The Levellers | Michael B. Levy (essay date 1983)
Michael B. Levy (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: "Freedom, Property and the Levellers: The Case of John Lilburne," in The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1, March 1983, pp. 116-33.
[In the following essay, Levy counters the historical view of the Levellers as class-conscious elitists and proto-capitalists put forth by C. B. Macpherson. Levy examines Lilburne's writings and maintains that Lilburne was concerned with equality for all and with protecting the common people from an absolutist political regime.]
The seventeenth century struggle between Parliament and Crown—and its attendant philosophical and ideological debates—is customarily said to initiate the English liberal tradition. The same received opinion has placed the Levellers, the left-wing of Cromwell's New Model Army, at the headwaters of liberalism's most democratic and egalitarian branch. Colonel Rainsborough's exclamation at the Putney Debates in 1647 has epitomized...
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