J.P.Sommerville

Democracy: the Levellers

Suggested reading

Aylmer, G.E., The Levellers in the English Revolution. London 1975.
[Anthology with commentary.]

Brailsford, H.N., The Levellers and the English Revolution, 1976.

Greenberg, Janelle, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution, CUP 2001
[Convincingly argues that there had long been a radical aspect to English common law thinking; many earlier scholars claimed that the radicalism of the Levellers wholly broke with English common law thought.]

Gregg, Pauline, Free-born John, 1961.
[Biography of Lilburne.]

Hill, Christopher, The world turned upside down, London 1972,
[Classic discussion of radicalism in mid-seventeenth-century England.]

Houston, Alan, "'A way of settlement': the Levellers, monopolies and the public interest," in History of Political Thought 9(1993), 381-419.

Macpherson, C.B., The political theory of possessive individualism,  Oxford 1962.
[Highly influential Marxist approach. On seventeenth-century English thinking in general, with a chapter on the Levellers.]

Morton, A.L., "Leveller democracy - fact or myth?" in The World of the Ranters, 1979.

Sanderson, John, '"But the people's creatures": the philosophical basis of the English Civil War, Manchester 1989
[Good overview of political thinking in Civil War England.]

Sharp, A., Political ideas of the English Civil Wars, Harlow 1983.
[Anthology with commentary.]

Thomas, Keith, "The Levellers and the franchise," in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum, 1972.
[Response to Macpherson.]

Weston, Corinne C., "England: ancient constitution and common law," in J.H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, Cambridge 1991, 374-411.
[Background material on English constitutional  thinking.]

Wootton, David, "Leveller democracy" in J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of PoliticalThought 1450-1700, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Winstanley, Gerrard, Works, ed. G.H. Sabine, Ithaca 1941;  The law of freedom and other writings, ed. Christopher Hill, Harmondsworth 1973.
[Works by the leading Digger Gerard Winstanley; the Diggers saw themselves as "True Levellers." Here is an online version of The law of freedom.]

Zagorin,Perez, A history of political thought in the English revolution, London 1954.
[Sensible old guide.]