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The Levellers : radical political thought in the English Revolution
The Leveller movement of the 1640s campaigned for religious toleration and a radical remaking of politics in post-civil war England. This book, the first full-length study of the Levellers for fifty years, offers a fresh analysis of the originality and character of Leveller thought. Challenging received ideas about the Levellers as social contract theorists and Leveller thought as a mere radicalisation of parliamentarian thought, Foxley shows that the Levellers' originality lay in their subtle and unexpected combination of different strands within parliamentarianism. The book takes full account of recent scholarship, and contributes to historical debates on the development of radical and republican politics in the civil war period, the nature of tolerationist thought, the significance of the Leveller movement and the extent of the Levellers' influence in the ranks of the New Model Army -- Publisher's website.
Book
Levellers
The Leveller movement of the 1640s campaigned for religious toleration and a radical remaking of politics in post-civil war England. This book, the first full-length study of the Levellers for fifty years, offers a fresh analysis of the originality and character of Leveller thought. Challenging received ideas about the Levellers as social contract theorists and Leveller thought as a mere radicalisation of parliamentarian thought, Foxley shows that the Levellers' originality lay in their subtle and unexpected combination of different strands within parliamentarianism. The book takes full account of recent scholarship, and contributes to historical debates on the development of radical and republican politics in the civil war period, the nature of tolerationist thought, the significance of the Leveller movement and the extent of the Levellers' influence in the ranks of the New Model Army.
eBook
The Levellers
The Leveller movement of the 1640s campaigned for religious toleration and a radical remaking of politics in post-civil war England. This book, the first full-length study of the Levellers for fifty years, offers a fresh analysis of the originality and character of Leveller thought. Challenging received ideas about the Levellers as social contract theorists and Leveller thought as a mere radicalisation of parliamentarian thought, Foxley shows that the Levellers’ originality lay in their subtle and unexpected combination of different strands within parliamentarianism. The book takes full account of recent scholarship, and contributes to historical debates on the development of radical and republican politics in the civil war period, the nature of tolerationist thought, the significance of the Leveller movement and the extent of the Levellers’ influence in the ranks of the New Model Army.
eBook
JOHN LILBURNE AND THE CITIZENSHIP OF ‘FREE-BORN ENGLISHMEN’
John Lilburne's extensive writings were a major part of the pamphlet output of the Leveller movement. The apparent traditionalism of his language has obscured the extent to which he developed a radical line of thought. For Lilburne, all Englishmen are ‘free-born’; his radicalism lies in his assertion that this free status is to be seen as political status. The phrase ‘free-born Englishman’ comes to be a signifier of a uniform and inclusive citizenship, and the word ‘subject’ drops out of Lilburne's vocabulary. He reinterprets the language of the English legal tradition – following the lead of Sir Edward Coke – to make a collection of ‘liberties’, ‘franchises’, and ‘privileges’ into a uniform set of citizen entitlements. His writing suggests varying and sometimes incompatible grounds for this citizen status: historical arguments, and arguments depending on different notions of positive law, are employed alongside appeals to divine or natural law. However, Lilburne's attachment to the English legal tradition persists, and is an effective vehicle for the politicized vision of the English nation which he wants to convey.
Journal Article
'DUE LIBERTIE AND PROPORTIOND EQUALITIE': MILTON, DEMOCRACY AND THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION
John Milton's political thought has been interpreted in strikingly divergent ways. This article argues that he should be seen as a classical republican, and locates key aspects of his political thought within an ancient Greek discourse critical of democracy or extreme democracy.
Milton was clearly familiar with the ancient texts expounding this critique, and he himself deployed both the arguments and the characteristic discourse of the anti-democratic thinkers across the span of his writing. This vision of politics emphasized the rightly-ordered soul of the masculine
republican citizen, in contrast to the unruly passions seen both in tyrants and in the democratic rabble.
Journal Article
PROBLEMS OF SOVEREIGNTY IN LEVELLER WRITINGS
The English seventeenth-century radicals known as the Levellers are often credited with a ground-breaking social contract theory: believing that England's civil wars and political conflicts had reduced the nation to a state of nature, they proposed 'Agreements of the People'
which were essentially social contracts to reconstitute political authority in the nation. However, a closer look at their account of the natural state of mankind and the operation of natural law in society reveals that they saw government by consent as an extension of the natural order rather
than an escape from it. Consequently, the line between the exercise of their natural sovereign power by the people and its exercise by a representative government becomes blurred, creating insoluble problems for the Levellers in their constitutional theory. The people's defence of their
natural rights can be seen as part of their ongoing exercise of their natural rights, even under government, rather than a struggle to escape the state of nature.
Journal Article
'The wildernesse of Tropes and Figures' Figuring Rhetoric in Leveller Pamphlets
The Leveller writings of the 1640s are directed at immediate political circumstances and agitate for specific political ends. The leveller leaders themselves had very different educational backgrounds and formative literary influences. Yet almost throughout their writings there is a constant theme of hostility to rhetoric--a consistency which is not always to be found in Leveller thinking on apparently more central political topics such as the desirable extent of the franchise. Here, it is examined that leveller writers, various as their educational backgrounds were, having had some direct contact with the classical pedagogical tradition of rhetoric.
Journal Article
Problems of sovereignty in Leveller writings
The English seventeenth-century radicals known as the Levellers are often credited with a ground-breaking social contract theory: believing that England's civil wars and political conflicts had reduced the nation to a state of nature, they proposed 'Agreements of the People' which were essentially social contracts to reconstitute political authority in the nation. However, a closer look at their account of the natural state of mankind and the operation of natural law in society reveals that they saw government by consent as an extension of the natural order rather than an escape from it. Consequently, the line between the exercise of their natural sovereign power by the people and its exercise by a representative government becomes blurred, creating insoluble problems for the Levellers in their constitutional theory. The people's defence of their natural rights can be seen as part of their ongoing exercise of their natural rights, even under government, rather than a struggle to escape the state of nature.
Journal Article
The Roman Republic and the English Republic
The story of the Roman Republic in English political life is the story of the aspirations, fears and, ultimately, deep disappointments of the English republicans. Rome was an appealing exemplum and a viable site of controversy because education beyond elementary level in early modern England was founded on classical languages and texts. Republican authors had access to the latest discussions of the workings of the Roman constitution through works such as those of the Italian scholar Sigonius. The histories and oratory of the Roman Republic furnished seventeenth‐century writers not just with examples of patriotic fortitude and valour, but with a language which could evoke such Roman virtues even without explicit mention of Rome. The crisis of 1659–1660, in which republicans rallied round the ‘good old cause’ in the hope of preventing a return to monarchy, spurred republicans into sometimes acrimonious debate about which constitutional arrangements could best secure the nation against this imminent threat.
Book Chapter
Introduction
The Levellers can seem uncannily modern. ‘[W]hatever our Fore-fathers were; or whatever they did or suffered, or were enforced to yeeld unto; we are the men of the present age …’, proclaimed theRemonstrance of Many Thousand Citizensin July 1646. These citizens, speaking perhaps through the voices of William Walwyn or Richard Overton, and just beginning to cohere into a movement which would later become known as the Levellers, rejected the precedents and obligations of the past and sought ‘naturall and just libertie, agreeable toReason’.¹ With such bold claims, the Leveller writers detached themselves from their own past,
Book Chapter