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THE LEVELLERS AND THE BIRTH OF LIBERAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

James R. Otteson
James R. Otteson*
Affiliation:
Business Ethics, University of Notre Dame, USA
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Abstract

When did liberal political theory, or perhaps liberal political economy, begin? Although many would trace their beginnings to the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, or perhaps John Locke, in fact many of the propositions we today recognize as forming the core of liberalism were articulated in the first half of the seventeenth century by an unduly neglected group called the Levellers and their leader John Lilburne. In this essay, I first give some historical background and context to the Levellers and Lilburne. Next, I articulate several of their liberal positions, including freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of commerce and trade, and I examine their justifications for these positions, which I argue were both novel and radical. I conclude by exploring the contemporary relevance of the Levellers and argue that they should be considered as among liberalism’s most important founders.

Keywords

LevellersJohn Lilburneliberalismpolitical economyfreedom of religionfree tradeorigins of liberalism
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Summer 2020 , pp. 170 - 189
Copyright
© Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation 2020

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Footnotes

For their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay, I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, Thomas Cushman, Carmen Pavel, Gregory Robson, David Schmidtz, and the other contributors to this volume. I have drawn liberally, though silently, on their excellent suggestions. Remaining errors are mine alone.

References

1 Because there is more than one way to define “political economy,” the argument I am about to make that the Levellers were an early source of liberal political economy must be qualified. As will soon become clear, perhaps the best way to put my claim is that they were developing a normative conception of individualism from which they deduced both political and economic positions on which other, later thinkers could build.

2 Locke did, however, have several short letters and essays on topics like trade, interest, and paper currency. See The Collected Works of John Locke, vol. 9 (London: C. Baldwin Press, 1824). Another major figure in this early period of liberalism’s development is Grotius, though the Levellers did not cite Grotius and there appears to be no evidence that they were aware of his writings.

3 See Anderson, Elizabeth, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)Google Scholar, which claims that the “Levellers undertook one of the first egalitarian social movements of the modern world,” though Anderson claims that it was a “left” variety of egalitarianism (7). See also Ann Hughes, “Learning from the Levellers?” in Anderson, Elizabeth, Private Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 75–88Google Scholar.

4 The term “Levellers” was used earlier than this. Its first known political use was in 1607 to name a group in Northamptonshire who protested the enclosure of commons by filling in the ditches and leveling the fences that marked the new boundaries. Although there is some dispute about who first called the political group led by Overton, Walwyn, and Lilburne “Levellers,” it was probably Cromwell in the Putney Debates of 1647, as Lilburne himself later reported. See Worden, Blair, “Appendix—‘The Levellers’: The Emergence of the Term,” in Mendel, Michael, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 280–82Google Scholar; Gregg, Pauline, Free-Born John: The Biography of John Lilburne (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 221Google Scholar; and Frank, Joseph, The Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 291–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For a discussion of this lineage, see McNally, David, “Locke, Levellers, and Liberty: Property and Democracy in the Thought of the First Whig,” History of Political Thought 10 (1989), 17–40Google Scholar; and Foxley, Rachel, “John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ‘Free-Born Englishmen,’” in Rees, John, ed., John Lilburne and the Levellers: Reappraising the Roots of English Radicalism 400 Years On (London: Routledge, 2018), 6–31.Google Scholar

6 See Wooton, David, “Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution,” in Burns, J. H., ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 412–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 The Levellers used masculine nouns and pronouns throughout their writings. For that reason, and not to beg any questions, I will follow their practice. As I will discuss later, however, they intended their principles to include women as well. See Hughes, Ann, “Women and the Levellers: Elizabeth and John Lilburne and Their Associates,” in John, Rees, ed., John Lilburne and the Levellers (London: Routledge, 2018), 49–60Google Scholar.

8 See, for example, the 1645 Englands Birth-Right Justified, in James R. Otteson, ed., The Levellers: Overton, Walwyn, and Lilburne, 5 vols. (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2003), vol. 3, 56–57.

9 In his 1649 The Free-man’s Freedom Vindicated, Lilburne argues that legitimate government requires “mutual agreement or consent” (Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 105).

10 Other notable figures in the movement included Katherine Chidley, John Wildman, Thomas Prince, Thomas Rainsborough, Edward Sexby, and Walwyn’s son-in-law Humphrey Brooke. Holorenshaw, Henry, The Levellers and the English Revolution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971 [1939])Google Scholar, lists several more persons, on several sides of the events of the time in his list of “Dramatis Personae” (9–10). See also Rees, John, The Leveller Revolution (London: Verso, 2017)Google Scholar.

11 The total output of the Levellers during the 1640s—in letters, pamphlets, petitions, and tracts—numbered in the hundreds. For a list of Leveller writings, see Frank, Joseph, The Levellers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 276–89Google Scholar.

12 For a collection of speeches, remarks, and so on, delivered at the Putney Debates, see Woodhouse, A. S. P., ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents (London: Dent, 1938)Google Scholar. See also Le Claire, Lesley, “The Survival of the Manuscript,” in Mendle, Michael, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19–35Google Scholar; and Henderson, Frances, “Reading, and writing, the text of the Putney debates,” in Mendle, Michael, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 36–50Google Scholar.

13 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 4, 206.

14 See Wolfe, Don M., Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), 97ffGoogle Scholar.

15 The reasons for the rapid collapse of the Levellers as a political movement are more complex than one might suspect. For discussion, see Gregg, Pauline, Free-Born John (London: Phoenix Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Pease, Theodore C., The Leveller Movement: A Study in the History and Political Theory of the English Great Civil War (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965)Google Scholar; Brailsford, H. N., The Levellers and the English Revolution (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961)Google Scholar; and Rees, John, The Leveller Revolution (London: Verso, 2017)Google Scholar.

16 See Sharp, Andrew, ed., The English Levellers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xi–xiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent recent collection of reappraisals of the Leveller movement, see Rees, John, ed., John Lilburne and the Levellers: Reappraising the Roots of English Radicalism 400 Years On (London: Routledge, 2018)Google Scholar.

17 For discussion of the Levellers’ influence after Burford, see Harris, Tim, “The Leveller Legacy: From the Restoration to the Exclusion Crisis,” in Mendle, Michael, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 219–40Google Scholar; and Vallance, Edward, “Reborn John? The Eighteenth-Century Afterlife of John Lilburne,” in Rees, John, ed., John Lilburne and the Levellers (London: Routledge, 2018), 117–42Google Scholar.

18 For more information about Lilburne and his life, see Gregg, Pauline, Free-Born John (London: Phoenix Press, 2000)Google Scholar and Braddick, Michael, The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar. In this section I draw on Otteson, James R., The End of Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 120–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 See Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 59–60.

20 See Rees, John, The Leveller Revolution (London: Verso, 2017)Google Scholar and Braddick, Michael, The Common Freedom of the People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

21 See Braddick, Common Freedom of the People, chap. 2.

22 Hume, David, The History of England, 6 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), vol. 5, 244.Google Scholar

23 See Lilburne’s Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England in Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 289–367.

24 Hume, David, The History of England, 6 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), vol. 6, 39Google Scholar.

25 Braddick, Michael, The Common Freedom of the People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), ixGoogle Scholar.

26 Gregg, Pauline, Free-Born John (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 354 and 358Google Scholar.

27 At his trial during his second imprisonment, Lilburne, who was facing charges of treason that carried a potential sentence of death, took his claimed right to face his accusers even further: he “demanded a sword telling them [the Lords] that he desired to die in single opposition man to man with any there, or if they feared the trial, any two so he might die with honour” (quoted in John Rees, The Leveller Revolution [London: Verso, 2017], 83–84).

28 See Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 137.

29 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 57.

30 Lilburne refers explicitly to, and distinguishes the Levellers’ claims from, the “erroneous tenents [sic] of the poor Diggers” in his 1649 The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England (Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 366).

31 See Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 105–6, and Anderson, Elizabeth, Private Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

32 For discussion of this Levellers’ claim, see Seaberg, Robert, “The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: The Levellers and the Argument from Continuity,” Historical Journal 24 (1981): 791–806CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 There were exceptions to this—for example, the mutiny of 1647 and the final resistance at Burford in 1649—but violence was not their usual modus operandi.

34 Robertson, for example, argues that the Levellers’ writings cannot be understood apart from their religious faiths. See Robertson, D. B., The Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy (New York: Kings Crown Press, 1951)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an alternative view, see Sabine, George H., ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley with an Appendix of the Documents Relating to the Digger Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1941), 1–8Google Scholar.

35 I note that a similar issue arises when trying to understand the argument of Locke’s Second Treatise. See, for example, Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 2, 399.

37 Otteson, Levellers, ibid.

38 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 2, 402.

39 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 2, 401.

40 See Brockway, Fenner, Britain’s First Socialists: The Levellers, Agitators and Diggers of the English Revolution (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar and Holorenshaw, Henry, The Levellers and the English Revolution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971)Google Scholar.

41 See Hill, Christopher, “Introduction,” in Hamilton, Leonard, ed., Gerrard Winstanley: Selections from His Works (London: Cresset Press, 1944), 1–8Google Scholar.

42 Cf. Psalms 115:16: “The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to the sons of men.” Sir Robert Filmer articulated a related argument in defense of the divine right of kings, namely, that God gave the world to Adam and his descendants, in his Patriarcha; or, the Natural Power of Kings, published posthumously in 1680. Although Filmer was probably in his 50s during the time of the Civil War, and surely would have been aware of the Diggers and the Levellers, he makes no reference to them in Patriarcha.

43 See, for example, Lilburne’s 1645 Englands Birth-Right Justified (Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 57–58).

44 For discussion of exactly how far the Levellers wanted to extend the franchise, see Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar. See also Morton, A. L., The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970)Google Scholar and Wooton, David, “Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution,” in Burns, J. H., ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 412–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 For a view that is skeptical of the connection between the Levellers’ concerns and general individual liberty, see William Lamont, “Puritanism, Liberty and the Putney Debates,” in Mendle, Michael, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 241–55Google Scholar. See also Gregg, Pauline, Free-Born John (London: Phoenix Press, 2000)Google Scholar and Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

46 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 376.

47 Woodhouse, A. S. P., ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London: Dent, 2001), 27Google Scholar.

48 Sharp, Andrew, ed., The English Levellers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Ibid., xx–xxi.

50 The Levellers also frequently used “lawful” to refer to the principles articulated in the Magna Carta. See, for example, Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 147 and passim.

51 See Walwyn’s 1651 Juries Justified (Otteson, Levellers, vol. 2, 387–98).

52 Foxley, Rachel, “John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ‘Free-Born Englishmen,’” in Rees, John, ed., John Lilburne and the Levellers (London: Routledge, 2018)Google Scholar.

53 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 108.

54 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 138.

55 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 142–43.

56 Quoted in Foxley, “John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ‘Free-Born Englishmen’,” 21.

57 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 105. See also vol. 3, 372.

58 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 105.

59 See Foxley, Rachel, “John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ‘Free-Born Englishmen’,” 21 and Peter Wende, “‘Liberty’ und ‘property’ in der politischen Theorie der Levellers,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 1 (1974): 147–73Google Scholar.

60 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 295.

61 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 296.

62 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 142.

63 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 137–38.

64 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 2, 399.

65 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 2, 401.

66 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 2, 402.

67 Otteson, Levellers, vol. 2, 402–3.

68 See, for example, Ann Hughes, “Learning from the Levellers?” in Anderson, Elizabeth, Private Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 75–88Google Scholar. See also Foxley, Rachel, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Anderson, Elizabeth, Private Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 7–17Google Scholar.

69 See the 1649 Englands New Chains Discovered (Otteson, Levellers, vol. 3, 257–60).

70 Mill wrote: “It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. [ . . . ] Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage” (John Stuart Mill, On Liberty [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978 (1859)], 9–10).

71 Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849: 675), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000080778727;view=1up;seq=695.

72 Thomas B. Macaulay, “Essay on Milton” (1825, paras 70 and 71), https://archive.org/stream/cu31924010389868/cu31924010389868_djvu.txt.

73 Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Raphael, D. D. and Macfie, A. L., eds. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1976 [1759]), 206–7Google Scholar.

74 Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, Macpherson, C. B., ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), 17Google Scholar.

75 See Schmidtz, David and Brennan, Jason, A Brief History of Liberty (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Quoted in Sharp, Andrew, ed., The English Levellers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77 See McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)Google Scholar and Rosling, Hans, Rönnlund, Anna Rosling, and Rosling, Ola, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018)Google Scholar.