What the Scholars Say: The Levellers and Their Future

• In Event: The Politics of Levelling: History and Theory

Abstract

The Levellers were largely erased from historical memory after 1700, despite the long-term survival of some of their ideas in legal and political practice. The understanding of the Levellers from the time of their retrieval in the 19th century was the work of political activists as well as professional historians with decidedly left-wing political interests, and to some extent this remains the case. Hence they were seen as harbingers of social democracy, socialism, communism (in their 'true Leveller' or Digger version), and more recently neoliberalism and populism (in the shape of the UK Independence Party); there was also a Corbynite version of the Levellers.

Strong objection in the 1970s and 1980s to the Marxist version of history associated with Christopher Hill (where the Levellers stood for a 'people's revolution' in the late 1640s that was suppressed when the English republic was founded in January 1649), made work on early modern English radicalism rare in history departments; the Levellers survived more readily as subjects of literary study or less commonly among historians of political thought.

Radicalism began to receive renewed attention from the 1990s onwards and this paper explores how the Levellers now look in the context of recent work in legal history, religious and gender history, the history of poverty, the history of diet, the history of the book, censorship, the historical sociology of political meetings, and of political communication (in civil society and among men at arms) and transnational studies: the matter of Leveller connections with movements, thinkers, texts and societies in early modern continental Europe and colonial north America. What was their relationship with other groups identified as participants in the English Revolution: Independent and Baptist churches, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, 'true' republicans and vegetarians? What was novel about the Levellers, if they can still be regarded as a distinct group, and how did their ideas and personnel cope with the challenge of political transformations after 1660 and 1689? I'll argue that we are still some way away from a generally agreed and satisfying picture: gaps in our knowledge still remain, and I'll outline some ways forward in several research agendas.

Author

• Nigel Smith, Princeton University