I. Introduction
When did modern liberalism as a system of philosophical thought begin? There is, of course, some degree of arbitrariness to any answer that might be given to this question. But for many who teach political philosophy or political theory, a common idea seems to be that it began with John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, first published (anonymously) in 1689, just after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that deposed James II and installed William and Mary on the British throne. Some mark the beginning of modern political theory earlier, perhaps with Hobbes’s Leviathan, first published in 1651, or with Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace, first published in 1625; or perhaps even earlier with Machiavelli’s Prince, published posthumously in 1532 (though first circulated as early as 1513).
If we narrow the question and ask when liberal political economy began—understanding political economy as an integration into political theory of what we would now recognize as the principles of economic reasoning, and the making of policy recommendations regarding economic mattersFootnote 1—the most obvious founding fathers would seem to be David Hume and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. An argument might be made that liberal political economy might also have begun with Locke, given that there is some discussion of what might be considered an economic conception of scarcity and value, as well as money, in the Second Treatise. Yet the discussion there is not developed, and there is no exploration of trade, prices, or markets, no proposal offered for why some places are wealthier than others or how a country might increase its prosperity, and no policy proposals regarding specifically economic matters.Footnote 2 That would seem to bring us back to Hume and Smith, and perhaps justify the seeming consensus that the best place to identify as the birth of modern liberal political economy is the publication of Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776.
I would like to argue for an earlier provenance for modern liberal political economy. Specifically, I trace the ideas we now recognize under that term, and that we typically identify with Smith (and perhaps Hume), to a group of English thinkers and activists who were active in the lead-up to and during the English Civil War of 1642–1651. This group was derisively called “Levellers” by Oliver Cromwell. The leading figures of this group, including in particular John Lilburne, embraced “Levellers” as their title, and in the process of constructing arguments for the specific policy reforms they advocated the Levellers articulated several of the key philosophical positions we often today associate with later thinkers. Among other things, they argued for private property, free trade, and markets half a century before Locke, and a century before Hume and Smith. I argue that the Levellers should be regarded as among the founders of modern liberal political economy.Footnote 3
This essay begins with some historical background about the Levellers generally and their leader, John Lilburne, in particular. I then flesh out several of the central philosophical principles for which they argued, which I claim form some of the principal elements of what we would now recognize as liberal political economy. I close by suggesting what I believe is the enduring significance of the Levellers.
II. Who Were the Levellers?
The group of people Oliver Cromwell called “the Levellers”Footnote 4 entered the historical, political, and legal scene in the lead-up to the English Civil War. Although their movement lasted only a few years, they declared and defended principles that prefigured central elements of the liberalism that grew and spread in subsequent British and Western history.
Many of the central ideas that motivated the American desire for independence are traceable to John Locke, who in his Second Treatise of Government had articulated notions of natural rights, individual sovereignty, and limited government of separated powers based on the consent of the governed nearly one hundred years before the American revolutionary war. Yet many of the substantive premises on which Locke would base his arguments were already expressed some fifty years earlier in the works of the Levellers.Footnote 5 In their writings, one finds—in some cases for the first time everFootnote 6—nearly all of those premises enunciated and defended: menFootnote 7 are equal insofar as each is essentially an individual, and under natural law they have natural rights, including natural rights to private property, that precede and trump manmade legal rights; each person is also equal insofar as he possesses reason, which, when exercised properly, will apprehend not only the natural law and its entailed individual rights, but also their self-evident authority;Footnote 8 one of the rights each man has by nature is sovereignty over his conscience, which includes the right to practice religion as his conscience privately dictates; and no government is legitimate that is not founded on the voluntary consent of the governed.Footnote 9 The central figures in the Leveller movement, including Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and John Lilburne,Footnote 10 were motivated principally by a desire for religious toleration, and they withstood repeated imprisonments, public condemnation, torture, and threats on their lives for defending the right of individuals to exercise their private conscience on religious matters. What they produced during those tumultuous years—in scores of pamphlets, tracts, and briefsFootnote 11—was the beginnings of a vision of individualism and limited government that, despite the group’s relatively brief existence as an organized movement, laid the philosophical groundwork for subsequent generations of “liberals.”
The English Civil War had been waged in the name of the people and of Parliament, and the Levellers, who claimed to speak in the name of everyday Londoners and Englishmen, demanded that sovereignty be given completely to the people via the House of Commons. When they were unsuccessful in persuading Parliament, they took their argument directly to the public, and to the New Model Army under the leadership of Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton. The army proved amenable to their arguments, and in 1647 it elected leaders that were largely Leveller supporters. In October of 1647, a Council of the army met with Cromwell and Ireton at Putney to discuss the army’s demands, which were presented in the Agreement of the People. These discussions became the famous Putney Debates.Footnote 12 Although initially in sympathy when their common target was Charles I and his (by joint agreement) “arbitrary” rule, the Levellers and Cromwell did not see eye to eye once Charles was executed and it came time to discuss details of a new government. In the end, Cromwell took a hard line and would not adopt the bulk of the Levellers’ leveling and democratic program, which he believed would result in a government with no true seat of authority and hence, as Ireton put, in “utter confusion.” It must also be said that Cromwell, like most other English at the time, simply did not believe in the radical equality that the Levellers were preaching. The prevailing belief, shared by Cromwell and presumed by most others, was that people were, by dint either of nature or God’s will, quite unequal and thus should not enjoy the same rights. Although Cromwell was sympathetic to parts of the Leveller views of religious freedom and property rights, he differed with them on what the role of the state should be. Cromwell thus chose to reject some of the Levellers’ demands and reintroduced a hierarchical discipline into the army and ultimately in the government. Over the next two years, leaders of the Levellers, though still enjoying sporadic popular support, were imprisoned, and mutinies among sympathizers in the army were forcibly put down.
After the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649, the Levellers were unsatisfied with their newly acquired liberty, which they thought merely “Notionall, Nominall, Circumstantiall.”Footnote 13 Notwithstanding their disputes with the Levellers, a group led by Cromwell called the Independents had adopted some important parts of the Leveller argument, even recommending a few Leveller principles as the basis of England’s new government. But the Independents had not abolished tithes and excise taxes or removed certain hated monopoly privileges, and they had not made many of the judicial and military reforms the Levellers demanded; so it was not enough for the Levellers.Footnote 14 In the February 1649 Englands New Chains Discovered, the Levellers enumerated the differences that led to the final break with the Independents, whose initial successes in garnering public support had arguably been due to the Levellers’ own arguments. As weeks passed, the Independent government became stronger and more entrenched, and Leveller influence waned. Many of the Levellers’ erstwhile supporters began to side with the Independents as they saw the balance of power shifting to the latter. The Levellers made several attempts to regain support among the army by severely criticizing Independent leadership, particularly that of Cromwell and Ireton, but to increasingly less avail.
Four principals of the Leveller movement—Overton, Walwyn, Lilburne, and Thomas Prince—were arrested in the early hours of March 28, 1649 at the behest of Cromwell, who had grown tired of their agitation. On May 1, from their prison cells, these Levellers issued their third Agreement of the People, by which means they were able to muster an improbably large amount of both army and popular support in London. On May 2 some of the troops under Ireton and Cromwell would not march; this led to the mutiny of further troops, until by May 14 some twelve hundred men stopped taking orders from Ireton and Cromwell, demanding instead the release of Lilburne and the other Levellers. This was the last straw for Cromwell. Just after midnight on May 14, 1649, he and a contingent of the men who were still loyal to him surprised and crushed what remained of the Leveller army sympathizers at Oxfordshire near Burford, effectively putting an end to the Levellers as an organized, political movement.Footnote 15
Destruction of the Leveller movement did not mean, however, that the Levellers’ ideas were extinguished. The individuals who constituted the Levellers began to evaporate from British consciousness after the 1650s, and by the 1680s were largely gone from British memory—not to re-enter until later historians rediscovered them.Footnote 16 Nevertheless, the ideas the Levellers articulated did not dissipate; on the contrary, though usually under other banners and in other guises, those ideas spread and propagated a philosophy that endured far beyond their first proponents.Footnote 17
III. John Lilburne
The political and philosophical leader of the Levellers was John Lilburne, or Free-Born John, as he was called.Footnote 18 He was born in Greenwich in 1614 or 1615 to a family of low-level gentry, and he was an agitator and troublemaker almost from the beginning. In 1630 he began an apprenticeship to a Puritan cloth merchant in London, and shortly thereafter he joined the radical opposition to Charles I. In 1637, at the tender age of twenty-two, he smuggled from Holland outlawed copies of John Bastwick’s account of the punishments he had suffered for denouncing Catholicism. When one of Lilburne’s accomplices betrayed him to the Archbishop’s agents, Lilburne was arrested and tried before the Star Chamber, a body Lilburne detested and whose existence he protested. When Lilburne was brought to the bar before its judges, however, he refused to bow. He also refused to take the customary oath pledging to answer all interrogatories.Footnote 19 Lilburne explained that as a freeborn Englishman, he was, as he put it, the “peere and equall” of both the bishops and the Star Chamber’s judges; there was therefore no reason for him to show the deference they demanded.Footnote 20 For this shocking snub to the authority of the Chamber, he was fined, publicly whipped and pilloried, and finally imprisoned, receiving increasingly harsh punishment over time because he refused to stop denouncing the presumed authority of the bishops. Lilburne remained in prison until he was liberated by the Long Parliament in 1640 after a speech on his behalf by Cromwell (who himself would later imprison Lilburne).
Lilburne became a brewer and got married, but his principles would not allow him to lead the quiet life of a working- and family man. When the Civil War broke out in 1642, Lilburne was commissioned as a captain in the Parliamentary army. Despite his success and popularity, he resigned from the army in 1644 at the rank of lieutenant colonel rather than subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant with Scotland, which required the Church of England to be reformed along Presbyterian lines. His opposition to the oath seems to have been principled: he objected to being forced to swear any kind of religious oath, regardless of whether he had sympathies with its doctrines or not—signaling a general commitment to liberal freedom of religion.Footnote 21
Even as he was put in the stocks, imprisoned, and tortured, Lilburne continued denouncing the presumed authority of the bishops, of the Star Chamber, of Parliament, and then even of Cromwell. As David Hume wrote approximately a century later, “[I]t was found difficult to break the spirits of men, who placed both their honour and their conscience in suffering.”Footnote 22 He was again arrested and spent most of August 1645 to August 1647 in prison. But Lilburne was unbowed. On May 1, 1649, while imprisoned yet again, he published a pamphlet arguing that people had a right to their private consciences by birth, not by pleasure of government; furthermore, that the authority of each individual’s conscience for himself was equal to that of everyone else; that therefore a person’s religious beliefs were only his own business; and that therefore no one was entitled to any answers about others’ beliefs.Footnote 23
Lilburne’s message and example resonated. After Cromwell crushed the Leveller rebellion in 1649, Lilburne was arrested and tried for treason. He defended himself in court, and he argued to the jury, in defiance of the explicit instructions of the judge, that as the judge’s peers and equals the members of the jury were empowered to judge not only the facts but also the law itself. To Cromwell’s consternation, Lilburne was acquitted—and he promptly returned to denouncing Cromwell’s increasing imperiousness. Cromwell grew so infuriated that in 1653 he re-arrested him and had him tried for treason again. Again Lilburne defended himself, and again he was acquitted. This second acquittal led to a large popular demonstration in support of Lilburne, symbolized by thousands of sympathizers wearing the Levellers’ characteristic sea-green ribbons on hats and clothing. This sufficiently worried Cromwell that he decided to keep Lilburne in prison despite the acquittals. Lilburne remained in prison until 1655, when he converted to the Quaker faith and apparently, finally, foreswore his aggressive, confrontational ways. In 1657, with his health failing, he was granted parole to visit his wife, Elizabeth. Exhausted from years of imprisonment and torture, he died in her arms at the age of 43. Hume concluded that Lilburne was “the most turbulent, but most upright and courageous of human kind.”Footnote 24 In his recent biography of Lilburne, Michael Braddick writes of Lilburne’s “remarkably courageous career” and his “remarkable life.”Footnote 25 Pauline Gregg writes, “nothing dims the luster of the remarkable man who was [the Levellers’] leader”; “John Lilburne’s name stood for freedom against oppression.”Footnote 26
Lilburne’s agitations formed a surprisingly coherent philosophy of individualism, from which he derived several specific political policies. These included the rights to be free of arbitrary seizures, to a trial by jury, and to face one’s accusers in open court.Footnote 27 He also called for an extension of the franchise;Footnote 28 he advocated free trade and private property; he called for freedom of religion; and he called for all laws to be “binding to the very Parliament themselves as well as others.”Footnote 29 He demanded, furthermore, an abolition of legal economic privileges like state-enforced monopolies, including the Levant Company’s chartered monopoly of trade with the Middle East, arguing that the right to trade with whomever one wished was one of mankind’s natural rights.
IV. Leveller Positions
Contrary to later description, the Levellers were called “Levellers” not because they sought to level all property holdings—that was the position of a contemporaneous group called the Diggers.Footnote 30 The Levellers were called “Levellers” instead because they sought to equalize the privileges and rights of citizens: no one was by nature or by God entitled to less authority over his own life than anyone else, and no one was justified in asserting authority over anyone else without the latter’s willing consent.Footnote 31 This conception of morality and human personhood spread and eventually gave rise to many of the institutions we enjoy in the West today. If no one, regardless of class, family, or wealth, had any justified authority over anyone else, then individuals no longer needed to beg leave from their “superiors” to own property, to select lines of work, to trade or exchange or cooperate with others, or to worship and associate as they judge fit. Lilburne inspired many others and was emblematic of a changing conception of morality and thus politics. The liberal government that promotes justice for all while at the same time respecting each person’s unique individual dignity as an equal moral agent is consistent with, even an embodiment of, this moral imperative.
Many of the Levellers’ arguments appeal to unaided reason—able, as they believed, to discern natural law—instead of to biblical authority. The Levellers were divided on whether precedent was relevant. Sometimes they cited common law precedents and long-standing customs—as when Lilburne argued that the Star Chamber and the House of Lords were un-English institutions, making his argument by reference to an allegedly pre-Norman-invasion limited monarchy in England.Footnote 32 At other times they derided and flouted tradition—as in their recurring contempt for the long-standing practice of the limited franchise and in their call for all law and legal proceedings to be in English rather than in the traditional Latin (or French). Nevertheless, they seemed not to waver in their faith in human reason, or in their belief that all men of good faith would ultimately find compelling the principles on which they based their arguments. Hence the Levellers assiduously practiced the arts of pamphleteering and petitioning in preference to organizing violent uprisings.Footnote 33 This would have made no sense unless based on the belief that mankind can be persuaded by reason.
The Levellers’ reliance on reason has led to some scholarly dispute about the extent to which a particular religious faith, or even religion generally, is necessary for the success of the Levellers’ claims.Footnote 34 Many of the Levellers’ writings included multiple references to the Bible and to God, but it is not always clear that their arguments require or rely on these references.Footnote 35 This issue is of no small moment. A claim to natural rights or a questioning of a state’s authority that is based on a particular religious worldview will necessarily be limited in its appeal, unable to persuade people who do not subscribe to the same view. Despite their contentions, the Levellers could not expect even the possibility of universal consent to their principles if they could not offer a justification that built upon something common to all.
My view is that the Levellers took pains to show that their positions were consistent with, but not reliant upon, a theological worldview. I base this view on several considerations. First, the people constituting the Leveller movement did not have the same religious beliefs—indeed, the religious beliefs of many of them seemed to change throughout their lifetimes—yet their support for the elements of what we now recognize as liberalism did not waver. Moreover, the frequent reliance on unaided reason belies the necessity of a particular religious belief or set of beliefs. It was reason, the Levellers insisted, that would prove them right, not a particular set of religious doctrines; their claim to universality therefore relied on the universality of reason, not religion. Finally, as they claimed repeatedly, the Levellers themselves believed their arguments to apply to and be compelling to all men, not just believers of one particular stripe or another. Of course, one cannot overlook the important role that the Levellers’ early exposure to various strains of Puritanism played in the development of their radical dispositions. But my suggestion is that although these might have been influences in the origins of their beliefs, they were not the ultimate philosophical justifications for them.
Some of the rights, liberties, and demands claimed in various places by the Levellers included: the right not to pay the legally required tithes to the official church; the claim that no one is above the law; freedom of the press and freedom of expression; an equality of legal rights among all classes of citizens; toleration for minority and dissenting religious views, including Anabaptists and Jews; the right to petition the government for redress of grievances; and the general right to freedom of religion. These would come to form central parts of modern political liberalism. But they also argued for specific economic policies, which might justify their place as early modern liberal political economists. For example, in the 1652 Conceptions for a Free Trade, William Walwyn argued against public charters for companies and argued for “forraine Trade to be universally free to all English men alike”; he claimed the right to free trade to be an “ancient and continuall Claime of Right” accorded to all Englishmen going back to Magna Carta of 1215.Footnote 36 Both this ancient birthright and the fact that it would be “more profitable for the Commonwealth” demanded “universall freedome in all forraine trades.”Footnote 37 Walwyn argued that free trade would lead to an increase in the number of merchants, and that competition among them would “produce the best ordered goods” and would lead to goods “more exquisite in the workmanship,” and that by contrast denying free trade would “impoverisheth the maker, worker, grower, growth & Land.”Footnote 38 Thus Walwyn’s conclusion was that “the Right & the publique good both are conceived to be undeniably with generall Freedom of Trade.”Footnote 39
V. Liberals or Socialists?
Some scholars have considered the Levellers to be proto-socialists, some arguing indeed that they are the forerunners of Marx and of twentieth-century socialism.Footnote 40 Yet Overton, Walwyn, and Lilburne were not socialists in the modern meaning of that term. These Levellers must be distinguished from the radical Surrey Digger’s movement at St. Georges Hill, a group calling themselves “True Levellers,” who arguably were proto-socialists. These “True Levellers” were led principally by Gerrard Winstanley,Footnote 41 who argued that the earth belonged to mankind in common,Footnote 42 and that no distinction of land ownership was recognized by God or nature; it was under that justification that they occupied the land on St. George’s Hill in Cobham, Surrey in 1649. These Diggers were levelers in land ownership, and it was by that standard that they regarded themselves as distinct from the Levellers, who did not argue for equal distribution of land.
Indeed, with regard to land ownership, as well as other forms of private property, Overton, Walwyn, and Lilburne were anything but levelers: they seemed to have regarded it to be part of man’s natural rights to own as private property whatever he could legitimately acquire.Footnote 43 The sense in which they did argue for a leveling was in bringing all men—at least “all the freeborn” men of England—before the same bar of laws, enfranchising them all,Footnote 44 and granting none special legal privileges. All men were “leveled” by their equal participation in natural right, and the equal defense thereof that was thereby required of the state. In both their Petition of September 1648, which was presented to Parliament, and in their December 1648 Foundations of Freedom (the second Agreement of the People), they explicitly call on Parliament not to abolish private property or to try to equalize wealth by law—requests made in part precisely to distinguish themselves from others, such as the Diggers, who were calling for such measures. The Levellers were repeatedly critical of the concentration of power in the hands of a few, a condition that possessing great wealth could facilitate, but their objection here was to the erection of legal guarantees of power rather than to the possession of wealth.
This last point raises the issue of the extent to which the Levellers should be counted as what we today might call “classical liberals.”Footnote 45 In some respects, their concerns were local and provincial rather than principled. For example, in his 1649 Walwyn’s Just Defence, Walwyn defends himself against the charge that he is ambitious for power and is an unscrupulous Machiavelli in his attempts to get it; moreover, in the 1649 Manifestation, signed by Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton, and Thomas Prince, the Levellers defend themselves against the specific accusations that they were atheists, anarchists, and wealth-levelers. As a rule, however, their arguments were phrased in general terms and based, as I have noted, on universal concerns. For example, although Walwyn’s 1652 For a Free Trade was initially motivated by a dispute between people supporting free trade, on the one hand, and the Levant Company’s monopoly of trade with the Middle East, on the other, its argument is that free trade respects all men’s natural rights and will have economic consequences of benefit to everyone. Thus Walwyn said free trade respected both the “publique good” and “Common right.” And in Lilburne’s 1653 Just Defence, in addition to his defenses against particular charges Lilburne nevertheless also enumerates a series of “fundamental rights,” which he argues are held by all men, including the right to be free of arbitrary seizures, to a trial by jury, to face one’s accusers in open court, and “to worship God according to their own Judgements and Consciences.”Footnote 46 We can clearly see in these arguments the building blocks of the larger classical liberal tradition, dedicated to a radical individualism—indeed, an individualism so radical that it shocked the conscience of many of the Levellers’ detractors, including Ireton, who, at the Putney Debates, spoke of “that wild and vast notion” and remarked in horror “at the boundless and endless consequences of it.”Footnote 47
The Levellers might therefore justifiably be called radical individualists. Andrew Sharp argues that the Levellers were seen indeed as anarchists because they stood against the deeply seated view at the time that subordination, not equality, reflects human nature.Footnote 48 The common view was articulated by the 1648 Larger Catechism, published by the Westminster Assembly of Divines, which claims that “inferiors owe . . . willing obedience to [superiors’] lawful commands and counsels” and that inferiors sin if they rebel “against their [superiors’] persons and places and their lawful counsels, commands and corrections.”Footnote 49 But note the repetition of the word lawful. The Levellers claim that all men are equal insofar as they are required to obey lawful commands, but they also hold that commands count as “lawful” only if they are consistent with and perhaps issue from natural law.Footnote 50 Moreover—and here is perhaps the opening of the door to eventual anarchism after all—each person is himself, individually, both entitled and duty-bound to judge for himself what counsels, commands, and corrections are lawful. This is the radical individualism for which the Levellers became notorious, the possible consequences of which so worried Ireton. It is, I argue, precisely this notion of individualism, and the Levellers’ repeated demands for “liberties” and “freedomes” (note the plural), that chiefly constitute their enduring political and philosophical significance. They consistently fought tyrannical authority and consistently sided with the abused and oppressed, always against the strong and for the weak.
VI. Three Central Political-Economic Claims
As I have suggested, among the rights for which Lilburne and the Levellers argued were the right to freedom of conscience and religion, the right to vote, the right for citizens and accused not only to judge guilt or innocence under the law but to judge the law itself (i.e., nullification),Footnote 51 the right to be free from arbitrary seizure and imprisonment, and the right to freedom of speech and publication without censorship. Let me now emphasize, however, three main ideas from Lilburne and the Levellers that were not only novel and radical, but central to what would become liberal political economy. The three ideas are: (1) a conception and defense of equal rights for all (all are “freeborn”); (2) a conception and defense of what I will call “residual liberty”; and (3) a defense of the economic freedoms of free commerce, free trade, and the abolition of legal monopolies or charters. Let me address these briefly by turn.
A. Equality
Before Lilburne, the term “free-born Englishman” was quite uncommon. As Foxley points out, until Lilburne the phrase one was more likely to hear was “free-born subject,” not “free-born Englishman.”Footnote 52 Lilburne changed that. He deliberately and frequently used the term “free-born Englishman,” by which he meant to indicate two principal things. First, people had rights either from their essential nature or from God; either way these rights preceded manmade law and, if there was a conflict between the two, their natural rights trumped manmade law. In his 1646 Liberty Against Slavery, Lilburne refers to Magna Carta as recognizing, rather than creating, the free-born Englishman’s freedom: “these Liberties and Franchises were not of Grace and donation, but of Right and Inheritance”; Magna Carta was “no new Declaration,” but instead was merely “declaratory of the principall grounds of the fundamentall Lawes of England.”Footnote 53 Second, Lilburne used the term “free-born Englishman” to refer to everyone in England, not only a select or privileged few. For example, the 1646 Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered refers to the “Birth-right and Inheritance” of “all the Inhabitants of every countie throughout this Kingdome,” and asserts equal natural rights for “all the inhabitants of this Land”—not only those born in England.Footnote 54
The Levellers argued for an extension of the scope of natural rights and freedoms beyond only highborn men to, first, Englishmen of all classes, then to English of both sexes of all classes, then to all inhabitants of England and even of the entire British empire, and then, finally, to all humans on earth. It may be hard to appreciate today the radicalness of such claims made in the 1640s, but they had virtually no philosophical precedent and virtually no intellectual history on which to draw. They were effectively new moral claims. Lilburne and other Levellers frequently cited Magna Carta in support of their view, but Magna Carta did not conceive of the rights and freedoms for which Lilburne and the Levellers argued. The Levellers repeated the claim again and again in their writings and speeches throughout the 1640s. In addressing his fellow English citizens, Lilburne writes: “These your Neighbours were [ . . . ] each one laboring in his place to preserve the common Liberties and Lawes of the Kingdome, which makes us indeed true free-men, without seeking, or endeavouring to Lord it thus (as now we do) one over anothers faith; your Brethren, together with you, and all the Commons of England, have an equall interest and property in the Law, being all of us free-born English-men.”Footnote 55 Note that Lilburne speaks of “common” liberties, of “all” the Commons, and of “all of us” having “equall” interest and rights under the law—which he extends to everyone in the British kingdom. Elsewhere, Lilburne extends the scope of those rights and freedoms even further when he claims a right to plead his case and defend himself against criminal accusations, a right, he claims, is “the natural and undoubted right of every individual Englishmen, yea and of every man, upon the face of the Earth.”Footnote 56 Not only “every man,” but women also: while discussing Adam and Eve in his 1649 The Free-man’s Freedom Vindicated, Lilburne claims that “every particular and individual man and woman” are “by nature all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty, none of them having by nature any authority, dominion, or magisterial power one over or above another.”Footnote 57 He further claims that humankind’s equal freedom entails that no one may exercise any power or authority over another except “by mutual agreement or consent.”Footnote 58
Lilburne was thus constructing a novel and bold argument that there was a universal equality in the rights and freedoms the Levellers were asserting, and that no one—neither a king nor a judge nor a bishop—had proper authority to take those rights and freedoms away.
B. Residual liberty
One implication of universal rights and freedoms was that people possessed what I will call “residual liberty”—that is, an indefinitely wide scope of freedom to engage in behavior, activities, and associations that were neither described nor delimited, except as specifically prohibited by warranted law. It was a claim to a natural right to permissionless living. Instead of conceiving of the individual as being allowed only certain prescribed freedoms, it conceived of the individual as in possession of full, complete, and limitless freedom—with only those few exceptions required by proper recognition of others’ rights and freedoms. This became for Lilburne and the Levellers the claim that I have the right to full and “unmolested” use of my person and my property, to full freedom of conscience and religion, and so on, except and only insofar as my activity impinges on the similar full rights and freedoms of others—who are equal in their rights and freedoms to me.
This conception of residual (natural) liberty is reflected in the Levellers’ numerous and frequently interchanged terms—used both in singular and plural—for which they were pressing, including: right/rights, liberty/liberties, freedom/freedoms, privileges, immunities, and so on.Footnote 59 Their argument, in other words, was not for specific rights or specific freedoms, but, rather, for a broad and indefinite scope of liberty within which rights to practice religion, speak and write freely, and so on were merely instances. In his 1649 Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England, for example, Lilburne explicitly defends “all private aims, personal respects or passions whatsoever” against the king’s and the bishops’ “reall intentions to destroy Liberty and property,” as well as to curtail “the maintenance and advancement of Religion, Justice, Liberty, Propertie, and peace.”Footnote 60 As this passage indicates, and as his subsequent extended discussion makes plain, Lilburne’s intention is to assert a general or plenary freedom on behalf of all, and “naturall” rights under that plenary freedom to engage in an indefinitely large range of unspecified liberties.
C. Free commerce
The final set of rights and freedoms advocated by the Levellers was to engage in commerce and trade without restriction, and to enter into any line of work without a mandatory requirement of license or apprenticeship. Lilburne criticizes, for example, the legal attempt to take the “Lives, Liberties, and Estates out of their hands whom they have chosen and entrusted therewith,”Footnote 61 and he claims it is among “our Nationall and Fundamentall Lawes, Rights, and Priviledges” to employ our “lives, Liberties and Estates” according to their own wishes.Footnote 62 He rails against “so many Monopolies and Pattents under pretext of publike good”; he denounces “the Prerogative-Monopolizing Patentee-men of London” and “Patentee-Monopolizing Companies, Corporations and fraternizes”; and he concludes: “So that to speak properly, really, and truly, their Brotherhoods are so many conspiracies to destroy and overthrow the lawes and liberties of England, and to ingrosse, inhance, and destroy the trades and Franchises of most of the Freemen of London.”Footnote 63 William Walwyn, for his part, claims as a “native right” a “general freedom of Trade,” which, as noted earlier, he argues includes “forraine Trade to be universally free to all English men alike.”Footnote 64 Walwyn specifies that this freedom to work, trade, and associate includes the right to the “buying & transporting of Native Commodities,” to “occasioning profitable Labour for all industrious people, in buying and transporting all sort of Manufactures,” to “the increase of Shipping,” to “being more secure from advantages of Forraine States,” and to “the increase of Wealth and plenty.”Footnote 65 Walwyn goes on to argue in favor of both foreign and domestic market competition, and argues that monopolies and charters create “greater prices for worke” and “impoverisheth the maker, worker, grower, growth & Land.” Footnote 66 He concludes by advocating the abolition of all “unreasonable Orders, Oathes, fines, Censures” as well as “Courts & meetings” on the grounds that they violate every citizen’s “Generall & equall freedom.”Footnote 67
The Levellers’ argument is that the rights to trade, exchange, and associate freely are natural rights and are thus possessed by all people, and that they entail the right to trade with people from other countries. Thus, contrary to what some might suggest,Footnote 68 the general and equal freedom they supported was not only consistent with, but they believed was actually fulfilled within, commercial society based on open markets and free trade. And this argument is made both on principle—they possess these rights naturally—and on the consequentialist grounds that free trade and free commerce allow all citizens to improve their stations by generating wealth and prosperity. By contrast, charters, legal monopolies, and forced apprenticeships impoverish both individual citizens and the overall economy while enriching the privileged few.Footnote 69
VII. Conclusion: Enduring Significance
To illustrate the radical nature of the Levellers’ positions, consider the heinous practice of slavery. Slavery has probably existed as long as humans have existed. Think of the Pharaohs and their pyramids, the Romans and their Colosseum, or the Great Wall of China. What is remarkable about these accomplishments is not only that these feats of architecture and construction were achieved without modern mathematics and engineering and wealth, but also that they did not produce any real change in average levels of prosperity of their communities. Pharaoh, Caesar, and the Emperor enjoyed levels of freedom and prosperity that were spectacular in their days, but their people did not. Their achievements were built instead on the backs of conscripted slave labor, imperialism, conquest, and theft. Though we may revere and enjoy them today, one does not need to wonder whether the slaves hailed the pyramids as something of which to be proud.
Although slavery might serve the narrow economic interests, and flatter the vanity, of the slaveholders, the cost in human liberty and suffering and misery cannot begin to make the tradeoff worthy of endorsement. Yet some defended the practice on the grounds that the enslaved were not worthy to be free. Even the great liberal John Stuart Mill in his 1859 essay On Liberty argued that his first principle of freedom—namely, “that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection”—should not apply to everyone, in particular to people too still in their “nonage” to be granted the full rights of free human beings.Footnote 70 In the middle of the nineteenth century Thomas Carlyle could still write of the “two-legged cattle” who required the “beneficent whip” to bend them to righteous ends.Footnote 71 What monstrous ends, Carlyle asked rhetorically, would African slaves pursue if granted freedom as full human beings?
Carlyle’s rhetorical question has a real answer, however, which had been provided over two decades earlier by Thomas Macaulay:
There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces; and that cure is freedom. When a prisoner first leaves his cell he cannot bear the light of day: he is unable to discriminate colours, or recognise faces. But the remedy is, not to remand him into the dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of the sun. The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage. But let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. In a few years men learn to reason. The extreme violence of opinions subsides. Hostile theories correct each other. The scattered elements of truth cease to contend, and begin to coalesce. And at great length a system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos.
Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.Footnote 72
But the answer to Carlyle’s rhetorical question had already been provided some half-century before Macaulay by Adam Smith, who wrote, “There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”Footnote 73 And yet the answer to Carlyle had been provided by John Locke three-quarters of a century before Smith, when he wrote, “The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule. [ . . . ] This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together.”Footnote 74 In fact, however, the answer had already been provided by John Lilburne and the other Levellers in the 1640s.
Despite the dark episodes of repression in this history, then, there have also been inspiring examples of courage and resolve in the assertion of individual liberty.Footnote 75 When Lilburne had been brought before the Star Chamber in 1637, he stood his ground, asserting his equal right as an individual to the freedoms anyone else enjoyed. In 1641, Lilburne saw the Star Chamber abolished. That was a great moral leap forward, elevating the individual—even the low, the mean, the disrespected, the disfavored individuals, those to whom Leveller Thomas Rainsborough referred as “the poorest he that is in England” and “the poorest man in England”Footnote 76—to the status of moral agents equal in dignity to those in the favored classes. Lilburne’s conception of morality and human personhood spread and eventually gave rise to many of the institutions we today in the West often take for granted. If no one, regardless of class, family, or wealth, had any justified natural authority over anyone else, then individuals no longer needed to beg leave from their “superiors” to own property, to select lines of work, to trade or exchange or cooperate with others, to worship and associate according to their private consciences. In time, and in fits and spurts, individuality, diversity, and of course various inequalities—except formal or legal inequality—arose, and along with it the ensuing unprecedented growth in human accomplishment, in material prosperity, in longevity and health and nutrition that we have seen occur in the world in the last two centuries.Footnote 77
Now, of course neither Lilburne nor the Levellers were solely responsible for this—and in any case it is extremely difficult to establish causal links, in part because the historical record is incomplete—but their example was emblematic of a changing conception of morality and thus politics. The lesson to draw from the example of Lilburne and the other Levellers is that each individual is unique and precious, and that fact issues in a moral imperative of equal respect. The liberal government that promotes justice for all while at the same time respecting each person’s unique individual dignity as an equal moral agent is consistent with, even an embodiment of, this moral imperative. Moreover, the prosperity to which it leads can give rise to the hope, and even the realization, of lives of meaning and purpose for increasing numbers of people. These twin goals of dignity and prosperity, for which the Levellers argued and risked (and sometimes paid with) their lives, are at the core of modern liberalism and the liberal political economy built upon it. For these reasons, then, the Levellers may rightfully be considered among its most important founders.
