famous political manifesto, the Agreement of the People (item 7), and the later Agreement of the Free People (item 12), then move to the extracts from the Putney Debates (item 8), and then read the rest.

Some further reading:

G. E. Aylmer, The Levellers - good, clear introduction;
David Wootton, "Leveller democracy," in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700;
the chapter on the Levellers in John Sanderson, "But the People's Creatures": the philosophical basis of the English Civil War;
and the chapter on them in C. B. Macpherson, The political theory of possessive individualism - an interesting Marxist interpretation, published in 1962.
Pauline Gregg, Free-born John, is a very readable biography of the most important Leveller leader.

Some Web sites include:

	The Dissenters: the Levellers ;
	Selected Works of the Levellers .
	Diggers/Levellers Links also gives transcripts of some Leveller tracts
	John Lilburne for a biographical outline

There are many more - [The Levellers is also the name of a British rock band, named for the Levellers.]