The Levellers | Maurice Goldsmith (essay date 1986)
Maurice Goldsmith (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: "Levelling by Sword, Spade and Word: Radical Egalitarianism in the English Revolution," in Politics and People in Revolutionary England: Essays in Honor of Ivan Roots, edited by Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt, and Stephen Roberts, pp. 65-80. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
[In the following essay, Goldsmith maintains that despite the emphasis many modern critics place on the differences between the Levellers, the Diggers, and the Ranters, all three radical groups used the same type of rhetoric to argue for mankind's equality and freedom.]
Despite, or because of, much recent work on the radicals of the English Revolution, there are many disagreements about the meaning of their views and proposals. The prevailing orthodoxy tends to emphasize the distinctions among various sorts of radicals, spreading them out along a spectrum from left to right. On this view, the Levellers, or some of them, turn out to be...
[The entire page is 7175 words long]
Navigate
