The Levellers | Perez Zagorin (essay date 1954)
Perez Zagorin (essay date 1954)
SOURCE: "The Leveller Party Programme," in A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, pp. 35-42. 1954. Reprint: New York: Humanities Press, 1966.
[In the following essay, Zagorin analyzes the third and final version of The Agreement of the People as representative of the Leveller party platform. He includes commentary on thes evolution of this document between 1647 and 1649.]
In the separate writings of the Leveller leaders, there had been formulated a conception of the social order which insisted that institutions justify themselves before the bar of reason. Whatever the past had been, the present must be shaped so as to allow every man's rational nature scope for expression. Only thus could the law of Christ and true religion be fulfilled. By the middle of 1647 there existed a movement of men who accepted this theory as the expression of their deepest, but hitherto inchoate,...
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