Learning from the Levellers?
Ann Hughes
As the most recent historian of the Levellers has declared, “the Levellers can seem uncannily modern.”1 In late October 1647, Colonel Thomas Rainborough, one of the Leveller sympathizers at the Putney debates, insisted in an argument about the extent of the franchise in a reimagined and reconstructed English polity: “really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.”2 The Putney debates, held in a London suburban church, involved the commanders and soldiers of the English Parliament’s victorious army, and some civilian associates, in discussions of the possible settlement of the kingdom following the decisive defeat of Charles I in a traumatic and bloody civil war; they demonstrate, among other things, the capacity of relatively ordinary men for intellectual vision and political resourcefulness. Professor Anderson notes the “intellectual depth and seriousness” of these debates (Lecture 1, note 9); their words still resonate for contemporary egalitarians.
That this call for a broad manhood suffrage—the poorest “he” (and we should pause a little over the “he”)—was couched in economic terms is something to which I will return. Professor Anderson offers an eloquent, perceptive, moving, and challenging account of the seventeenth-century English Levellers as egalitarian thinkers and as activists. They offer us resources for thinking about our continuing dilemmas of how to argue and work for a fairer society. Her first lecture is an exemplary demonstration of the deployment of historical material as a storehouse of the imagination, and a legacy for the present. Professor Anderson suggests that an apparently paradoxical Leveller commitment to free exchange through the market could nonetheless suggest how we might conceive of equality as more than a material issue, as a matter of esteem, standing, and authority, in Anderson’s terms. Furthermore, the Levellers, as a pioneering “egalitarian social movement,” are the foundation for Anderson’s project of recovering a normative egalitarianism for the contemporary world.
Leveller petitions, campaigns, and manifestos did indeed include attacks on the great monopoly trading companies. Their “great” petition of September 1648 demanded of the English Parliament, as its tenth clause, “that you would have freed all trade and merchandising from all monopolizing and engrossing by Companies and others.”3 Their pamphlets often endorsed a variety of political and social campaigns, including support for provincial merchants trying to break in to London-dominated trades.4 Like more recent free-marketeers, Levellers were anxious to constrain the power of the “state,” even that new state they sought to bring into being. As Rainborough was speaking at Putney, army radicals issued the first version of the “Agreement of the People,” a manifesto for the remaking of the English polity that has come to define our understanding of the Leveller movement. The current Parliament, which had failed to deliver on its promises to the people, was to be replaced through a direct process of participation and consent. The Agreement was founded on trust in the capacity of ordinary (male) political actors, and a profound suspicion of concentration of power in all its forms: it called for the dissolution of the present Parliament, “to prevent the many inconveniences apparently arising from the long continuance of the same persons in authority”; then “the people” would “of course” choose a Parliament every two years. Constituencies were to be established proportionately to their population, which implied universal manhood suffrage. This new Representative was charged with the passing and enforcing of law, the making of war and peace, and the appointing of office holders. The framers of the Agreement thus proposed wide authority for this body but hastened immediately to limit its scope. Following elections, “the power of this and all future Representatives of this nation is inferior only to theirs who choose them”; except for “whatsoever is not expressly or impliedly reserved by the represented to themselves.” Certain powers could not be resigned by the people to their Representative, and these “whatsoevers” were extremely significant. The first “reservation,” probably the most important, concerned religious liberty: the Representative was to have no power over “matters of religion … because therein we cannot remit or exceed a tittle of what our consciences dictate to be the mind of God, without wilful sin.” In modern political analysis, control over military affairs is usually central to conceptions of the state, but even here the Levellers sought to curtail the Representative’s powers: the second “reservation” declared that conscription for military service was “against our freedom,” although the Agreement acknowledged that “money (the sinews of war) being always at their disposal,” the Representative was unlikely to “want numbers of men apt enough to engage in any just cause.”5 The Levellers’ profound suspicion of state power is revealed in the May 1649 final version of the Agreement of the People, which called for annual Parliaments, with no permanent executive allowed; the state would in effect be run by temporary committees of each Parliament.6
The Levellers’ resistance to tyranny, their commitment to freedom, popular consent, and the individual conscience, and their consistent opposition to the monopolization of power, whether in the state, the law, the economy, or the church, offer, as Professor Anderson’s first lecture demonstrated, an inspiring and still relevant egalitarian vision for those on the left. These Tanner lectures were presented shortly after “lovers of liberty and justice in Britain” used Rainborough’s words at Putney to inspire their opposition to a Global Law Summit denounced as “a shameless festival of corporate networking.”7 As the lectures were given, British activists, film-makers, songwriters, and historians were celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Lilburne, the most celebrated Leveller leader. Among these activists were Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn, now the leader of the British Labour Party. John Lilburne is said to be the historical figure Corbyn most admires, while Tariq Ali, like Professor Anderson, has seen the agitation of the 1640s as a resource for thinking about present dilemmas, but he was prompted, not to a defense of market relations but to call for a new “Grand Remonstrance” that would demand the “nationalization” of the railways and public utilities (what British socialists used to call the commanding heights of the economy), returning them to public/state ownership.8
Mid-seventeenth-century English history can provide profoundly divergent legacies for our contemporary world. This raises for me, writing as a historian, some difficult issues of how we deploy historical material within other disciplines, and within broader contemporary public discourse. Most historians today want their scholarship to engage with public concerns and even to have an impact on public policy, although they disagree (often bitterly) about how best this can be done.9 On the other hand, most historians are instinctive or congenital pedants, habitually prone to nit-picking about their specialist areas and periods. Even in these post-postmodern days, after the linguistic turn, when we understand that all accounts of the past are contested and provisional, we are still committed to constructing the most “accurate” or at least plausible version possible, one that most coheres with the surviving evidence. So I do want to say that the Levellers and their seventeenth-century social context were not quite as portrayed in Professor Anderson’s first lecture. I do not want to hurl boring, isolated supposed “facts” into our discussions, but I do want to encourage us to think about what difference it makes to our arguments if the historical picture is made a bit more complicated, or even contradictory. Historical material offers raw material for inspiration, and for thought experiments in which we seek alternative directions or means of achieving change. How, though, does this differ from the use of imaginative literature or abstract philosophical concepts? How much does it matter that something—that we, as historians, try to understand as well as we possibly can—really happened, and involved real people? This is an unsophisticated formulation, but I do want to insist on the limits of the real, and on the benefits of acknowledging these limits. Historians’ skepticism in the face of the partial, intractable evidence that survives from the past usually produces complex accounts of historical processes; it may be that complexity, rather than straightforward solutions, best serves our current dilemmas.
Within this framework, then, writing as a historian of mid-seventeenth-century England, I want to address three aspects of Professor Anderson’s first lecture, suggesting we need a more nuanced or more complicated picture. I will focus especially on the nature of early modern economic and social change in England. How should we characterize it as a society in transition, and how might our characterization affect the potential for the market to be “left”? Second, and more specifically, I want to complicate the notion of the market itself, in its early modern form, and nuance Leveller attitudes to markets and to private property. Finally, because Professor Anderson’s lecture raises the question directly, I want to ask where women fit in here, both within the Leveller movement, and when we consider the relationship between “individuals” (put deliberately in quotation marks) in markets.
Professor Anderson, following Adam Smith, structures part of her argument around a positive transition in England, from a feudal society where social relationships were based on fawning servility, to a capitalist market economy, where “masterless men” could potentially achieve autonomy, through reciprocal transactions of exchange conducted on a basis of equal dignity. This is a drastically simplified version of social transformation, but we should probably not judge Smith as a historian; his method is rather the more schematic one of a political economist or even of an avowedly utopian thinker. We need, however, to understand the complexities of how social and economic changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England affected people like the Levellers, and consequently, the subtleties of how, as a movement, the Levellers responded to these changes. Within their historical context, the Levellers appear to be more ambiguous about the potential of this new world. Early modern England did not experience an Industrial Revolution, but it did see very significant, dislocating change in the century before the Civil War, and as Anderson shows, the effects were very diverse. Sections of the population benefited from rising population and inflation; and from the expansion, specialization and greater productivity of agriculture, industry, and commerce. These groups profited from market transactions. But people with small amounts of land, and insecure tenancies where profiteering landlords could raise rents or enclose land for private exploitation, fell by the wayside. They became dependent on wages or languished as “masterless” men; and most such men were not the self-employed farmers or artisans enjoying independence, as idealistically described in the lecture. These masterless men were rather vulnerable wage laborers or vagrants, dependent on individual charity or, increasingly, on public assistance. The most authoritative social historian of early modern England, Keith Wrightson, sees production for the market a risk small households were “constrained to make” rather than an opportunity.10 The changes of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries produced poverty on an unprecedented scale, and a rising number of households dependent on wage-labor, during an era of declining real wages. Probably half the population relied mainly on wage labor by the middle of the seventeenth century. The national income of England doubled at least in the century up to 1640, but, as in other periods, the benefits of this expansion were unevenly shared and the results were greater inequality and increased social polarization. It became less and less likely that an apprenticeship to an urban trade was a pathway to a comfortable life as an independent artisan or businessman; many hopeful young men faced a lifetime as journeymen or laborers. The Levellers made much of the rights of “freeborn” Englishmen, and their campaigns helped to give the term free man some of its modern connotations of individual autonomy and agency, but it also continued to imply someone with specific and exclusive privileges in trade and manufacture as a member of a company or guild. In this sense, barely half of adult males in London were free men by 1640. Economic change and commercialization in practice went in hand-in-hand with increasing state power, to defend English overseas trade, and, most pertinent to our discussions here, to address the problems that resulted from increasing social polarization. As Keith Wrightson has explained, by the mid-seventeenth century, “a commonwealth based upon households had become one in which a substantial segment of the population was no longer able to sustain a household without periodic public assistance, and in which a further substantial minority could not establish an independent household at all.”11 England’s unique system of poor relief began as local initiative, subsequently established by national legislation and locally enforced in parishes. The English poor law represented and helped to construct new social hierarchies: by the second half of the seventeenth century, some 40 percent of the population lived in rate-paying households; while 10 percent at least usually were in receipt of relief; with the rest somewhere between the two—too poor to pay the rates, and intermittently dependent on parish help.12
It is difficult then to share Adam Smith’s benign judgment on social and economic change in early modern England. There were more losers than winners, and most of the Leveller leaders, and many of the cavalry at least in Parliament’s army were from the more prosperous sections of this divided society, albeit not from its richest elements; historians use the woolly term the “middling sort.”13 We should not labor this point by connecting men’s social programs or political views directly to their social standing, but it is worth noting that Rainborough’s advocacy of the political rights of poor men did not reflect his own economic position, for he was the oldest son of a prominent London merchant and naval officer; it was most probably the comradeship of parliamentarian military service that prompted his egalitarian vision. William Walwyn was the Leveller who developed the most extended justification of free trade as “most advantageous to the Commonwealth,” but he was himself a freeman of the great Merchant Adventurers’ Company and the grandson of a bishop.14 Levellers were mostly independent householders of the “middling sort”; they could conceive of markets as offering opportunities, but they were also intimately aware of the danger of “declining” into a shameful dependency on charity or wage labor. They would certainly have recognized the force of Adam Smith’s comment, quoted in the lecture, that “no one but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly on the benevolence of his fellow citizens.” The Levellers sometimes hesitated over adult male suffrage, one spokesman acknowledging at Putney, that: “I conceive the reason why we would exclude apprentices, or servants, or those that take alms, is because they depend upon the will of other men and should be afraid to displease them. For servants and apprentices, they are included in their masters, and so for those that receive alms from door to door.” In the third and final Agreement of the People, there were political and social exclusions from the franchise: all men of twenty-one and upward “not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served the late king in arms or voluntary contributions” were to vote for the Representative.15
The Levellers indeed hated concentrations of power and restrictions on people’s freedom, they loathed the ways the rich and powerful could monopolize privilege and manipulate the law, but I wonder how central a free market was to their vision. Their loathing of domination was based on an optimistic view of human nature and of the possibilities of political engagement. In social terms, Leveller proposals owed as much to self-confidence as to experience of oppression, for men of the “middling sort” were accustomed to participation in English legal and political processes (as jurors in counties, or constables and churchwardens in their local communities). Above all, however, Leveller drives for egalitarian social and political forms were the product of exhilarating religious and political struggles. They emerged out of the dramatic, radicalizing experience of fighting and winning a civil war; a war where Parliament had called on the “people” to rally to its cause; where the House of Commons had claimed to be the representative of the people; and where the war had been presented as a struggle for God’s true religion, but there was no settled agreement on what true religion actually was. The Leveller movement grew out of campaigns, first, for religious freedom, and, subsequently for the closely connected necessities of freedom of the press and of debate. The Levellers, like other mid-seventeenth-century radicals, were driven also by a burning sense of betrayal that for all the “blood and treasure” sacrificed in the civil war, it was the Parliament itself that was limiting these freedoms.16 William Walwyn defended free trade as a natural right in 1652, but it was not at the forefront of his concerns for most of his life—religious freedom was clearly his first priority.17 All this is to suggest that Leveller adherence to a free market was deduced from other elements of social life, rather than foundational to their views, within a context where the economic and social implications of market relations were already—long before the Industrial Revolution—less benevolent than Adam Smith or Professor Anderson believe.
Second, we need to complicate the notion of the market itself. The early modern market was not based on abstract notions of reciprocity, involving free and equal persons and straightforward monetary exchange. Market relationships were central to early modern England, but they operated on the basis of complex understandings of trust and credit, and credit here is a social and cultural concept not a merely technical process. As Craig Muldrew explains, early modern society encompassed “a market not just where things were bought and sold, but where trust was extended, or not extended, and where the social was defined as the need for, and the extent of such trust.”18 Actual money (that is coin or specie) was in short supply in early modern England, accounting was haphazard, and people often had only the broadest notion of their current economic position; the workings of society and economy depended on juggling debt and extending credit, forgoing or delaying repayments of debts, or rents. In receiving credit in this narrow sense, credit in its social meaning of esteem, reputation, or standing (to use some of the terms within Anderson’s understanding of egalitarianism) was a vital advantage, and might help people of similar “real” economic capacity to flourish better in practice. The market was emphatically not an arena of abstract egalitarianism or individual equality, and well into the nineteenth century, “personal credit remained central to market relations, sometimes indistinct from and sometimes existing alongside gift relations.”19 The sharp contrast in Smith’s thinking between market and gift transactions did not apply in practice.
Neither were the Levellers consistent in their approach to social and economic issues. In a time of social and economic upheaval, oppression and exploitation could be found in very different contexts, and the Levellers constructed a movement out of various, complex, even contradictory issues and groups. Once seen as “possessive individualists,” the Levellers equally often projected a sense of collective and communal activism. Their pamphlets often denounced many injustices, as in Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered, which ranged from the sufferings of John Lilburne and his wife to political domination within the city corporation and the struggles of provincial merchants.20 Levellers were not always committed to a free market based on private property rights in our modern sense, but often defended customary rights, as part of their resistance to the power and domination of the rich. Those large numbers of early modern households already largely dependent on wage labor could not survive without other sources of income—a small cottage garden, or various forms of nonmarketized, or not quite marketized customary communal rights: the right to “glean,” to pick up the dropped corn at harvest, or to fatten a pig or graze a cow on common land. This involved differential rights over the same piece of property; it might be conceived of as specific to certain (private) individuals, but it was more properly a collective, multiple, layered concept of ownership. So the Levellers supported the “free miners” of Derbyshire who claimed the right, by ancient custom, to mine for lead wherever it was found against the increasing protests of landowners who claimed sole and absolute ownership of the surface land and all that was found beneath it; and they offered help to the small proprietors in the fens whose complex livelihoods of fishing, crafts, and farming were being destroyed by drainage projects.21 All this may complicate but perhaps enrich the ways in which we look to the Levellers for experiments in egalitarianism and activism.
Third, and much more schematically than I would like, I want to raise some qualifications to the picture of the Levellers as a feminist movement. As Professor Anderson has shown, women were active Levellers; among individuals we can highlight Elizabeth Lilburne, Mary Overton, and Ellen Larner, and the radical religious separatist and author Katherine Chidley. The attack on a monarch whose rule was legitimated partly through patriarchalism had implications for gender hierarchies within the household, although most parliamentarians and republicans were very careful to limit these implications, most often through various versions of a separation between public or civil authority from the private world of the household. As Professor Anderson stressed, religious pluralism disrupted earthly hierarchies and challenged notions of sin and obedience: everyone should obey God before man, and men and women alike were equal before God. Leveller women insisted on their right to petition Parliament: “we knowing that for our encouragement and example, God hath wrought many deliverances for several nations from age to age, by the weak hand of women,” and claimed an “equal share and interest with men in the commonwealth.” But I am not convinced that Levellers as a movement thought that family power was monopolized by men; rather, I think they often fell back on a conception of society as made up of male-headed households, with women as valued but subordinate participants. John Lilburne referred to his loyal and long-suffering wife as the “weaker vessel,” and Leveller rituals, like Leveller publications, presented the movement as a collectivity made up of various elements distinguished by place and by (I think) assumptions of natural inequality. In the funeral procession for Robert Lockyer, a Leveller sympathizer executed in May 1649 for his part in army mutinies, “citizens and women” and “youth and maids” followed the hearse in solemn but differentiated order. We remember again Rainborough’s poorest “he” at Putney, the idea that servants and apprentices were included with their masters, and the fact that formal political rights for women as agents rather than as petitioners were never part of the Leveller agenda.22 This view can be challenged but it is also worth remembering the classic arguments of feminist political philosophers that expansions of male political rights often prompted an intensification of arguments that women were unsuited by nature to political participation.23 The problems for women and markets go beyond ignoring women’s labor in the household, although that is one crucial aspect, as the lecture explains. More fundamentally, the difficulties are founded on the fact that, in the early modern case at least, the basic unit that competes in the market,24 or aspires to political agency, is a household rather than an individual, and its head is normally, naturally (a word we need to highlight and challenge) assumed to be male.25
It is really exciting to see egalitarianism as about more than economic issues—to see it as a commitment to a broad enhancing of human capacities, enabling a fulfilling independence from the domination of others. I have responded to Professor Anderson’s first lecture as a seventeenth-century historian, but I am also conscious of an upbringing within British social democratic or socialist traditions. Both combine to make me unconvinced that everything went wrong with the “Industrial Revolution”; seventeenth-century England was already a society where some half, at least, of the population, had little prospect of competing on equal terms in the market. Differential access to capital, credit, skill, training, time were all connected to wealth (which brought more advantage to its holders than “dominion” or “vanities”). I want to present a darker view of the potential of the seventeenth-century example, and I still think that economic inequality cannot be detached from the broader elements Professor Anderson has focused on.