The Varieties of ‘Levelling’ in Early Modern England

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

Abstract

When Oliver Cromwell accused the “London Agents” present at the Putney Debates of 1647 of “driv[ing] at a levelling” in their proposals for “a more Equall representative,” he inadvertently christened a political movement that continues to capture the modern imagination. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers not only celebrate “the Levellers” Cromwell had in mind as egalitarians avant la lettre, they continue to deploy the language of “levelling” in describing—as well as criticizing—the normative logic of modern egalitarianism. But what was levelling, and what were its political implications?

To answer these questions, this paper examines the varieties of “levelling” and its association with equality in early modern English political thought. While William Walwyn and his colleagues embraced the label, they famously disavowed any interest in “levelling…for which we suppose is commonly meant an equality of men’s estates, and taking away the proper right and title that [is] every mans to what is his own.” By contrast, Gerrard Winstanley and his compatriots styled themselves as “True Levellers” when they camped out on St George’s Hill and “began to dig then to so[w] the ground with Parsnips, Carrets, and Beanes.” In characterizing this activity as “levelling” both movements were evoking earlier protests against enclosures, which “levelled” or flattened the fences and hedges surrounding private property. But “levelling” could also evoke the architectural activity of laying a firm foundation on which to “raise a fabric”—as in John Lilburne’s Regall Tyrannie Discovered and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, both of which took the natural equality of human beings as a fundamental premise of political argument, but in pursuit of vastly different political ends. I argue that the essential, if neglected ambiguity of “levelling” as an early modern political project sheds light on similar ambiguities in egalitarian political philosophy today.

Author

• Teresa M. Bejan, University of Oxford