'Like Parchment in the Fire': Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

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LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES


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LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E. CAIN, General Editor COSMOPOLITAN FICTIONS Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee Katherine Stanton OUTSIDER CITIZENS The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin Sarah Relyea AN ETHICS OF BECOMING Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot Sonjeong Cho NARRATIVE DESIRE AND HISTORICAL REPARATIONS A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie Tim S. Gauthier NIHILISM AND THE SUBLIME POSTMODERN The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from Romanticism to Postmodernism Will Slocombe DEPRESSION GLASS Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams Monique Claire Vescia FATAL NEWS Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature Katherine E. Ellison NEGOTIATING COPYRIGHT Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America Martin T. Buinicki

“FOREIGN BODIES” Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Contemporary American Culture Laura Di Prete OVERHEARD VOICES Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry Ann Keniston MUSEUM MEDIATIONS Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry Barbara K. Fischer THE POLITICS OF MELANCHOLY FROM SPENSER TO MILTON Adam H. Kitzes URBAN REVELATIONS Images of Ruin in the American City, 1790–1860 Donald J. McNutt POSTMODERNISM AND ITS OTHERS The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo Jeffrey Ebbesen DIFFERENT DISPATCHES Journalism in American Modernist Prose David T. Humphries DIVERGENT VISIONS, CONTESTED SPACES The Early United States through the Lens of Travel Jeffrey Hotz “LIKE PARCHMENT IN THE FIRE” Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War Prasanta Chakravarty


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“LIKE PARCHMENT IN THE FIRE” Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War

Prasanta Chakravarty

Routledge New York & London

RT7185X_Discl.fm Page 1 Tuesday, February 7, 2006 4:31 PM

Published in 2006 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97718-5 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97718-0 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Catalog record is available from the Library of Congress

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com Taylor & Francis Group is the Academic Division of Informa plc.

and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge-ny.com


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This work is lovingly dedicated to my teachers Supriya Chaudhuri and Sukanta Chaudhuri And to the inspiring brilliance of Christopher Hill and J. G. A. Pocock


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter One Radicalism from the Center: The Republican Moments of John Milton

21

Chapter Two Natural Law as a Radical Weapon: John Warr, the Levellers and John Locke

57

Chapter Three The Universal in the Local: Digger Radicalism Revisited

107

Chapter Four Turning the World Upside Down and the Limits of Liberalism: The Delayed Radicalism of the Ranters

155

Notes

185

Bibliography

203

Index

209

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank my dissertation committee members at the State University of New York, Buffalo—Shaun Irlam, Jim Swan and William Egginton—for helping this project come to fruition. Their intellectual rigor and personal warmth has been a continual source of inspiration. I also thank Barbara Bono for agreeing to be the outside reader to the dissertation and for her important suggestions. My thanks to all my teachers at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, for providing me with an intellectual foundation based on humanism from which I dare not renege. I must also thank Ernesto Laclau, Elizabeth Grosz and Rudophe Gasche, for initiating me into phenomenology and post-structuralist political thought. Their teaching has made my belief in humanism more critical. I thank Quentin Skinner, Gordon Schochet, David Armitage, Jonathan Israel, Nicholas Canny, James Moore, Knud Haakonssen, J. G. A. Pocock, Silvia Berti, Duncan Ivison, Colin Kidd and Liana Vardi for directing me towards the nuances of early modern historical and political thought. The many discussions and electronic mail exchanges I had with Dipesh Chakraborty, Amlan Dasgupta, Ramakanta Chakrabarty, Gautam Bhadra, Ramachandra Guha, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Martha Nussbaum, Kumkum Sangari, Tejaswini Niranjana, Uday Singh Mehta, Ananda Lal, Manisha Basu, Niharika Banerjea, Ramesh Mallipeddi, Rares Piliou, Iclal Cetin, Barish Ali, Sharmadip Basu, Rahul Nair, Haimanti Roy and Varuni Bhatia about religion, politics and literature provided my early modern interests with a sense of continuity with contemporary issues. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all of them. My thanks to the staff of the Lockwood Memorial Library at SUNY, Buffalo, the Ilah Dunlap Little Memorial Library, University of Georgia, Athens, Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and the

ix


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Acknowledgments

Folger Shakespeare Library at Washington DC, for their ever-encouraging assistance and numerous helpful suggestions. I remain forever indebted to G. S. Chakravarty and Moutusi Maity for selflessly and tirelessly assisting me with the necessary editorial polishing and much more. I also thank Max Novick, Richard Tressider and William E. Cain, who have been a constant source of encouragement till the book came into being. This work would neither have seen the light of the day, nor been in the present state without James Holstun. It is not possible to thank him enough.


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Introduction

It is difficult to strictly pinpoint the Revolution in the English Revolution of the 1640s.1 There was a moderate constitutional one during 1640–42 and then the more tumultuous one during 1648–50 in which the king was executed and the Parliament purged. The Puritan Saints, the godly bourgeoisie and even the honest radicals and the neutrals of the counties, all stake their claim for fomenting both these uprisings. And yet, by the mid-fifties we have a spineless Parliament, unable to take full political and economic responsibility for the English nation, a tyrannical dictator masquerading as the protector of democracy, and finally in 1660 a restored monarchy. What went wrong for the ushers of change? The interesting part of this abortive transition is that almost all of the participants who sought to challenge royalist politics and conservative religious designs projected themselves as genuine harbingers of democracy, reason and freedom. G. R. Elton had memorably remarked long ago that there was no “high road” to Civil War.2 And yet, the past few decades have witnessed a most vital and at times acerbic debate on the nature and role of politics, religion and literature of the period that is the focus of this study. At the macro-level, the historians and scholars of political literature who consider the English civil war to be a “revolution” and who have marked especially the long-term social and religious tensions as reasons for the conflicts of the first half of the seventeenth-century have been critiqued vigorously by other scholars, often described as the revisionists.3 Although the revisionist scholars sometimes do accept certain structural issues within the context of Tudor and Stuart England (for instance, the revisionists often stress the financial weaknesses of the crown), they are extremely skeptical about linking political conflict or immediate allegiances to social change or progress, a staple of the Whig and Marxist accounts. Within this framework arrived a different set of scholarship, sometimes described as “post-revisionism.”4 While the post-revisionists 1


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“Like Parchment in the Fire”

accept many of the insights that the revisionist scholarship have provided (for example, the role of the court/elite politics in shaping the Civil War or the argument that there were times during the civil war when there was no clear split between the “government” and the “opposition”), they dispute that the revisionists have offered any new analysis of the Civil War. Most importantly, the post-revisionists are convinced that there were indeed long term “causes” of the English Civil War/Revolution and that there are important connections between the different conflicting views on religion, politics and “culture” and social changes and relationships. In such a context, it would be rather simplistic to make any outright choice between consensus and conflict. Indeed, as Peter Lake has sagely suggested, a wiser approach would be to explore the contradictory potentials within the English political culture.5 However, the mainstream revisionists and postrevisionists alike have largely ignored the sectarians from their scope of research. In this study, I contend that during the Civil War certain select groups of sectarians—in both principle and practice—come closest to what might be described as truly revolutionary principles and actions. They are the plebeian Republicans, the Levellers of several hues and the Diggers. This assertion does not mean that there are no contradictory strains in the ways these sects operated. In fact, this essay tries to underscore the significant inner contradictions within each sect as well as the internecine struggles that mark the rise, flourishing and subsequent demise of such sects within the context of the Civil War. The importance given to certain select groups in this study also does not mean that there are no other factions within the context of the Civil War that do not seek democratic political and social changes. The Independents and the Quakers, the plebeian neutrals and the Fifth Monarchists also challenged the existing political and religious orthodoxies in their own way. But I have not attempted to write a continuous and comprehensive narrative of those two decades in English literary and political history. Rather I mark certain structural traits that certain sects and their milieu share during the Civil War and I find these traits to be most conspicuously present in the groups that I discuss. I have called these sects radical liberals based on these shared attributes and have tried to underline the significance of such a radical liberal approach in bringing about social changes. There are crucial differences in approach among these three groups which I seek to explore and I try to differentiate them as and when necessary. For example, the classical republicans do not always seek the economic changes in the English society that the Diggers envisage and the Diggers, in their turn, are not particularly enthusiastic about the legal and constitutional changes that the Leveller reformers seek. But ultimately, I contend that their shared radical values come out much more strongly than their differences.


Introduction

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3

As a political and social ideal, liberalism has been understood variously by its advocates.6 In the seventeenth-century context, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are supposed to be the paradigmatic liberals because of the emphasis they place on individual freedom. Thomas Hobbes, however, can only be called a liberal with severe qualifications since he argued for acute restrictions on the very freedom that he had underlined. Hobbes is a monarchist and a dedicated atheist. Among the causes of the English Civil War, Hobbes distinguishes two—the influence of the universities, which inculcated the elite with the classical ideas of political freedom and the influence of the Presbyterians, who inspired the common people with the language of grace. As opposed to the ideals of the classical city-state and doctrinal Protestantism, Hobbes proposes the idea of the ruthless and the disinterested individual, always ready to defend his personal safety and maximize his self-interests. There is no scope for values of plurality or communal aspirations in Hobbes, and hence no radical liberal notion of a body politic. John Locke introduces a host of moderate liberal ideas into early modern sensibility: limited government, freedom of conscience and speech, the concept of the person in whom “political rights” here, equality before law, the educability of everybody in the body politic and so forth. While I argue that Locke is certainly very close to the radical liberals, especially in his ideas of legality, he falls short of any genuine liberalism, since the Lockean individual does not provide us with any vision for a radical society where political liberty is complemented by religious, economic and social freedom. For both Hobbes and Locke, the absolutism of the individual reigns supreme. The early modern radical liberals like Winstanley, John Milton and John Lilburne, on the other hand, define for the first time the positive conceptions of liberalism. They insist, through their writings and actions, that a person or a community is free only if it is self-determined and autonomous. By putting forth autonomy as a core liberal notion, the Civil War sectarians were not only adumbrating the ideas of John Stuart Mill and such modern neo-Hegelians as T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet, they were also formulating for the first time, a communitarian variety of liberalism.7 For the sectarians, individual freedom is always complemented by a democratic social framework. The individual advances not by relinquishing his community, but going along with it. In this respect, the classical republican views of John Milton come very close to the natural rights theory of John Lilburne. However, I use the term liberal more as a conceptual tool than as a specific historical concept. Moderate mainstream forms of liberalism are founded on two ideological pillars: individual human rights and possessive individualism. The individual rights definition of liberalism claims that the


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political right (ius) is ultimately contingent upon whether the individual possesses political power (potestas). Such a claim is based primarily on a specific arrangement of juridical and constitutional procedure whereby law and political organization as the will of the legislator are kept at bay by the individuals who are free to have liberties in so far as they are not commanded directly by such a legislative will. Liberalism has also been defined in terms of property or possessive individualism. The origins of this notion is said to be found in the equivalence of property (dominium) and rights (ius) in early Franciscan Poverty tracts and in the subsequent medieval and early modern literature.8 By making the individual the absolute yardstick for all political and social pursuits, such a possessive and property-based definition of liberalism suggests a complete disjunction between the individual and the lifeworld or concerns for the community. In the seventeenth-century context, Thomas Hobbes was proposing precisely such a variety of liberalism. As opposed to these moderate mainstream definitions of liberalism, I suggest a radical definition of liberalism which relies as much on rights as on collective values and actions. Such a definition coincides with a theory of radical pluralism and the principle that no one idea of the good can be defined for all—everyone’s understanding of what is of value is “subjective,” and there is always only a pluralism of values which must be protected by a government refraining from imposing any one value or set of values on its citizens. A radical liberal political position differs also from the moderate mainstream in the sense that radical liberalism proposes a dialectical relationship between the individual subject and society at large. The individual realizes his or her potential and flourishes by acting with others. By emphasizing this dialectical relationship between the individual and the society, radical liberalism immediately places certain limits on an absolute rights or property based approach to liberalism. The radical species of liberalism also depends on how much the participants are ready to act politically and change the existing social conditions. By radical action I mean something reflected upon, planned and goal–oriented. Action is also both verbal and non-verbal among the Civil War sectarians. Both varieties of action often effortlessly flow into each other and each influences the other. It is important to define radicalism here. Radical means, “pertaining to the roots” from the Latin “radix.”9 The term was used across fields of knowledge as diverse as philosophy and mathematics, biology and astrology, from the middle ages onwards. However, the deployment of radical to describe a thoroughgoing transformation of a social system or a set of ideas, from the root upwards, dates from the eighteenth-century. This does not mean that the earlier radicals did not share common conditions and characteristics. The


Introduction

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radical movements in the period at issue, 1640–1660, although emerging in particular historical conditions, certainly share two structural affinities with the radical movements of any given period—one anarchic and the other constructive. First, persistent attempts to overthrow the prevalent top-down political and religious orders. And second, a social vision different from the one offered by the state or the reigning power structures of the time. However, to emphasize the conceptual differences between the moderate mainstream and its radical counterpart is not to ignore the historical trajectory of the liberal tradition. The historical circumstances are crucial because they define a particular situated moment when concepts of right, power, and ownership are thrown into contention, and individuals find themselves, align themselves, in subject positions—moderate or radical, or somewhere beyond the continuum—defined by their material relation to these contested concepts. In fact, the early modern radical liberal tradition simultaneously developed along with mainstream varieties of liberalism. The usual trajectory of the historiography of liberalism of the English Civil War has been to locate a tradition unearthed by S.R. Gardiner and C.H. Firth and which blossoms fully in Lawrence Stone’s magisterial work The Causes of the English Revolution.10 The weight in such Whig analyses of the Civil War has been on the constitutional improvements and on the rise of Parliament as the custodian of the English people during the war. The radical liberals, on the other hand, are much more oppositional in thought and action. They not only challenge the royalist and the religious privileges but are also extremely suspicious of the prerogatives that the Parliamentarians claim. On the other hand, though the sectarians are not merely content with gradualist reforms of absolutism, the revolutionary actions which they undertake are often based on a certain sense of pragmatism and toleration, and are not just exercises in pure anarchism. Radical liberalism sometimes finds itself in dialogue with the moderate mainstream, (for example, the Levellers’ notion of political rights come quite close to that of Locke) but quite often pits itself against the latter (Winstanley was completely averse to superficial Parliamentary reforms and to the Cromwellian tyranny). Recent commentators on early modern liberalism have stressed the significance of the dissenting voices within liberalism itself but have not gone far enough to sufficiently identify and analyze the nature of such liberal dissent.11 I argue that in the early modern context, certain varieties of mid-seventeenth century English sectarians advanced some of the most radical ideas in the liberal dissenting tradition. At another level, C.B. Macpherson’s thesis about the possessive individual as the emerging liberal still haunts any study of early modern liberalism,


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and one of the aims of this study is to challenge that kind of a purely economic definition of liberalism. The notion of ownership is central to the political theory of possessive individualism, which presumes that society consists of relations among independent owners. It is considered that property in such a society is private and exclusive and the government’s role is to protect the owners against unlawful incursions upon their property and to maintain conditions of orderly exchange. The principles and machineries of democracy are visualized merely as adjuncts in such a set-up so that the basic system of property ownership does not get jeopardized. Others have already argued that Macpherson takes a rather selective and impoverished view of liberalism.12 First, Macpherson treats natural law and natural rights among liberals as a façade for an underlying utilitarian structure of thought. Such an assumption is logically followed by his subordination of the political aspects of liberalism to the purely economic ones. For example, Macpherson crucially neglects the liberal tradition of limiting the power of the state and reconciling the freedom of the individual to the various groups and communities within the society. He also talks little about political participation that is required for human development in a liberal society. Second, a social theory that totally relies on possessive individualism does not tackle sufficiently the notion of human differences, since its basic assumption is that all humans irrespective of status, class or culture, wish to maximize ownership. Finally, instead of identifying the abuse of power in a given society and looking for remedies, Macpherson makes it seem that a liberal society is by its very nature coercive and alienated. He is not open to the possibility that the use and abuse of oppressive power might happen in all kinds of societies, including the ones that espouse wholesale egalitarian values. In order to challenge Macpherson’s model of a liberal society, I shift the discussion of liberalism from property and subject-centered human rights to that of natural law, political deliberation and the language of studied toleration, reflected especially in my discussion of the legal reformers and the republicans. Besides, the writings of the main players among the sectarians show a curious mix of rhetorical, aesthetic and logical literary strategies that are critical pointers to their radical liberal attitude. However, I believe that it is not sufficient to challenge Macpherson’s model of liberalism by evading the questions of economics that he raises; rather we must engage them from a wider angle. To that end, I bring back the issues of property rights and enclosure in my discussion of the Diggers. I try to show that it is not possessive individualism that fires the imagination of the radical liberal but rather the dialectic that lies between just distribution of property and individual political rights.


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Looking from the historical as well as conceptual points of view, there are certain core foundational values on which a radical liberal social order stands. The three radical groups that I discuss in the first three chapters—the Republicans, Diggers and the Natural Law reformers—have three structural characteristics in common: (1) democratic republicanism, (2) religious materialism and (3) a principle of equality. The members of the extreme radical sect of the Ranters, I argue in the fourth chapter, fail to qualify as radical liberals since they do not meet one or more of the three traits mentioned above. DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICANISM Liberalism does not mean any antiseptic form of a purely human rightsbased approach. A radical liberal program must include certain classical republican tenets, especially the ones that underscore the virtues of political activity and deliberative community, in order to successfully challenge any top-down form of governance. The moderate mainstream forms of liberalism are often hesitant to incorporate republican ideas within liberalism. One of the central criticisms of classical republicans is that they encourage civic virtue as a normative ideal, a virtue which will ensure that they consequently fulfill their duties of political participation.13 To the moderate liberal, a belief and reliance on the metaphor of virtues effectively means putting individual rights at the risk of being compromised in order to fulfill the obligatory aspects of republicanism. Mainstream liberals contend that the republican ideal of vita activa civilis is at its core an ethic of dutiful passivity. Far from encouraging the active pursuit of glory or political ambition, let alone democratic participation, the image of the good citizen is one who suppresses his ambition and exhibits an unquestioning deference toward those who govern. Radical liberals, on the other hand, argue that liberty is a matter of participation of the citizens in the decision-making process in order to maintain civic independence and political autonomy.14 Personal rights are to be applied in the civic rather than in the contractarian or juristic sense. For a radical liberal, positive liberty is based on autonomy and virtue (a distinctly personal concept where the activity is “voluntary”) rather than on enacted law. This emphasis on participation primarily allows the citizens to practice their own affairs based on active deliberation and not on impersonal and codified positive laws. For the moderate liberal, political liberty means acquiring freedom to practice his own affairs protected merely by legal rights and immunities, and also by the imperium that decrees and enforces the laws. The locus of sovereignty, instead of becoming truly “personal” and human, paradoxically, becomes positivistic and non-civic. The radical liberal, on the


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other hand, maintains that the individual must actively participate in formulating, reforming and if need be, revolutionizing the procedural aspects of polity. The radical liberal especially relies on the concept of discordia concors propagated by the classical republicans which posits that a political solution can only be achieved through active debate about contradictory political and social issues among the individuals and the various groups of the polity. The radical liberal, thus, is a political pragmatist who guarantees to the citizen the right to challenge the codified laws as well as the imperium or auctoritas of the prince or magistrate who administers such laws. It is in this sense that the radical liberal is a revolutionary. At this stage we may retrace the history of the concept of classical republicanism. The term became well known to the historians in Englishspeaking countries only after 1955, when Hans Baron published his classic work, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in the Age of Classicism and Tyranny. In this study Baron depicted a Florentine Renaissance that reached a cultural and political zenith through its devotion to ideals of patriotism, popular government and public service. Inherited from ancient Greece and Roman republic, these ideals had been rediscovered and popularized by an apolitically committed band of educators and intellectuals whom Baron christened as civic humanists. Within twenty years or so, recovering the history of republicanism became a central activity of the “Cambridge School” of political philosophers associated above all with the names of Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock. Later it was argued that Florentine civic humanism flourished sometimes in opposition to the popular guild republicanism that had periodically surfaced to challenge oligarchic ambitions.15 Guild republicanism was created by the broad middle ranks of the Florentine society, the popolo, consisting of the regional merchants, notaries, moneychangers, manufacturers of cloth for the local market, retail cloth dealers, and other professional groups of the major guilds and the shopkeepers, providers of services, builders, and artisans of various sorts in the minor guilds who did not belong to lineages of great wealth or prestige. How and when, in what terms and conditions, did the Englishman became aware of himself as a political actor in a public realm? As an answer to that question, Donald Hanson, in From Kingdom to Commonwealth, stringently asserts that jurisdictio and gubernaculum, rights and duties—were never integrated and hardly related in medieval and Elizabethan England. Instead, the Tudor Englishman lived under a conceptual scheme of intractable duality which Hanson terms “double majesty.” In other words there was no effective dialectic operating between the realms of rights and duties.


Introduction

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In the tenth and eleventh chapters of The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock offers a conspectus of pre-Civil War political discourse in England. Referring very briefly and eclectically to the works of such authors as Walter Raleigh and John Pym, (and concluding largely from Michael Walzer’s The Revolution Of The Saints) Pocock argues that the themes of citizenship and republic did not gain ground in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Pocock does not commit himself simplistically to the idea of “Elizabethan world picture” but he does contend instead that the ideology of civic humanism was effectively hindered in England by other modes of thought. According to Pocock, the descending authority of the monarch, the theory of ancient constitution, the doctrine of elect nation and the tradition of natural jurisprudence, all interposed a most effective obstacle and ultimately prevented the emergence of civic consciousness in Tudor England. One must remember though that even Pocock benchmarks 21 June 1642, the day when Viscount Falkland and John Colepaper drafted His Majesty’s Answer To The Nineteen Propositions Of Both Houses Of Parliament. It is then that the arcane imperii conceded for the first time that it was not a matter of adjusting to ascending or descending authority but rather sharing and balancing the three elements of government—absolute monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Pocock thus views the answer as an assertion that the republican ideals of Aristotle and Polybius, which lay dormant in the popular imagination, were recoverable. Blair Worden, in a series of articles, has reasserted the similar claim of radical discontinuity in republican vocabulary: that it was effectively only after 1649 that civic republicanism blossomed in England.16 However, Worden tacitly concedes the republican legacy of earlier humanist scholarship in England, especially that of Thomas Starkey around 1530 and that of Henry Marten, Thomas Chaloner and Richard Overton during the seventeenthcentury. But his main contention remains that the republicans did not effect the regicide and that most of its organizers were concerned to remove a particular king, not kingship. Arthur B. Ferguson’s The Articulate Citizen And The English Renaissance challenges this thesis most effectively. He contends that humanism came late in England but it is fortunate that this was so, since before humanism could mean more to late medieval England, the growth of humanism in Italy had to reach the stage where the enthusiasm of the classicists for ancient literature and art was balanced by renewed reformist assertions to religion, and by endeavors to reconcile the classical legacy with the Christian tradition. The result was that English thinkers could draw inspiration from already mature and socially sensitive forms of humanism. It was a Christianized humanism


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(deeply influenced by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola but even more so by Erasmus) of Colet, More, Elyot and Starkey that brought the Christian ethics and humanist spirit together to achieve a true civic consciousness in the sixteenth-century itself. Humanists raised the problem of counsel from the level of mere truthtelling to that of intelligent citizenship and then considered it in relation to practical antique example and moral philosophy. The intellectual had still to make a choice between the active and contemplative ideals. It was this debate that gave vent to the classic arguments concerning the problem of counsel as they appear in More’s Utopia and Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset. But the alternatives are no longer so apart as they once had been. To the humanist, thought without reference to action was as difficult to imagine, and would have been as reprehensible if it had existed, as was action uninformed by thought. The life of the scholar whose learning is potentially useful must be applied to the real world in order to realize its potentiality in the service of the community. In the context of the Civil War, it is this argument about activity that centrally binds the writings of John Milton and Gerrard Winstanley. However, there is more to the republican theorists of the Interregnum and Restoration than just the humanist tradition. They share a much more popular and radical strain.17 The more inclusive and democratic republicanism of the Levellers most radically exemplifies this strain. Overton, Walwyn, Lilburne, Wildman, Sexby, Maxmillian Petty, William Bray, John Harris—all are conversant with classical republican rhetoric. They take freely from Livy, Sallust, Machiavelli, from the “agrarian republican” Caius Flaminius as also from more contemporary thinkers like the Scottish republican George Buchanan. The Leveller variety of republicanism shows close conceptual parallels with the ideas of the workers and artisans of Florence who precipitated the Ciompi (wool-carders) revolt of 1378. One such interesting parallel is the idea of the popolo armato or the citizen soldier, the theme of the political power of the ordinary citizen-soldiers. The other is the denunciation of county committees as oppressive and counter-productive to the parliamentary cause. The Levellers, in consonance with the classical republicans, often endorse the system of rotation of office and insist on the right of the elected representative to remove corrupt executive office-holders. In fact, Marchamont Nedham’s writings show that the oligarchic republicanism of the 1650s was in part a response to a more representative and popular republicanism that had been advocated by the Levellers in the previous decade. Nigel Smith has also asserted the continuity between the Leveller and the Republican aims.18 Discussing the “publisher, soldier and politician” John


Introduction

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Streater, Smith discovers a range of common interests between Streater and the republicans including a shared belief in popular forms of government, land reclamation, divesting monarchy, the fusion of the private with the public, and most importantly, a belief in the principle of discordia concors. It is in these contexts that I discuss the writings of John Warr, the legal reformer. Warr combines the Aristotelian idea of the natural inclination of the humans to actualize a social order based on rational reflection with the emerging Lockean form of individualism. Such inclinations or tendencies, Warr insists, strive toward a social fulfillment that is in accord with human dignity. The idea of human dignity is singularly absent in the mainstream modern liberal “natural law” thinkers like Hugo Grotius or Samuel Pufendorf. Warr is thus one of the first modern formulators of “natural law” who shifts the metaphor away from procedural or subject centered viewpoints towards a more participatory and civic direction. Through this radical refashioning of the “natural law” tradition, I argue, Warr at once challenges Hobbesian legal positivism and the common-law tradition sanctioned by the likes of Edward Coke. In his republican tracts, John Milton too emphasizes such a participatory side of politics. For Milton, a free government springs neither from oligarchic privilege nor from royal prerogative, but from active participation by the virtuous in the population. As a radical liberal, Milton rejects the opportunity concept of liberty of the moderate mainstream by proposing the exercise concept of liberty.19 The essence of liberalism, a radical liberal would argue, is to empower the private person to maximize the ways of “exercising” his political liberty. It is here that liberalism is most compatible with civic humanism. The idea of active citizenship ought to be backed not as a “primary good” of perfecting one’s nature through cultivation of abstract virtues but because it principally contributes to maintaining freedom from arbitrary power and corruption. Radical liberalism is not against non-interference. In fact, a radical liberal welcomes non-interference in private matters. Rather it reacts against every kind of political and social domination and to that end, sets civic virtue in opposition to domination. Even the Miltonic idea of law is participatory in the highest sense of the term. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, for instance, Milton emphasizes a deliberative mode of legal practice as long as the social expectations of the people are fulfilled. But as soon as that trust is broken and an absolutist legal system raises its ugly head, the people are free to challenge the existing legal code, even violently. The formation of the republic is primarily dialogic but if that possibility is exhausted, the people are free to provide a more popular definition of justice based not on “general will” but on reason. But,


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among all the sectarians, it is in Winstanley’s Digger project where one can trace a most radical idea of participation. As an apprentice in a trading company in London in his early life and as a radical preacher and activist later in Surrey, Winstanley realized that the “middling sort”—the artisans in the city and the copyholders in the countryside—were both being exploited in a similar fashion by the landholding gentry and the parliamentarians. Thus began his radical crusade against unfair landholding and enclosing so that the “middling sorts” are not left behind and they receive their rightful economic and political share from the churnings of the Civil War. In The Law of Freedom, Winstanley projects his utopian community where each section of the society would work in unison with each other. The necessary moral virtues emerge ideally in the private sphere of family, which then is complemented by voluntary or secondary institutions/associations that foster “cooperative virtues” of mutual trust, equitability and justice. Finally, through fulfilling the offices of citizenship, individuals develop a sense of justice such that they learn to treat fellow citizens as free and equal beings as they are. The Law of Freedom shows that the republican idea of a virtuous society and an economically egalitarian vision are not luxuries but necessities for the flourishing of a radical liberal social order. The issue that makes certain liberals during the Civil War more radical is their positive assessment of the concept of autonomy as self-determination, or self-government.20 An autonomous individual is first of all in a position to act without being compelled by any external force or threat of punishment. Second, the autonomous agent, in cooperation with other members of the community, must rationally and deliberatively choose or create a legal and political framework. Freedom, rationality and self-determination are three positive characteristics that mark a tolerant social movement. Acting autonomously involves being free from external constraints as also from the tyranny of internal, irrational desires. John Milton’s professing of the concept of liberty as non-domination precisely demarcates such a radical notion of autonomy. The essence of what it means to be unfree, and hence to lack personal liberty, is to be within the power of someone else. It is not necessary to suffer overt coercion in order to forfeit one’s civil liberty. The idea of active citizenship in Milton acts as a countervailing force to such condition of manumission and slavery. Similarly, autonomy in Winstanley is reflected in his repeated insistence on the need to be reasonable and determine a sphere of self-determined community. The Law Of Freedom marks a very crucial phase in Winstanley’s oeuvre because the tolerant nature of his political vision is tested here. I argue


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that his utopian community is finally erected on a judgmental notion of toleration whereby a minimal bureaucratic structure functions for the benefit of the individual. For John Warr, an autonomous polity is the one that follows the dictums of “natural law,” without being coerced by a common or a codified legal framework. Not only that, autonomy in Warr has a greater liberal imprint of carrying the members of the community towards human perfection. In Warr, “natural law” acts as a catalyst, as a background assumption helping to achieve the polity a position of rational self-determination and perfect autonomy. The other thread that binds the sectarians to the republicans is their mutual aversion to corruption. Corruption is the other great enemy to the classical republicans, since it could take the form of shirking one’s civic duties in favor of personal pleasures such as indolence or the pursuit of luxury, or it could take the form of actively advancing one’s personal interests at the cost of the common good.21 This active form of corruption, in turn, could tempt citizens to overthrow the rule of civic law and back forms of tyranny instead. Perhaps the idea of corruption is best manifested in the sectarian critique of the Norman way of lawgiving and governing. Both Winstanley and Warr charge the Normans of establishing a top-down social and legal system that alienates the common man from getting true justice. The Diggers and the Levellers are certain that the corrupt legal and social order established by the Norman Conquest tarnishes the very idea of a Saxon self-government. The fear of dependence is the other key ingredient in Republican thought. Inculcation of virtue and civic participation is necessary as a means of avoiding political dependence on positive law or abstract whims of the ruler. These two fears, that of corruption and dependence, indicate the importance of liberty in the republican conception of virtue. The citizen, in opposing these two threats, makes the government of common affairs primarily a matter of self-governance. RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM Perhaps the single most contentious and revolutionary aspect that divides the early modern radical and mainstream liberal is the fact that the radical liberal, unlike his moderate counterpart, accepts and uses the liberating potential within religion for individual and communal purposes. One of the central aims of this study, instantiated through the various contours of the Civil War sectarian movements, is to show that the highway taken by modern Anglo-American historiography of liberalism, from seventeenth-century onwards, passing through the deist phase in late


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seventeenth-century, and backed by instrumental reason, reaching its high enlightenment in the eighteenth, is misguided and exclusivist. There is an immediate need for liberalism to look back at its inception and revise its highhandedness towards religion.22 Michael Walzer, one of the foremost exponents of contemporary mainstream liberalism, has explored the saintly tradition in Calvinism and has championed the Genevan Calvinists and the French Huguenots, the Scottish Covenanters and the English Marian exiles, as the new intellectuals, the calculated elect, who profess religious discipline and household government for the good of the holy commonwealth.23 But for Walzer, the radical millenarian movements of early modern times only come through “gradualism from above” and not through the nonpolitical and helplessly unorganized common mass. I argue that such an assumption is at best lazy. The prose tracts of John Milton, Gerrard Winstanley and John Warr testify to the fact that religion, if understood and used humanely and purposefully, can provide liberalism with the strongest scaffold to build up a more inclusive society. All of them do, of course, work within the Protestant framework, but they are severely critical of the “saintly” tradition of ecclesiastical authority. They all act and profess as radical antinomians and as religious enthusiasts. In Milton, prophecy and politics, the civic and the sacred, were inextricably linked. And it is this link, rather than the lack of it, that often offers itself in terms of opportunities for pragmatic social action. As a pragmatic Christian humanist, Milton was far less impressed by the visible saints than by the spirit of radical Arminianism. Despite man’s original sin, for Milton it is not impossible for man to salvage some remnants of the divine image, which always exist in him. In Milton’s enunciation of the liberty of the free spirit, especially in Areopagitica and in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the idea of a Christian eschatology is unmistakable. The Miltonic variety of Christian liberty at once emphasizes a conscientious form of individualism and a sense of fellowship within sects and communities, rather than ecclesiastical authoritarianism. Moreover, Milton’s republicanism imagines the biblical covenant and political contract in similar terms. Both are designed as open ended and revocable agreements that depend for their realization on the performance of the contracting parties. Winstanley too, is simply not content with reading the Scriptures hermeneutically but rather fuses such radical readings with everyday applications. In the best traditions of religious enthusiasm, Winstanley is rationalistic in the experimental sense of the term and places experience and self-authentication beyond analysis and strict exegesis.24 The effects of such a


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denial of the outward and the instrumental are profound and devastating for clericalism, ecclesiasticalism, dogmatism and supernaturalism in both the Catholic and the Reformed religion. Winstanley’s enthusiastic inspiration and revelatory messages fires the Digger movement. The most important lesson for liberalism that we discover in Winstanley is that the transcendental sensibility and the social material nature of religion are not opposing structures, but that they are dialectically entwined with each other. Though Winstanley is severely critical of both sacerdotal and institutional forms of religion, he values the cohesive and communal spirit that experimental religion provides. Above all he looks for simplicity and love in religion, the normative cornerstones, from which Winstanley erects his vision for a radically liberal society. The “natural law” tradition that John Warr advances is also heavily indebted to religion. In his fourfold classification of law, Thomas Aquinas placed “natural law”—lex naturalis—as one of the fundamental principles to the whole idea of legality in human affairs, the other three being eternal law, human law and divine law. But the magisterial reformers like Martin Luther believed that human nature exists only after the Fall and hence is inherently corrupt. By positioning themselves against the official varieties of the Reformed religion, legal reformers like Warr recover the logic of the Thomistic position. In the backdrop of the Civil War, reviving the “natural law” tradition was crucial for the radical liberals. Levellers such as Richard Overton and William Walwyn and legal reformers such as Warr in the middle period of 1640s realized that the Presbyterian establishment was intending to give religion a fixed and disciplinary dimension, as strict as that sought by William Laud and his Arminian associates in the1630s. As an answer to that threat, the Levellers came up with the “natural law” argument: the right of the unmolested individual to serve his God. “Natural law” also implicitly says that the individual is capable of recovering some degree of pre-lapsarian moral intelligence. PRINCIPLE OF EQUALITY The mutual compatibility of naturalistic democracy and socialism rest on three things: (1) the extent of participation and discussion among the general population in political decision-making, (2) the extent of the economic and political differentials based on status or class and (3) the nature of the class or strata which controls state power.25 There is indeed a fundamental agreement between liberal and socialist political theories in the sense that both react


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strongly against the moral consequences of exploitation. Both propose, in various ways, blueprints for a community that should thrive on support of common good. I propose that during the Civil War years of 1640–1660, the sectarians and the plebian republicans are practically the only core democratic sector with a radical liberal agenda since no other group facilitates political deliberation and radical action among ordinary people the way this particular sector does. This participatory aspect among the sectarians is a major democratic component that both liberalism and socialism emphasize. Social individuality for the liberals is not simply moral or altruistic but a deliberative permutation of solidarity and other forms of self-expression. This brings us to the other powerful basis that drives both liberal and socialist thought alike: the reaction against political and social alienation. The ethical foundation of Marxism and Lockean liberalism lie in their challenge to all kinds of external, alienated and instrumental progress. Individuals consciously choose solidarity in political relationship. This fusion of free human choice with revolutionary praxis is the conceptual core of all radical movement. In this context, one may refer to Locke’s notion of the “political society” in the Second Treatise (Chapter VII, VIII and IX). According to Locke, every individual willingly consents to form a political community or commonwealth in a way that the freedom of the individual and the freedom of his fellow beings in the state of nature are minimally disturbed. This very dialectic between self-love and concern for others is what also drives the logic of Marx’s German Ideology. Marx stresses the idea of solidarity based on mutual concern as opposed to the “mutual exploitation” of utilitarianism. As opposed to mutual human concern, stands alienation and in Marx, from The Paris Manuscripts to Capital, the conception of alienation remains fundamentally unchanged, according to which man suffers an alienation whenever he comes to be ruled by something of his own making. The Diggers, the Levellers and the plebian classical republican reaction against such human constructs like positive law, top-down political order, clandestine and ritualistic aspects of organized religion, all highlight a conceptual reaction against alienation. In the seventeenth-century context, in a section of the chapter on “natural law,” I try to show how Locke’s doctrine of property emphasizes the mixing of human labor, something irreducibly individual, with unformed property, and in doing so, provides inspiration to the labor theory of value. However there seems to be a paradox working in Locke. In Locke property accumulation occurs in the state of nature, before the social contract, while, paradoxically, in this “natural” state economic distinctions already exists and those who are already wealthy can possess more land than the labor theory would in principle entitle them to. Their wealth enables them to hire others


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to work the land and, according to the theory, since they own the labor of those they hire, they can therefore justify owning the larger tracts of land cultivated by those laborers. In these circumstances, the crucial question is whether the laborers’ right is infringed. Locke’s answer to that would be in the negative since the distinctiveness of labor is not to produce the right to property but to produce value. The laborer preserves this value by preventing it from disappearing or being wasted. In other words, labor to Locke is “disindividualized” as the quantity of the social labor as a whole. Locke begins with an individualistic justification of property rights but ends with a collective one. The ultimate justification of the right to property in Locke is its economic utility. Marx moved beyond economic utility and radicalized the Lockean labor theory decisively in the sense that he envisioned the degrading servitude of the nature of the toil among the wage earners. Against the historical backdrop of slavery and serfdom, liberalism is based on recognition of equal worth of persons. The radical liberal as well as the socialist are not merely happy with formal laws and procedures but must look at more empirical solutions. The Levellers revive a fresh interest in natural and humanizing aspects of law (beyond the merely procedural), and the Diggers act to revolutionize the economic structures of the early modern English society—both in the city and the country. The Diggers as well as the Levellers emphasize the need for private innovation without compromising on the good of community. It is here that the Diggers also crucially differ from the Hartlibian Improvers. The applied benefits of knowledge are the driving force behind the improving zeal of the Hartlibians. Consequently, their social thrust is utilitarian. The Hartlibians play the role of the mediators in technology transfer, rather than provide a comprehensive blueprint for any radical social change. Looked from this angle, the Improvers are closer to the mainstream liberals. For Winstanley, on the other hand, gathering knowledge for its own sake is not only useless, but also dangerous, since such an enterprise would create experts, who would be in turn responsible for creating social hierarchies based on their expertise. I argue that Winstanley is not averse to trade and commerce per se, and he is not blind to the potentialities of improving land, but he would not compromise his egalitarian vision merely for the sake of applied technocratic knowledge. THE LIMITS OF RADICAL LIBERALISM The chapter on the Ranters upholds the wider scheme of the book, namely, to chart the core tenets of radical liberalism by discussing the various sectarian literatures in the context of the Civil War. Is it reason or a pluralist ideology of


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religion that provides a norm for liberal thought? Is it some sort of legality and jurisprudence, one that is based not on law’s empire but on natural human inclination to be free and construct a cooperative community? Or does pragmatic and case specific social action provide the real bedrock of liberal thought? The Ranter chapter, where I mainly discuss the writings of Lawrence Clarkson, visualizes liberalism from another angle. Suppose we do away with norms as liberating ideals. Do we then become truly liberal? Is hope the real basis for liberal thought? Skepticism and political neutrality are central questions for liberal26 ism. Tolerating diverse and competing social and political lifestyles have been sometimes justified by the moderate mainstream in terms of choosing against any given way of life or set of values. Thus classical republican virtues or an insistence on “natural law” might clash with the idea of diversity in the sense that such norms subscribe to particular views of human nature and a good society. Modern liberalism is underpinned by its denial of a strong form of perfectionism. This denial finds an ally in the ideal of toleration that chimes well with the liberal commitment to diversity. Liberals often think that the value of any normative claim is less than the value of allowing people to choose for themselves. In fact, to a certain extent the idea of toleration is among the basic tenets of the Levellers and the Diggers. The idea of toleration pre-eminently rests on a tradition of humanism, since liberty and equality are meaningless unless predicated on the recognition of the worth and dignity of the human being.27 Armed with the laws of nature and reason, the sectarians seldom wavered from recognizing the worth of human dignity and toleration. The “natural law” reformers like John Warr wish to radically alter the course of legality away from legal positivism and the common law tradition, by appealing to the idea of a natural human dignity in opposition to codified and rigid top-down forms of legislated law. Gerrard Winstanley’s Digger tracts, especially the earlier ones, are also remarkably tolerant about the various approaches to Christianity. However, the idea of toleration among the Civil War sectarian radicals is markedly different from mainstream liberal counterparts in two important ways. First, the radical sectarians do not advance a Whig notion of toleration, as we witness in Shaftesbury or John Toland in the latter half of the seventeenth-century. John Lilburne, Gerrard Winstanley and John Milton were no deists. This is not to say that the deists were not influenced or inspired by Interregnum hylozoism (the doctrine according to which all matter possess life). 28 Toleration among the Civil War sectarians is never meant to separate the moral order from the religious. But religion is practiced by the sectarians


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not simply from a realization that the existence of God sustains moral values necessary for the smooth running of the society. Many of the sectarians are also radical millenarians and Joachites, who use Protestant eschatology in their writings in order to imagine and hope for an egalitarian and free England.29 To the sectaries the Civil War was a great period of political and religious churning. In other words, the radical sectarians take an inclusive view of religion where instrumental reason was not always strictly distinguished from faith. Second, the sectarians were constantly evaluating, judging and acting against their royalist or parliamentarian enemies even as they were talking in terms of tolerance or political reforms. The idea of toleration primarily depends upon accepting diverse ideals and activities. But tolerance and endurance are not one and the same thing.30 Effective circumstances of toleration are those where diversity is coupled with disapproval for the “other” and where the tolerant has the power and will to influence the tolerated. Thus, toleration of religious diversity among the radical liberals during the Civil War is marked not by neutrality but by a reaction against the clandestine and ritualistic forms of religious practice. In other words, the radical liberals subscribe to a judgmental form of toleration according to which they challenge the intolerant forms of religious and political practice.31 In fact, antinomian tendencies—the doctrine that the moral laws of religion was questionable and is not the rule and standard of the life of the Christian— find various forms among the sectarians. In Milton, reaction against magisterial forms of Protestantism finds expression in his radical Arminian leanings, whereby he doubts the doctrine of unconditional predestination and feels that God had given man the freedom to choose or reject eternal life. The Diggers are arch materialists who use the millenarian and egalitarian values present within Protestantism for challenging landed property holding and enclosing. John Warr uses the millenarian metaphor of the Three Kingdoms in order to justify his stand against illiberal forms of law-giving. Toleration among the radical liberals is also judgmental in the sense that they use their writings for political action and practice. The radical liberals are not merely contemplative, and in this crucial sense they differ from the moderate mainstream. The act of writing itself is a form of action in Winstanley. But he was not content merely with preaching as a detached intellectual, but rather goes on to initiate from the forefront the Digger movement at St George’s Hill and at Cobham. In Milton, writing is necessary in order to inculcate political and religious virtues among the people. John Warr and the other legal reformers also comprehensively challenge the top-down and intolerant forms of legislative order by appealing to “natural law.”


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But the political optimism inherent in being tolerant and diverse and the concomitant denial of perfectionism could also easily foster skepticism. This is what concerns the fourth and final chapter. The defense of freedom in a tolerant society is premised upon an optimism which dictates that people will freely choose the right path. The point is that such optimism is not always necessarily associated with the commitment to political freedom. I see a strong connection between such liberal insistences on political neutrality with postmodern ethics, both of which ultimately justify themselves on some form of ethical skepticism. A genuinely liberal society, which the radical liberals back, far from affirming no values, affirms the values of autonomy and toleration. Liberalism actually asserts what skepticism denies, that some values like toleration, reason, equality and autonomy are superior to others. The Ranter chapter makes a commentary on this skeptical bent of liberalism and in the process, attempts to trace the limits of radical liberalism. The chapter argues that without a normative core, radical liberal philosophy ultimately flounders. It either takes an inward, contemplative turn, or an outward, all-embracing skeptical position, or at times both, so that it rather suicidally manages to blunt its own radical edges. I specifically discuss the writings of the Ranter and Muggletonian Lawrence Clarkson as a typical example of a seventeenth-century religious and political skeptic who is ethically a revolutionary liberal but politically ineffective. In my assessment, Clarkson does not qualify as a radical liberal because paradoxically the contradictions in his extreme monist philosophy make him a political neutralist. Clarkson is a radical millenarian and political activist much like the Winstanley or Lilburne, but what differentiates him from them is his commitment to political imperturbility or ataraxia.32 Although the Civil War sectarians predated the high Enlightenment, in a way the Ranter chapter is also a commentary on the very idea of “Enlightenments” that explore, among other subject matters, secret cabals, sexual underworlds, religious societies and such fragmented and liminal motifs of a counter-culture.33 Such an approach, by projecting the idea of multiple enlightenments through the variegated, the clandestine and the idiosyncratic in an early modern setting, undermines the earlier meta-narratives of Enlightenment. Among the casualties is liberal philosophy. Once again I look at the Ranters as an example of how their apparently liberating variegated lifestyle and skeptical philosophy ultimately affirm deferential social patterns. I argue that this happens not in spite, but because of, their faith in the excesses of radical ways.


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Chapter One

Radicalism from the Center: The Republican Moments of John Milton

Isaiah Berlin begins his celebrated essay on Leo Tolstoy “The Hedgehog and The Fox” by referring to two kinds of thinkers.1 The hedgehog represents one group of thinkers—those who relate everything to a single central vision, on a system more or less coherent. They try to make sense of the world through a single, universal, organizing principle. The fox variety of thinkers, on the other hand, is driven by a variety of impulses, often unrelated and at times even contradictory. They perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thoughts move on many levels, continuously seeking to flee from any unitary vision. But Berlin faces a curious difficulty in pigeonholing certain thinkers into his binary scheme. Such thinkers, among whom Berlin includes Tolstoy, do not take any fixed ideological standpoint but profess and act pragmatically depending on the situation. Such thinkers can be broadly designated as centrists. It is one of the most difficult businesses in political philosophy to pinpoint the radical nature of centrism.2 In fact, there are different varieties of centrists. While some of them would be happy to be opportunists and be non-committal about political and social issues, there are others who might be cautious gradualists and reformers, but at the same time harbor a genuine sympathy for radical causes. In seventeenth-century England John Milton is a prime example of this second variety of radical centrists. A heretical, anti-Calvinist Protestant in matters religious, he is extremely sympathetic and open to sectarian demands. For a man who almost always deplored the “perpetual cringings” of the “abject people,” Milton speaks perplexingly against all kinds of political orthodoxy. When I refer to Milton as a centrist, I do not mean to locate his politics as somewhere between radical and conservative “extremes,” advocating a 21


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position that seems ordinary, “natural” and apolitical. Far from it, I emphasize his pragmatism and argue that an understanding of the early modern public nature of political and legal deliberation is the key to appreciate Milton’s political thought. Milton, though one of the inaugurators of the modern era in England, was never enthusiastic about the mainstream liberal pre-political market-based absolute pluralism of values. Instead, it is the public nature of civic virtue that fired his political and literary imagination. Milton’s interest in public participation and deliberation in matters political makes him a very special kind of a Whig: a radical liberal whose thoughts are also colored by the rich hues of classical republicanism.3 A lifelong advocate of individual freedom, Milton was never a crass individualist. Though his economic views were quite influenced by the emerging commercial spirit of the time, he was emphatically not a “possessive individualist.” Politically, Milton was a cautious Whig and a democratic civic humanist guided chiefly by a Protestant concept of reason. His radicalism comes from a certain reasoned pragmatism. The other major contention is that the radical nature of the republican tracts of Milton is attained through a dialectical framework. Such a dialectic does not work within Milton’s “schizoid individualistic bourgeois” mindset, as critics like Andrew Milner and Christopher Kendrick propose, but between a normative virtue (not a retrogressive one but one based on reason) and a respect for individual zeal and pluralism (which again is finally based on reason). 4 This is not an enlightenment concept of reason but a forging together of Machiavelli and Locke, a forging of civic mindedness with individual interest. Niccolo Machiavelli was a pragmatist par excellence. That the same person could write The Prince, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy and The Art of War itself shows a certain amount of rigor and detachment that Machiavelli had mastered while reflecting on the nature of Florentine politics. The Machiavellian ideas actually rely upon an antithetical relationship between virtu (civic virtue) and fortuna (contingencies): the more the individual relied upon his virtu and on the virtu of his fellow citizen, the less he is likely to be tormented by external circumstances. In The Prince, Machiavelli considers whether the sovereign statesman can “innovate” political solutions for mastering contingent situations. He further inquires whether such innovations would have any moral quality and whether they can be classed as virtu. His answer is that the Prince might indeed be virtuous as long as his political innovations are not dependent on circumstances. To that end, the ideal Prince or the legislator is an extremely pragmatic individual who always keeps an eye upon immediate dangers and does not rashly attempt to transform the conditions of his political existence.


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In the Discourses, Machiavelli reflects upon a complementary structure of virtu, namely, the ability of every citizen in the republic to place the common good before his own, so that every man’s virtu can save every other (and the republic) from corruption and contingencies. The citizens actively participate in the political process of the republic. They deliberate—politically, socially and militarily—and then come to decisions that make the state superior to the vagaries of fortuna. On the threshold of modern era, John Locke tackles the same question of political and economic stability of the state from other angles: that of the individual human being and natural law. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government takes on headlong the patriarchal arguments of Robert Filmer that procreation gives one human individual the right of superiority, subjection of will to will and even ownership. Filmer further claimed that God had not only set fathers above their children, but also some men above other, men above women, the older above the younger and monarchs above all others. Locke contends against such authoritarianism by reflecting that God leaves us all free since we all have the same natural advantages, faculties and jurisdiction. What makes us positively free is rather the law of nature and reason which are the voice of God in man. Reason is sovereign over all human action. In human beings, Locke argues, reason acts as conscience and is instrumental in placing man above brutes. Reason is also the mode of cooperation between men, something that unites them into fellowship and society. The law of nature that governs reason remains in the hands of individuals. The individuals, by their labor, establish economic and political society. Although Locke goes into great detail about property relationships in the Two Treatises, his primary assertion is that every man has a property in his own person since labor of his body is his own. The other important argument that Locke builds up in the Two Treatises (especially in Chapter XIX titled, “Of the Dissolution of Government”) is the importance of dissent and revolution in case the government infringes the laws of nature and reason by introducing arbitrary rules, regulations and exploitative devices. In such a situation, Locke writes, “ . . . the People are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new Legislative, differing from the other, by the change of Persons, or Form, or both as they shall find it most for their safety and good” (Two Treatises 411). The fertile admixture of rationalism and empiricism of the Two Treatises is alien to Machiavelli and the writers of political advice. Similarly, the idea of inculcating virtu, rather than active labor among the citizenry, does not directly appeal to Locke. But these are largely superficial differences in the context of the wider framework. Two things strongly bind Locke and Machiavelli. First, both of them ultimately sought the stability of the commonwealth without sacrificing the freedom of the individual citizen. In both


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Machiavelli and Locke, the common man plays a vital and active role in shaping the political fortunes of the commonwealth. And second, both men were political pragmatists. So, on one hand they propose consent, trust, positive laws and such other tools to achieve and maintain political stability. On the other hand, they also suggest change, innovation and active dissent if situations necessitate such actions. As pragmatists both the writers had to justify the citizen’s duty to obey and his right to resist. No one understood it better than John Milton that there is no inherent conflict between Locke and Machiavelli. Machiavelli and Locke, in spite of their differences, work somewhere between immediate political necessity and a principled position. Milton attempts precisely that in his republican tracts. He operates, to put it in the eloquent phrase of Jurgen Habermas, “between facts and norms,” between idealism and hard reality, and it is here that one must trace the radical nature of his centrism. In order to analyze the radical nature of Milton’s republican prose tracts, I have identified certain structural connections that run through his writings. The most fundamental of these is Milton’s continuous attempt to strike a mean between a republican concept of virtue and a respect for individual freedom. This dialectic that works between the communal virtue and individual liberty is the bedrock of his radical society. The other strand that runs through his tracts is a very special definition of the idea of liberty itself. The notion of liberty in Milton is not merely the removal of constraints in the liberal sense of the term but rather the removal of political and social domination. To be unfree means to be dependent on somebody else’s powers and pleasures. A person is unfree if his conscience is shackled by the strictures of rites and rituals; a community is unfree if it is dependent on a power that is extra-civic, like monarchy or limited oligarchy. As an antidote to such an unfree state Milton proposes the nurturing of the republican virtue of active citizenship. The third and the final relational linkage in Milton’s pamphlets is his constant balancing of an ideal republican vision with the rough and tumble of everyday practice. The realization that empirical facts may not be always conducive to theoretical idealizations leads to a sense of pragmatism in Milton. But pragmatism in Milton is never selfish and opportunistic; rather it is proposed for the good of the English society. I specifically discuss the legal implications of such a pragmatic approach in bringing about social changes and conclude that in the Miltonic tracts there is enough evidence for both reformist and revolutionary politics. Milton advances a deliberative vision of legality where the negotiating rights always remain with the people. This approach to legality brings him very close to the Leveller idea of natural law.


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I take one of the later republican tracts of Milton, The Readie and Easie Way as a case in point and try to argue that even during times of political despair Milton remains a stalwart republican whose liberal vision of a radical English society stands fundamentally unchanged. Finally, I discuss the religious implications of Milton’s republicanism. Although Milton is ambiguous about the sectaries, his viewpoints are certainly at odds with the prevailing dogmatism of the Catholic and Protestant churches in three major respects: he is a monist-materialist, an anti-Trinitarian/ Arian and a mortalist.5 He is also steadfastly opposed to civil interference in religious affairs. Above all else Milton upholds the view that reason and conscience cannot be subject to any form of prescription or proscription. The Miltonic variety of Arminianism and Arianism are essential for his radical political ideas and his antinomianism brings his republican ideas very close to that of the sectarian vision of a free society. I argue that religion is yet another way for Milton to achieve “whole freedom” or the dialectical balance between the freedom of conscience and civil liberty. Freedom to Milton is never solipsistic; it finally rests upon the ethical foundation of deliberative reason and was therefore, communicable and transferable. MILTON’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Two major portraits of Milton as a political thinker have taken shape over the years—one Whig and the other, Marxist. In 1953, George F. Sensabaugh thought that Milton was a “Grand Whig” who inspired the Whig thinkers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries like no one else.6 But Milton’s contemporary reputation almost verged on notoriety when it came to the political evaluation of his works.7 Eikonoklastes and the two Defensio, books proscribed and publicly burnt during the restoration, made the Whigs embarrassed to own him in their camp. The distinction was often drawn between Milton’s exemplary erudition and dubious politics and prophecy. In “The Whig Milton, 1667–1700,” Nicholas von Maltzahn points out that “Religion was often an awkward subject for the Whigs owing to their associations with Dissent; Tories loved to dub them ‘fanatics,’ charged them with enthusiasm and fomenting rebellion, and identified them with their puritan predecessor. Hence their difficulty with Milton, who looked like a zealot because of his regicide writings and his uncompromising self-preservation as a servant of God” (230). Milton’s profound Christian humanism came to be appreciated much later. Nonetheless, he could only be a Whig of a peculiar kind. His earlier Republicanism and his revolutionary claims for popular resistance came to be seen by the end of the seventeenth-century as only serving the governmental


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aspects of the commonwealth and not the individual man. Milton’s republicanism was not popular with the Whigs, who favored limited monarchy, and the strong religious terms in which Milton expressed his resistance theory further alienated him from them. Till the late seventeenth-century, the Whig estimation of Milton was that of a sober, literary figure freed almost completely from the languages of freedom and citizenship. In more recent times, a certain contemporary liberal strand reads Milton as a reactionary classicist who spoke of virtue as a Spartan ideal against the emerging Market economy of Locke.8 Such an interpretation contends that the republicans are by definition backward looking since their kind of political economy is appropriate for a feudal society and not consonant with a truly self-conscious commercial society. Such readings further argue that there are other seventeenth-century commonwealthmen, however—men like Marchamont Nedham, Benjamin Worsley, Slingby Bethel, even John Streater–all of who could, unlike Harrington and Milton, blend the language of common good with that of the rights and interests of the individual. The contention is that Milton rejects the primary assumption of the new political economy, and believes that political right and personal virtue flow from the ownership of hereditary and transmissible land. Commercial wealth to him is associated with luxury and vice. The added charge is that Milton is a regressive thinker since he feels that interest, in the form of loaning money, is potentially dangerous for the health of a society. And since Milton sets very high standards of virtue he is always pessimistic about the capacity of the English people to inculcate civic virtue. Such pessimism, in its turn, directly leads to an elitist and conservative politics: “Because of the insistence on virtue, because of the overt commitment to a unitary notion of good life, which should be the end goal of the republic, the number and diversity of the republican citizens needed to be limited” (Pincus 724). It is however, unusually shortsighted to define Milton merely in terms of the language of virtue. Beyond the language of virtue Milton is fundamentally concerned about the political and social liberty of the common man. It is here that Milton merges his classical republican ideas with his radical liberal outlook. Milton, more than anyone else during the seventeenthcentury, uses the language of virtue so that the common Englishman gets politically ready and conscious to embrace self-government.9 However, Milton is not merely a mythmaker who undertakes writing in order to broaden the scope of the public sphere. He operates strongly at the individual level as well. Marxist critics of Milton assess him from a different angle. In Chapter 27, “Society and Heresy: Between Two Cultures” of his Milton and the English


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Revolution, Christopher Hill officially outlined what would be the Marxist position on Milton for years to come. Hill portrays Milton as a bourgeois intellectual facing that irrepressible dilemma: how to be a successful déclassé in order to engage with the radical egalitarian politics and religion of he masses. Milton’s kind of freedom, Hill emphasized, is “for the elite . . . not for the masses” though he is “on the libertarian, anti-Trinitarian side” on the questions of predestination and earthly hierarchy (334–35). Looking briefly at Milton’s Republican moments, Hill concludes that it was at best a hesitant and disinclined affair on Milton’s part; a far cry from the ardent Machiavellian in the Pocockian sense of the term: “since Milton accepted office under the republican government he had to accept its responsibilities and constraints”(336). Hill’s Milton is a reluctant republican. And yet Milton is, Hill says, divided between two cultures—rhetorically, between his classical learning and Christian faith, and politically “ . . . in some undefined position between Cromwell and the Independent Grandees on the one hand, and Levellers on the other” (335). The general thesis is that Milton, the aristocrat coming to terms with Whiggery, is an antinomian in temperament, and as such, was acutely aware of a sympathetic relationship he shared with the claims of Leveller politics. Hill had explicitly put forward his wish: “I should like to see the vast energy presently devoted to Milton Studies redirected—away from the classics and the Christian fathers to Milton’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors” (Preface, Milton and the English Revolution). Obviously there is some truth in reading Milton as a bourgeois revolutionary considering the huge historical and textual evidence that Hill produces and especially his delineating the overlapping cycles of Hermeticism, anti-Trinitarianism, mortalism and materialism, millenarianism, Antinomianism and anticlericalism. Milton, from a certain angle is indeed, as Hill suggests, “ . . . living in a state of permanent dialogue with radical views which he could not wholly accept, yet some of which greatly attracted him” (113–14). Taking a cue from Hill and C. B. Macpherson, Marxist critics of Milton have since carried forward the torch with certain modifications.10 For example, Hill was obviously speaking on behalf of the notion that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution but Andrew Milner in his John Milton and The English Revolution (subtitled suggestively “A Study in the Sociology of Literature”) says that the idea that the English Revolution was a bourgeois one is only a “specific hypothesis within the Marxist science of history and that the science as a whole in no sense stands or falls on the correctness or otherwise of this particular hypothesis” (61). It is perfectly possible, as Milner goes on to say, “ . . . for a Marxist historian to interpret the


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Revolution as a particularistic, aristocratic counter-Revolution, directed against that emerging absolutist state, somewhat analogous to the Fronde in France” (61). But whether Milton is a bourgeois or an aristocratic counter-revolutionary, Milner makes it clear that he was an Independent, standing in sharp contrast to the radical intolerance of both the pre-revolutionary Royalist governments and the Presbyterian party. It is crucial to understand here that Milner defines Milton as a “libertarian” not in the Macphersonian sense of an acquisitive, possessive individual. Instead, toleration and reason were the operating words that got associated with Milton. Milton was a tolerationist, according to Milner, because he was anti-authoritarian and proposed a break with the feudal notions of co-extensive State and church. Besides, Milton advocated institutional pluralism and epistemological individualism that became peculiarly consonant with the needs of the developing market society. In such a context Milton’s world vision was normatively rational. Milner sums up: “ . . . at the core of Milton’s system is a structure of thought which is essentially that of a characteristically bourgeois ‘equality of opportunity’ model, in which all men have the same opportunities, but only some take advantage of them” (102). Milton effectively becomes a social contract theorist who adumbrates Locke. It matters little that Milton so profoundly lock horns with a Hobbsian worldview through his radical political and social viewpoints. But Milner is alive to the criticisms of fitting Milton too closely with the Macpherson model. The central problem is of course that Milton offers no particular significance to the role of property, at least not explicitly at any great length, in the formation of political order. What kind of a bourgeois is one who does not make property pre-eminent in his system? The Marxist solution to this paradox is that Milton is not a theorist of class compromise like Locke but a theorist of a small revolutionary party that helps to seize power from a propertied class. Hill’s sense of placing Milton within a bourgeois subjective dialectic comes back in Milner: “In fact, Milton could neither base his theory of legitimating on property which would have implied a recognition of the rights of the Royalists and Presbyterians, nor on simple consent, which would have implied a direct concession to the ‘democratic’ aspirations of the Levellers” (106). Christopher Kendrick explicates this case in a more forceful and sophisticated manner in Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form. In chapter III, entitled “Possessive Individualism, Genre and Ethics” (thereby directly acknowledging his debt to Macpherson), Kendrick proposes a dialectic between the ethical and the economic sides of individualism in Milton. It is


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the ethical valorization of market forces and the extension of liberal ideology that simultaneously works in Milton. For example, there is a double tendency in Areopagitica. Books should not be subject to licensing because it disrupts the healthy flow of the market. But books are not commodities to be marketed like other commodities because “the power of the book production is not commensurable with the commodity form”(58). The circulation of books depends on the normative ethical principles of anti-monopoly. The capitalist subject is at once created and being “symbolically” reacted against. The two drives—of possession and proprietorship, as Kendrick names them, constantly battle each other. Areopagitica glorifies books as repositories of knowledge and wisdom. In the process, books are commodified as objects of possession. Books become objects unto themselves. At the same time Milton officially resists the very commodification process by challenging the act of censorship. What is actually being done is that the market structure is being fully naturalized and its free working given an ethical dimension. Milton’s sense of freedom is thus negatively determined by a reifying structure. Kendrick spells out his objective: “The validation of the market, then, allots to ethics a crucial role in political discourse. Even if possessive individualism obliterates or transcends an ethical perspective in its various theories of the state, nonetheless the state is justified by the reference to a kind of individualized group ethics—by reference, that is, to the natural interests of a series of competitive producers in their individual relations with one another” (74). Kendrick then, like Milner before him, separates radically the normative subject of the post-feudalist world from the earlier feudalist subject. The latter is still defined by its immediate relationship with its means of production. Indeed Kendrick’s primary aim was to argue that Paradise Lost, with its baggage of classicism, was anti-ethical and reactionary as opposed to Areopagitica, which negotiated with the market relations in keeping with the dialectics of history. It is useful to remember though that Paradise Lost was published in 1667 and was at least as close to Locke and the logic of emerging market forces as Areopagitica, which came out on the November of 1644. But perhaps that would amount to subscribing to the fallacy of confusing biographical with “pure” historical context. THREE WAYS OF CENTRISM From the declaration of the Commonwealth in 1649 to Cromwell’s forcible dissolution of the Long Parliament in 1653, a variety of tracts inspired by classical republicanism were published in England. Many of these republican tracts innovatively tried to argue for stabilizing the internal politics of the


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nation through further constitutional changes and at the same time also sought to realign issues in foreign affairs. Besides the individual tracts and pamphlets, it is during this period that Marchamont Nedham writes his editorials for the government organ Mercurius Politicus, where he celebrates the successes of the Rump and tried to draw a political future for England based on the writings of Sallust, Juvenal and Machiavelli. John Milton begins reading Discorsi seriously late in 1651 and acts as a licenser of Mercurius Politicus during those tumultuous years. I would like to concentrate on three main conceptual foundations in Milton’s republican tracts which demonstrate the nature of his radicalism as a political pragmatist. These conceptual foundations form a sort of thematic structure and run through Milton’s political tracts. Even in his anger and regret, such as during the 1660s, I would argue, Milton stood steadfast on these principles. THE DIALECTIC OF LIBERTY AND VIRTUE Despite identifying the late 1640s as one possible period when Milton’s republicanism is most pronounced, it is really difficult to isolate a point in his career when he became a republican. One early sign of interest comes in the Commonplace Book, which he began to write around 1637–38 and published in 1665. Here is an objective, judicial and aphoristic approach of a scholar rather than a controversialist, but the way he weighs evidence is a testimony to what is to come. Modern libertarians like Steve Pincus have made heavy weather of Milton first entry (out of nineteen in the Commonplace Book) from the Discorsi (this time from Bk II, Chapter 10): “Riches are not the nerves of war, as is the common opinion” (1: 414) by pointing out that here one can at once trace the twin strands of conservatism—a distrust of riches and encouraging military valor and warfare, and by extension, defending imperialism. Indeed, republicans have often been charged with having expansionist ambitions. Both the Roman Empire and the Florentine hegemony of the thirteenth and fourteenth century are cited as obvious examples. Such a criticism against republicanism relies on arguing that there cannot be any humane notion of imperium and that the concept of libertas is often a propagandist device designed to disguise the inherent expansionist and aggressive nature of the republic.11 The imperialistic designs (grandezza) of the republic, however, ultimately become a cause for its downfall. In an important essay titled “John Milton: Poet against Empire,” David Armitage has discussed how the Roman expansion had ushered in a certain amount of luxury and complacency, so that the


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internal liberty of the Roman citizens was gradually diminished. Dictators and tyrants rose to power and that in turn, became one principle cause of losing the empire itself. I would argue that Milton was acutely aware of such a disastrous fallout that an expansionist foreign policy of the Rump might cause, and so in his republican tracts he does something different. He does not, first of all, define the “citizen” on a conservative Christian scale but on his ability to live with other citizens who practice different faiths. There are also two clear evidences that Milton resists imperialistic designs of the republic and is censorious about virtue itself: (1)

“The virtue should be sought by philosophers cautiously. For a blind and carnal love of country should not carry us off to plundering and bloodshed and hatred of the neighboring countries, so that we may enrich our country in power, wealth or glory” (1: 422).

It is noteworthy that he is undercutting glory—a definite virtue—together with power and wealth, more self-interested factors. (2)

“It is not the duty of every state to enlarge the boundaries of its power and to bring other nations under its rule. On the contrary, Machiavelli wisely shows that it is dangerous to do so unless that state is rightly ordered and unless the addition of that new realm is justly administered” (1: 498).

It is evident that Milton’s virtue is neither acquisitive in the worst sense of the term nor an ethically conservative and “higher” ideal. Instead it is cautiously pragmatic. Moreover, there is a profound democratic subtext working constantly in his citations in the Commonplace Book. There are two guiding principles for the republican government—enacting “good” laws and reducing magistrates to the ranks of ordinary citizens or restoring the control of things to the decision of the people. Milton’s republic is designed for the democratic and well-off citizens. He is up in arms against undue taxes or protectionism from the government: “A people well furnished with money keeps more quiet; therefore it is to the advantage of a king that he should not reduce his people to poverty by taxes” (1: 484). One cannot possibly wish for a more radical utterance from a supposedly Whig aristocrat. Milton’s democratic impulse is most evident in the section “Of Sedition, Idolatry and the Church and Civil War.” He flatly states that “The rebellion of a people has often been the means of their regaining their freedom, and therefore they should not be blamed, because very often they act


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from just causes” (1: 505). Milton goes on to quote from Machiavelli to emphasize his point that “those who condemn the riots between the nobles and the common people thereby, in my estimation, blame those things that were the principal means of keeping Rome free. For good laws were derived from those disturbances” (1: 505). It is here that one can see that one of the central principles of republicanism—that of discordia concors—is fused with revolutionary fervor. This is as far as one could go away from the consensual politics of conservative republicanism. This complex balancing act between virtue and liberty, and a liberty not severed from wealth and industry, is carried forward to the “Digression on the Long Parliament” of Milton’s History Of Britain. Here he recommends a parliament which the people “thought best affected to the public good”(5.2: 443). And among the councilors should be men of “wisdom and integritie. The rest, and to be sure the greatest part whom wealth and ample possessions or bold and active ambition rather than merit had commended to the same place” (5.2: 443). Indeed merit and ambition are equally welcome until “the superficial zeale and popular fumes that acted thir new magistracie were cool’d and spent in them, straite every one betooke himself, setting the common-wealth behinde and his private ends before, to doe as his owne profit or ambition led him” (5.2: 443). That will be a stage when the huckster will determine the fate of the commonwealth. Justice will be delayed and denied and favor, factions and treachery rule the day. That is where virtue comes in, purely as a defensive mechanism to resist the anarchy developing out of extreme self-interest. In Areopagitica, the three libertarian strains—the reader as an individual, the book as a commodity and the reader’s right to choose a book, are most sacred, as has been noted by commentators time and again. But notice the fervently active nature of the Miltonian idea of virtue; virtue that must act as a complement to liberty: I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercised & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. That vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank vertue, not a pure; her whitenesse is but excrementall whiteness . . . since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of


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human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we be more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity (5.2: 515–17).

Nigel Smith notices a creative tension in Areopagitica in Milton’s attempt to root virtue in natural law. The radicalism of the tract lies in portraying “the image of a society in which individual virtue can flourish, in which divine grace and civic virtue combine in individual acts of intellectual labor” (Politics 116). The parliament should rediscover the original liberty of the English people which is consistent with natural law. Though Smith finds this tension confusing and finally irreconcilable in Milton (what he calls “disparate ideologemes, bits and pieces of value systems,” Politics 118), it is this very tension that forges a powerful dialectic. In the Miltonic vision of freedom of the press, two value systems—natural law and classical republican virtue—effectively combine. Milton refuses to believe in any radical distinction between natural world and civic life. For him there is no pre-political Hobbesian state of nature. Rather it is natural for citizens to form a polity and contribute towards its betterment. This seamless merging of natural into the political makes Milton come very close to the natural law reformers like John Warr. Both Warr and Milton could foresee the brilliant trick involved in severing nature from the civic-political, a trick that Hobbes would undertake in order to justify a top-down notion of contract and sovereignty. So the tension that Smith observes in Milton between virtue and natural law actually is an attempt to prevent virtue from being politicized. Milton is never very keen to peddle any variety of instrumental republican heroic values in order to prematurely facilitate a stable social harmonization. Instead, for Milton the crucial point is to apply our “personal rights” in the humanistic rather than in a strictly juristic sense as a liberal contractarian might do. Positive liberty in Milton is therefore based on virtue (a distinctly personal concept where the activity is “voluntary”) rather than on positive law, which might be “corrupted” in order to force coercion of the private self. Areopagitica affirms that the free flow of “learning” will provide a basis for different possibilities. It will help us understand the dialectic between reason and unreason, virtue and vice, liberty and license. It will work in between idealistic norms and factual anarchy. Milton is advancing “unconstraining laws of virtuous education, religious and civil nature” (2.2: 526). He is all for free choice “for reason is but choosing” (2.2: 527) but quickly stabilizes it by saying that “Truth and understanding are not such areas as to be monopoliz’d and traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards” (2.2: 535).


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So, Christopher Kendrick is right when he says that a dialectic was working within Milton as he composed Areopagitica. It is only that it is not the dialectic of the split bourgeois individual. It is dialectic between the agrarian democratic republican and the equally democratic and emerging liberal. Milton is the supreme example during the seventeenth- century who proves that it is hurried, superficial and ill-advised to search for too radical a break between Machiavelli and Locke. The very first celebrated line in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates is a profound testimony to this balancing act between facts and norms. This time Milton does it by negatively arguing against the ills of unconstrained liberty and the excessive reliance on virtue: “If Men within themselves would be govern’d by reason, and not generally give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within, they would discerne better, what it is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation” (3: 190). It is a cool, analytic argument. Reason is the bridge that forges the bond between true liberty and genuine virtue. It is a normative bridge that should satisfy both the republicans and the liberals. In Eikonoklastes, Milton straightaway proclaims that he has taken up the gauntlet against tyrants “in the behalf of Liberty, and the Commonwealth” (3: 338). Both the civil and personal varieties of liberty haunt him once again. Challenging Charles I, he asks whether the “sovereignty” of his soul as a Man and as a Christian did not ache even as “his outward and imperious will” made him “invade civil Liberties of a Nation” (3: 412). What we witness again and again in Milton is an ethics based on virtue that aspires to incorporate within it, and in fact stands on the very foundations of negative liberty: individual industry and reason. David Norbrook has recently said about Milton’s divorce tracts that if under modern sensibility the state became a household, there are counter tendencies in those tracts towards making the household a polis.12 That insight is applicable to the republican tracts on a different scale. The male individual, inescapably born out of household and family structures, is trying to come to terms with fellow beings within the polis by grounding himself on humanistic and democratic virtues, without compromising his individual self and notions of self-interest. What the Miltonic individual does not do, however, is to surrender his individuality and sense of reason to an alien authority in order to feel economically and politically secure. And that is what differentiates him from the Hobbesian individual. This is crucial to understand the Miltonic kind of republicanism and will be the story of the next section.


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LIBERTY AS NON-DOMINATION Since Isaiah Berlin freshly theorized Thomas Hobbes and John Lind’s idea of Liberty in his “Two Concepts of Liberty,” splitting it into Negative and Positive components, the very splitting has become the real dividing factor between the mainstream and the radical liberals.13 Negative Liberty, as Berlin conceived of it, involves the absence of interference, where interference is more or less intentional intervention of the sort exemplified, not just by the physical coercion of kidnapping or imprisonment, but also by coercion of the credible threat itself. I am negatively free “ . . . to the degree to which no human being interferes with my activity” (1958, 1997): to the extent that I enjoy unimpeded and uncoerced choice. The concept of negative liberty might also be read in more general terms, indicating the interference of the state action or action by other bodies of authority which diminishes the individual’s freedom of choice. Positive liberty, according to Berlin, requires more than the absence of interference, more than just being left alone by others. It requires the agent to take an active part in mastering itself: “I am positively free to the extent that I achieve . . . self-mastery, with its suggestion of a man divided against himself ”(Berlin 1958, 1997). It is noteworthy that Berlin defines positive liberty as a way of active life that stems from our private self, that is to say, private self comes before public life even as the agent takes part in active life. Berlin analyzed the allegiances of the contemporary political theorists in marking out negative liberty as a sensible ideal and in raising serious doubts about the claims of positive. A prominent strand of contemporary liberalism (dubbed as contractarian liberalism), most notable being the works of early John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, finds the idea of negative liberty early as the driving impulse to all political and social activity. At their worst the contractarians do not see any connection between negative liberty and public service. If freedom is understood as an absence of external constraints on one’s activity, then it makes no sense to identify it with a life of active citizenship and civic virtue. Active virtue, the Republicans argue on the other hand, should be valued, not necessarily because it is good in itself, but because it contributes to the maintenance of a free society. For the Republican/Communitarian, the reason to participate in politics depends on duty rather than on rights. This premise, according to the contractarian, is a normative leap since it ignores the claim that no particular individual’s participation is strictly necessary for the maintenance of liberty. This is a normative rather than a logical leap because such a leap can only be made “by appealing to fairness, or by embedding the agent in a more Kantian moral


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framework, which has recourse to an original position or other similar device” (Pettit 80–109). In this context, one might again begin with Milton’s Commonplace Book. It is here that one can detect many incipient ideas that would blossom fully in the later tracts. The crux of Milton’s idea of Liberty can be detected in an eponymous section in that text. He invokes the authority of Justinian to give a particular definition of liberty. Liberty has nothing to do with political or social constraints. It is rather opposed to domination. And what further domination than manumission and slavery. In the Commonplace Book Milton is most disturbed by the prospect of “appointing a slave as heir without giving him his freedom” (1: 471). The slave is not free because he remains at all times in potestate domini, within the power of the master. The essence of what it means to be unfree, and hence to lack personal liberty, is thus to be within the power of someone else. It is not necessary to suffer overt coercion in order to forfeit one’s civil liberty. One will also be rendered unfree if one merely falls into a condition of political subjection or dependence. To live in such a condition of political slavery is not to suffer merely any breach of security but of liberty itself.14 Only as a counter-force to such a variety of political manumission, Milton proposes active citizenship. Active citizenship to Milton is not important as a “primary good” for perfecting one’s nature through cultivation of abstract virtue, but because it primarily contributes to maintain freedom from arbitrary power and corruption, that is “negative liberty” in a wider sense. In Areopagitica Milton returns to this theme. It is the “removal of an undeserved thraldam upon lerning” (2: 539) that stirs Milton to defend books and their publishing. What cannot be allowed, and what the Licensing Act of 1637 was precisely attempting, is not any concrete action against any writer or publisher but the very possibility of such an action. What was being threatened is the possibility of a free circulation of opinion and “opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making” (2: 554). The opposite of liberty is slavishness and once liberty is achieved it cannot be compromised to slavishness. Knowing well that merely getting rid of the royalty is not enough, Milton pleads for real equality to the Parliamentarians: “Ye cannot make us now lesse capable, lesse knowing, lesse eagerly pursuing of the truth, unlesse ye first make your selves, that made us so, lesse the lovers, lesse the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formall, and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous, as they were from ye have free’d us” (2: 559). Licensing is potential tyranny, a mild form of totalitarianism, and freedom- loving individuals cannot squander their hard-earned freedom by


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transferring it to yet another form of authority. This is where republicanism parts ways with Hobbes and remains firmly tied with Locke and his followers instead. In Milton, republican ideas of virtue and positive liberty develop not from an idea of fettering the individual. Rather virtue highlights that individual liberty ought not to be handed over to an external authority like a king or an oligarchy that would violently undercut the rights of the very individual by potentially threatening his civil rights. The sovereignty of the people must not be transferred to any external authority. It cannot be bargained away even if that authority does not constrain you practically from practicing your free will and industry. Liberty is inalienable even in theory, even on a normative level. This theme of liberty as non-domination is also the chief principle behind Milton’s regicide tracts. The tyrant is no less dangerous because he is benevolent. His benevolence is theoretically contingent on his pleasure. And that is what makes the people, who finally hold the sovereignty, politically unstable and unfree. Thus in Tenure Milton says that “the root and sourse of all liberty” is to “dispose and oeconomize [practice administration freely, either in a private house, an institution, or a country] in the Land which God hath giv’n them, as Maisters of family in thir own house and free inheritance” and without this “natural and essential power of a free Nation . . . they can in due esteem be thought no better then slaves and vassals born, in a tenure and occupation of another inheriting Lord” (3: 237). Free inheritance and being a Master are contrasted with being a slave. In Eikonoklastes he makes a dent in the whole Hobbesian scheme by distinguishing between self-preservation and the need to be excessively acquisitive: “For the liberty of person and the right of self preservation, is much neerer, much more natural, and more worth of all men, then the propriety of thir goods, and wealth”(3: 454). Self-preservation is the preservation from slavery and manumission and not from any constraint in the modern liberal sense. Thus self-preservation is a fundamental human necessity but not greed. This is a kind of republicanism not too distant from Locke. It is the same logic working when Milton says, looking from the other side to the King as an individual subject, that while it is true that “Liberty” and “subsistence” of the “regal power” is important to the King, “We expect . . . something more, that must distinguish free Government from slavish” (3: 574). The kind of freedom defined here is a radical liberal one, absolutely democratic in nature: free government is neither oligarchy nor potential slavery under a mildly totalitarian king. Living under the scrutiny of a benevolent despot is slavery plain and simple because this mildness depends upon the pleasure of the tyrant and not the people.


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In the First Defense time and again Milton would address Salmasius as the slave opposed to the freeborn Englishman. Milton thunders: “Learn on, you rascal house-born slave, that unless you remove the master, you destroy the state, for it is some private property, and not a commonwealth, which owns a master” (4.1:334). His definition of commonwealth is not military and imperialistic. It is also not one that nurtures a “common will” or tries to guide the republic towards an apriori peaceful and consensual polity. The commonwealth is free only when it is not even potentially slavish. Milton quotes Paul (Corinthians 7.21–23) in order to distinguish between religious and political liberty and the distinction is made in terms of manumission and not constraint: Paul makes this assertion not of religious liberty alone, but also of political: “Are you called slave? Care not for that; but if you can become free, then use your freedom. You are bought for a price; be not the slaves of men (4.1: 374).

At one stage in the First Defense Milton almost betrays an elite, intellectual position even as he says that “I confess that those who long for liberty or can enjoy it are but few—only the wise, that is, and the brave; while most men prefer just masters so long as in fact they are just” (4.1: 343). Justice is not a function of empirical situations. Justice is always the function of reason and deliberation. And such an idea of justice is the third crucial aspect of Milton’s republicanism. WORKING BETWEEN LAW AND JUSTICE Legal claims are always coupled with authorized coercion. The subjects comply on account of the claims’ normative validity. Thus we have the mainstream liberal concept of respect for the law. The mainstream liberal concept of legality, however, only requires a behavior that objectively corresponds to an enacted (positivistic) legal norm. But then, there can be at least two perspectives on legal norms: for a person acting strategically, that norm lies at the level of social facts that externally restrict his range of action. Such a perspective holds that the validity of legal norms does not depend on its moral correctness. It is rather based on the values of absolute selfhood and empirical requirements. Individuals working within such a legal framework will always act strategically in order to maximize their own benefit. This is the Hobbesian natural law tradition that has been radicalized by the likes of Carl Schmitt.15


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For the person acting communicatively, on the other hand, law functions at the level of obligatory expectations, that he assumes the legal community have rationally agreed on. An interpretivist or communicative theory of law holds that legal rights and duties are determined by the best interpretation of the political practices of a particular community where each individaul can interact and deliberate with ecah other before forming any legal opinion. There is a deep idealism involved in any legal framework that is based strictly on communication or interpretation within the members of the community because for a person acting communicatively, correct interpretation is the one that puts the political practices of the community in their best light, or makes of them the best that they can be. This tension between the idealism of communicative law and the materialism of the positivist order, especially a commercial law that reflects only the unequal distribution of social power, finds its echo in the drifting apart of the Republican (ideal) and the liberal (empirical) approaches to law. The Republican and communitarian among the mainstream liberals are likely to subscribe to a communicative theory of law whereas the individualist liberals and the libertarians would usually follow a positivist legal order. In Between Norms and Facts, Habermas summarizes the problems that trouble the two legal schools. He says that in the liberal model of market competition, “Given an indissoluble pluralism of pre-political values and interests that are at best aggregated with equal weight in the political process, politics loses all reference to the normative core of a public use of practical reason” (274). On the other hand “Republicanism binds the legitimacy of laws to the democratic procedure governing their genesis, and thus maintains the internal connection between the people’s practice of self-determination and the impersonal rule of law” (Between Norms and Facts 271). There is thus a basic skepticism here in Habermas about an absolutely pluralistic society in contrast to republican confidence, since the latter tries to maintain a connection between actual self-determination and procedural law. The problem is that the republican concept of law depends on an exceptionalistic description of political practice—how it ought to be. The expectation of virtue in the republican definition of legality already splits the citizen between private and public spheres. The Renaissance concept of virtue was never bereft of the individual. It was the individual who was supposed to think about his fellow citizens and the good of the commonwealth in general. The effect of Protestant thinking during the seventeenth-century further makes virtue primarily private affair, creating a dichotomy in the very


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idea of virtue itself. The other-regarding nature of the original civic ideal got individualized to a large extent in the process. One option to avoid this radical dichotomy is to insist that democratic will formation does not draw legitimating force from a prior convergence of ethical convictions. Rather the source of legal legitimacy might depend on various forms of deliberation and a belief in the procedures that secure fair bargaining conditions. This is the reformist standpoint. The other is to offer a violent rupture from the existing legal community to form an altogether new legal ground. This is the revolutionary standpoint. In his republican tracts Milton hovered somewhere in between the two. From a certain angle, Milton is a reformist as far as the legal system is concerned because he believes primarily in the reasonable nature of law. It is not that his convictions about legality are not loaded with moral and Christian presuppositions. That would be impossible in a world where the institutional paraphernalia of the bourgeois society has not been fully conceived or implemented. But he tries to overcome that by sneaking in a minimal theory of law even when he sounds most normative. In the regicide tracts, which are virtually justifications of a political rupture, the idea of legality seems to be working on a purely normative level (as opposed to the fact based, empirical level) since it is beyond and above both the tyrant and the common man. Everybody needs to conform to that pre-political conception of the legal system. What is interesting is that Milton at once justifies the necessity of the political rupture (that of removing the tyrant) and asserts the empire of law. However, since in Milton the covenant between the ruler and ruled is not sacrosanct and is liable to get radically revised, there always remains the scope for revising the minimal political and legal framework through legal reforms or through democratic upsurges. Herein lies the radical potentiality of his republican politics. In The Tenure Milton writes that if “the Law was either not executed, or misapply’d, they were constrained from that time, the onely remedy left them, to put conditions and take oaths from all Kings and Magistrates at thir first instalment to doe impartial justice by Law: who upon those termes and no other, receav’d Allegeance from the people, that is to say, bond or Covenant to obey them in execution of those Lawes which they the people had made or assented to. And this ofttimes with express warning, that if the King or Magistrate prov’d unfaithfull to his trust, the people would be disingag’d” (3: 360). The thrust is toward a deliberative mode of legal practice as long as the normative expectations of the people are fulfilled. But as soon as that trust is broken and an absolutist legal system barges in, the people are


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free to challenge the existing legal code even violently. The formation of the republic will be primarily dialogic but if that possibility is exhausted, the people are free to provide a more popular definition of justice based not on “general will” but on reason. The Tenure affirms that the normative ideas of justice always need to be examined on the empirical grounds of their applicability before acquiring validity. And again in Eikonoklastes there is a similar plea to discourse and dialogue: “Law in a Free Nation hath bin ever public reason, the enacted reason of a Parliament; which he denying to enact, denies to govern us by that which ought to be our Law; interposing his own privat reason, which to us is no Law” (3: 486). And in First Defense Milton affirms, “should any law or custom conflict with divine or natural law or with reason, it is not to be considered a valid law. Although you might perhaps discover in our law some edict or statute, attributing tyrannical power to the king, you must realize that being contrary to divine will, to nature and to reason, such law should be revoked and held invalid by reason of that basic and inclusive law which I referred to” (4.1: 486). Here is a strong reaction against legal positivism. The nature of legality is always public and normative (the norms or divinity, nature and most of all reason) as long as the interested parties agree (and in doing so respect the decision-making capacity of the individual too) to that norm on which the existing legal system works. Reasonable law works between norms and facts. It is deliberative and hence by definition public in nature and as such cannot be Hobbesian and asymmetrically handed over to an external and private authority to be executed at his will. Deliberative law works between a blind decisionism and moral containment. It is a radical democratic framework because the power of negotiating always remains with the people. The Miltonic kind of republicanism asserts that there is an internal relationship between the minimal rule of law and democracy at the conceptual level. The primacy of human rights remains intact in both the people and the king as long as the king remembers that he is actually just another person, a functionary working for the good of the people and the nation. The moment the king turns tyrant the covenant is broken and law becomes positive. And in his rejection of positivistic legal frameworks Milton comes extremely close to the “natural law” argument of the Levellers and the legal reformers like John Warr. As far as law is concerned, Milton’s difference with the Leveller standpoint would perhaps pivot around the point that the legal system Milton finally depends upon has more to do with moral norms like rational opinion-making and deliberation. In the legal reformers like Warr, law is more about the natural proclivity to selfgovern rather than any actively cultivate notions of virtu.


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THE GOOD OLD CAUSE AND THE NATURE OF REPUBLICAN LIBERTY The twenty months from Cromwell’s death on 3 September 1658 to the restoration of Charles II in May 1660 witness a renewed debate on many issues close to radical hearts. Milton retains a civil service post throughout the 1650s, drawing his final salary for the third quarter of 1659 and, apart from writing diplomatic correspondence, the only major tract is the Latin defense Defensio Pro Se, published in 1655.16 Scholars think that during this period he was mostly preoccupied with compiling De Doctrina Christiana and was working on Paradise Lost and had produced no vernacular polemic after 1649. During the anarchic period of 1658–1660, Milton renews questions of governmental models and political arguments in his writings, and these renewed discussions show a shift from his earlier political stance. The question that has vexed critics is whether Milton is consistent in his political outlook as a republican? What is his conception of civil and political liberty during the later 1650s? There has also been a parallel scholarly debate on whether Milton rejects the Protectorate and denies allegiance to Cromwell in the final months of the Republic. Robert Fallon in his essay “Milton in the Anarchy, 1659–1660: A Question Of Consistency,” has summed up the three assumptions on which the claim of Milton’s rejection of the Protectorate is made: (a) his supposed withdrawal from public affairs, which is seen as a repudiation of Cromwellian policies; (b) the meaning of the phrase “a short and scandalous night of interruption,” from Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings and (c) the identity of the ‘single person’ so frequently referred to, particularly in The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. Many commentators, most forcefully Austin Woolrych, have asserted that Milton indeed was inconsistent in his political beliefs. This charge of inconsistency has been variously interpreted, from S. B Liljegren’s portrayal of Milton as a Machiavellian (this time, Machiavelli of The Prince) hypocrite and timeserver to A. E. Barker’s mild repudiation of Milton for being “illogical” in his later pamphlets.17 The other debate, closely connected, centers around the question whether Milton’s delineation of the Republic in his later pamphlets was an exercise in a dangerous political utopia or whether Milton was, as Barbara Lewalski has emphasized in “Milton: Political Beliefs and Polemical Methods 1659–1660,” “an extremely practical and realistic polemicist” (202). With respect to the Utopia question, a way out is to read these later tracts and especially The Readie and Easie Way as an exercise in the literary


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genre of Jeremiad, as argued by Laura Lunger Knoppers and James Holstun.18 Both Holstun and Knoppers argue that in the defense of the Good Old Cause Milton operates consciously within the nostalgic and prophetic jeremiad tradition in The Readie and Easie Way, mutating it so that it “ takes on a distinctively literary aim, to provide a myth of the nation, a story by which the English under the restored monarchy can interpret their tragedy” (Knoppers 224). With the jeremiad tradition in mind, Holstun first redefines utopia away from the idealist and the unreal and then points out that The Readie and Easie Way is really anti-utopian in its argument. He counters it with Areopagitica by arguing that the “mighty, rising commonwealth” vision of that tract is replaced here by a self-consuming and self-negating lamentation of “what could be.” Holstun traces a jeremiad rhetorical strategy in Milton which, he says, on the one hand operates in a celebratory mode of abstract republican political philosophy and, on the other hand, as a pessimistic acknowledgement of the historical inevitability of the death of commonwealth. Milton realizes that England is already “creeping and contagious” and so “associates England not with Israel as an elect nation but with Babel and Rome as a nation doomed by civic hubris” (A Rational Millennium 258). Holstun concludes that The Readie and Easie Way is a self-consuming artifact where Milton cuts himself off from his community and where “Virtue is, if not cloistered, at least thoroughly architectural” (A Rational Millennium 254). But as Thomas N. Corns points out in his Uncloistered Virtue, English Political Literature, 1640–1660, the jeremiad argument “straightforwardly assumes that the cause is lost” (291). Corns contends against Holstun’s assertion that “Milton as a Jeremiah pleads almost suicidally for his nation’s expiring liberty” (A Rational Millennium 262) by declaring that Milton “shows even in extremis a close attempt to manipulate those who could still arrest the Restoration, using their fear as a fulcrum on which to turn Presbyterian opinion” (Corns 292). These disagreements regarding Milton’s political position during 1658–1660, I would claim, stem from a fundamental lack of appreciation for the nature of radical liberal politics. To ask whether he was consistent or not in political beliefs is altogether a wrong question since radical liberalism takes it as a virtue to engage in pragmatic revision of one’s stance and takes pride in one’s capacity to do so without compromising on certain normative principles like liberty or non-domination. What we are talking about is a kind of malleable pragmatism that has a normative mooring in the liberty of conscience. One should thus test decision-making in Milton’s career primarily


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from this perspective: whether Milton’s belief in reason and liberty did waver and whether the dialectic of virtue and liberty, which we have witnessed so far, does change in his latter pamphlets. One would thus do well to begin with the most infamous passage from the second edition The Readie and Easie Way, which Austin Woolrych uses to support his conclusion that the tract “ . . . does not allow the people—even the ‘free’ people in Milton’s sense—any considerable power to chose or alter the form of their government, and that its assertion of the right of the minority to impose ‘their own just liberty’ upon the majority by force is not only incongruous with popular sovereignty but capable of infinite abuse” (Historical Introduction, 7: 218). That passage reads: One main end of government: which if the greater part value not, but will degenerately forgoe, is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of government should enslave the less number that would be free? More just it is doubtless, if it com to force, that a less number compel a greater number to retain, which can be no wring to them, thir libertie, then that a greater number for the pleasure of thir baseness, compel a less most injuriously to be thir fellow slaves. They who seek nothing but their own just libertie, have always right to winn it and to keep it, when ever they have power, be the voices never so numerous that oppose it (7: 455).

In this passage Woolrych, a steadfast liberal, found the echoes of 1956 and 1968 as he “shuddered at its distant echoes in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, and in lands Milton had never heard of ” (7: 212). He concludes patronizingly that Milton was forced to write such a passage since, during that period, he was acting under at least two powerful pressures: “the persistent classical tradition that the best form of state is not only just but immutable, and the still stronger common law tradition, synthesized on a monumental scale and with enormous authority by Coke, that the English pre-revolutionary constitution had come down, unchanged from the dawn of history” (7: 214). Woolrych farther cites Parker’s biographical authority to assert that from October 1659 to April 1660, Milton was dealing with desperate expedients and would offer different solutions had he taken up his pen again in May or June. Behind Woolrych’s tentativeness lies one crucial charge against Republicanism in general: that it is highhanded and almost always foredoomed to be complicit with the oligarchy. Such a criticism censures Aristotle for prescribing elitism and clique politics in the garb of descriptive categories in Politics


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and Nicomachean Ethics. Thus Isaac Kramnik in “Republican Revisionism Revisited” points out that Aristotle, unlike modern republicans, was a “theorist of hierarchy and privilege” (653). Similarly Don Herzog, in “Some Questions for Republicans” disturbingly “exposes” the oligarchic intentions of the republican Benjamin Rush.19 A most sustained attack along these lines comes from the gauchist critic John M. Najemy, who points out that the politics of virtue “delegitimated and supplanted the politics of class and collective interests” (93). He adds that the conservatism of civic humanism comes from a central concern with “consensus politics.” Najemy hits at the sanctum sanctorum of civic humanism: Florentine political order. He contends that civic humanism’s real antagonist was less the Duke of Milan than the popular guild republicanism that had periodically surfaced to challenge oligarchic ambitions of the likes of Leonardo Bruni. Guild republicanism was created by the broad middle ranks of the Florentine society—the popolo: “the regional merchants, notaries, moneychangers, manufacturers of cloth for the local market, retail cloth dealers, and other professional groups of the major guilds who did not belong to lineages of great wealth or prestige; and the shopkeepers, providers of services, builders, and artisans of various sorts in the minor guilds” (Najemy 82). The popular regime flourished most during 1378–82 to the fear and loathing of the elites and of the non-elite major guildsmen. Perhaps more than anything else, as Najemy reminds us, it was the spectacle of workers and artisans in the textile industries enjoying an autonomous corporate existence, and thus the right to bargain collectively with the cloth manufacturers of the wool guild, that made even the non-elite members of the major guilds realize the profound threat. It was in these contexts that Leonardo Bruni condemned the Ciompi revolution as the eruption of irrational and even criminal impulses latent in poor guildsmen and men of base condition, an uncanny reverberation of the condemnation of the “base, multitudinous rabble” by many English republicans. One of Bruni’s main objectives, behind his apparently humane politics, was to dissociate the guilds from the authority of the elite. Najemy underlines the class configuration of Florentine politics by recognizing the fact that the ruling elite understood “the necessity of expanding the ranks of the office-holders in order to broaden the consensus around their hegemony, but they were willing to do so only if the hundreds and eventually thousands of non-elite office-holders accepted their posts as a recognition of, and reward for, personal merit and thus loyalty to their patrons, and not as an opportunity to represent the interests of their class” (Najemy 92).


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The central theoretical point that comes out of all these is the contention that the republican ideal of vita activa civilis is at its core an ethic of dutiful passivity. Far from encouraging the active pursuit of glory or political ambition, let alone democratic participation, the image of the good citizen was one who suppressed his ambition and exhibited an unquestioning deference toward those who govern, and who has no idea whatsoever, in real political terms, of policies or interests to promote or defend the civic arena. In a perceptive essay trying to dissociate freedom and liberty, Hanna Pitkin even charges the popolo: “ The Roman plebs struggled not for democracy but for protection, not for public power, but for private security. Of course they sought public, institutionalized guarantees of that security. But libertas was “passive,” “defensive,” “predominantly negative” (Pitkin 534–35). In this context, the purport of Woolrych’s conclusion would be to undermine the nature of Milton’s political belief and to equate him with the likes of Nedham. But the republicanism of Nedham and Milton differ at least in one crucial point: the latter seamlessly tied his Christian humanist disposition to his political vision, without compromising the steadfast belief in the inner liberty of conscience, something that the former lacked. It seems that from a normative point of view Milton was too much of a one-issue man in the political sphere. For him, there is no wavering from the belief that until Man is spiritually free he cannot be free politically. During the last days of the Republic Milton realizes that the most important political factor that is going to lead to the downfall of the Republic is the open struggle between the Army and the Parliament, each hitting hard at the other, seemingly oblivious of the fact that their ultimate survival was dependent upon the union of their efforts. In these contexts, Milton recognizes most painfully that no freely elected Parliament would ever carry out a program of uniting the two institutions. Thus the select body of like-minded Republicans was summoned in The Readie and Easie Way. It is the same realpolitik concerns that made Milton approve of the dissolution of the Rump in 1653 because he hoped that Cromwell would then be free to move the nation toward disestablishment. Milton has indeed changed his stance and there is no hedging about it. In “A Letter to a Friend” of October 1659 for instance, he has not yet made up his mind about the nature of his legislature, whether the civil government be an annual Democracy or a perpetual senate. By the following March he settles for a perpetual senate. The chaos of the intervening months persuades him to take this stance. The perpetual senate would be selected from the very best but those senators would not run a hierarchical commonwealth, but rather be the “perpetual servants and drudges to the public at thir own cost and charges . . . yet are not elevated above thir


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brethren; live soberly in thir families, walk the streets as other men” (7: 425). And one thing, however, prevails throughout these late works: the danger of a returning monarchy. Robert Fallon has correctly stressed that “While still committed to freedom and liberty of conscience, he saw clearly that for the moment at least the Republic had to deal with a more pressing matter—survival” (Fallon 138). One of the main reasons that Milton decides to reject a successive idea of the senate is that such a senate “weakens the whole Commonwealth and brings it into manifest danger; while by this means the secrets of State are frequently divulgd, and matters of greatest consequence committed to inexpert and novice counselors” (7: 437). Most of all, there are enough hints in the pamphlet that the perpetual nature of Senate was a contingent affair. It would be required “till the Commonwealth thoroughly setl’d in peace and safetie, and they (the senators) themselves give us the occasion” (7: 442). The idea chimes well with the Miltonic belief that it is only by “degrees” that we reach “perfection” (7: 444). In Milton’s letter to Monck entitled The Present Means, and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth he urges Monck to save the commonwealth in only one way possible—by limiting suffrage to the well-affected in accordance with the laws of the land. In the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, now aware how ill received his proposal for a perpetual senate has been, Milton seeks to demonstrate that a sufficient decentralization of justice and administration will remove its powers for harm. There would be local authorities, and the Grand Council will not have control of the military. Most of all Milton specifically proposes at different points of the pamphlet that there ought to be safeguards against the abuse of authority by the perpetual senate. This almost visceral reaction against corruption is one of the hallmarks of radical republican and liberal thought. Moreover, the Army would also serve as a deterrent to that body’s aspiration for power. But how that might take place in practical terms was left unsaid. Writing in the white heat as the Republic was crumbling, Milton did not have the time to work out a fuller and more comprehensive method how that might be achieved. These modifications were not part of a “pardonable disingenuousness” as even staunch advocates of Milton’s consistency like Fallon and Lewalski have argued. These were means to achieve an end without compromising the liberty of inner freedom. Are we then moving away from the civic nature of Republican virtue as Milton’s interest gets tilted towards individual freedom? Emphatically not. It is only that the civic and the political do not mean anything without the sufficient evolving of inner liberty. Each is complementary to the other. This question about the nature of civic virtues in the Miltonic tracts of the late 1650s and early 1660s can be put forward from another angle. There


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is a remarkable tract written during this very period entitled, Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon, written between 2 and 20 April, 1660 as an answer to Dr. Matthew Griffith’s vehemently royalist sermon preached on 25 March, The Fear of God and the King. Milton reasserts here the popular–sovereignty argument based on the natural right of every citizen to alter and change their government. This is not only contrary to his defense of a worthy minority to represent the people (a political stance since 1651) but against the grain of the four preceding tracts that had argued for a perpetuation of such an oligarchic senate. Brief Notes firmly rejects Griffith’s assertion of monarchy as the fundamental law, and the conceptual foundation of this rejection is exactly similar to the one Milton used to counter royalist arguments during the revolution: by stressing the natural right of a free people. But this is a majority argument, an absolute contrast to that paragraph from The Readie and Easie Way upon which Woolrych bases many of his polemical points. What does Milton want then—a democratic majority rule or an oligarchic rule? Perhaps neither. Ernest Sirluck had long ago provided an answer.20 He said that the social contract was a suitable reply to the Royalists cry for monarchy of divine right, but since this led to an unproblematic celebration of majority governance it had to be modified. And this modification comes through a new doctrine of divine right: the right of the regenerate to execute the will of God. According to Sirluck (and Lewalski agrees), this ingenious twist for maximizing the right of the virtuous regenerate was hinted in Eikonoklastes and worked out fully in the two Defences. But that conclusion does not directly apply here, in these changed times of anarchy. David Norbook has drawn a more general but more plausible inference. In his Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660, even as he discusses Milton’s “jumps” and the shifting of his “speech acts,” he remarks that while writing with an immediate polemical aim (like the letter occasioned by Griffith’s royalist tract) Milton was ready to idealize the people, but when he aims at long-term, detached evaluations, he focuses on the weakness of the people and the monarchy/church alike. In the words of Norbrook, the central Republican impasse for Milton was to find political and religious agency “from within a far from civil nation to make republican civility possible” (Norbrook 327). The public deliberations that democracy requires must be open to the expression of the full range of public opinion and judgment of the populace, but it also must be presented in a form and in a place where the exchange of opinions and judgments is a possibility. As a public intellectual Milton does not mistrust the demos but the spiritual baseness of the demos, which he seeks to uplift.


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Revolutionary fervor and subversive zeal are pressingly needed when the prevailing political bottlenecks cannot be addressed through common sense. But subversion unbounded by civility yields dogmatism and worse. There is no pre-existing formula for knowing when the civil or the subversive should end and the opposite should begin. This is a matter of political judgment. REPUBLICANISM AND THE WAYS OF GOD For his republican moments Milton unquestionably owes much to the humanist heritage of the Mediterranean world as well as to the democratic impulses of his own land. But in Milton, prophecy and politics, the civic and the sacred, are inextricably linked. And it is this link, rather than the lack of it, that often offers opportunities for devising ways of action. He is never a closet centrist. Michael Fixler has rightly observed that in Milton “Progressive revelation, divine enlightenment moved out of the cloister, the university, the study, into the streets and into political councils; and the equality of believers—their royal priesthood—became confounded with the rights of man” (9). Milton certainly did want to divorce church from the state, but did not think of dividing religion from politics and knew that civil and religious liberties are inextricably linked together. What exactly are the implications? What stakes are involved for involving the divine in matters civic? After all, J. G. A. Pocock based his claim for republicanism on the advent of Machiavelli as a secular corrective to the rigid medieval religious and social setup (though he did not altogether overlook the republican and the millenarian merging in revolutionary England). 21 Pocock was advancing a thesis of radical rupture in the way the West looked at politics from Machiavelli onwards. And that language was primarily secular. Milton shows here greater prudence as a republican centrist and steadfastly holds to reformed religion. But what would be the nature of religion in such a commonwealth that includes religion as an essential ingredient? How far is it possible to celebrate republican liberty in such a setup? Although there are certain passages in Milton that argues for a millenarian justification of the rule of “Saints,” especially in De Doctrina Christiana, his commonwealth is certainly not, at any stage, an aristocracy of grace and a political entity to be ruled by the regenerate Saints. However, even in De Doctrina Christiana, there are definitive and approving remarks about toleration and mortalism.22 On the other hand, neither is his political theory wholly based on “natural law.” This is evident when one compares him with the Levellers who completely segregated the laws and goods of the two orders, refusing superiority to the order of grace when they decided issues


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relating to the natural order. The Levellers could thus follow the implications of a popular sovereignty theory to a fully democratic conclusion. Republicans, on the other hand, thought that a majority election would restore monarchy. Milton, however, had the Christian humanist’s disposition to be syncretic and tried to relate the two orders harmoniously. Indeed, in real-politic terms it would seem that Milton was more of a pragmatic than a detached humanist. It must be remembered that Milton often defended positions which in his view were far from being “saintly,” such as the “self-seeking” Rump, the “intolerant” Long Parliament, and the “ambitious” army leadership. During the anarchic period of 1658–1660, Milton could definitely “not divide sharply between the regenerate and the unregenerate on the basis of restored faculty or restrict the exercise of political privilege to a fixed group of ‘Visible Saints’” (Lewalski 201). Despite man’s original sin and in spite of the fact that moral goodness and virtue are most fully enjoyed by the regenerate, it is not impossible for the “natural man” to salvage some remnants of the divine image, which always exist in us. But these Arminian traits developed gradually and through a tortuous process of political and religious experience. In the reformed religion there was always a tension between the church type and the sect-type views and often each came dangerously close to the other. Lutheranism and English Episcopalianism retained the apocalyptic fervor of the sects, and the Calvinist Presbyterian churches freely shared both the Kingdom ideal and apocalypticism of their more radical brethren. In fact, the distinction between millenarian and Calvinist theocratic patterns often broke down at the conception of an eschatological Kingdom of God which justified the spiritual direction of society by the godly as a preparation for the last days and second coming of Christ. The orthodox Calvinist as well as the sectarian often felt that God was indeed foreshortening the period in which the Church must prepare the world for the New Jerusalem. Together with this was the right to resist that related the two types. Calvin had hedged the right of resistance to secular power with serious restrictions, but he had not absolutely forbidden it. In any case, the reformed Churches often took to arms in early modern times for the sake of true doctrine. If most orthodox Calvinists did not take arms as chiliasts they still fought ultimately for the interests of the godly and the Church. In the religious wars at times it was only the class factor that effectively separated the orthodox Calvinists from the chiliasts. Coupled with this was the theme of the English National Destiny. The likes of Martin Bucer, Joseph Mede, and Richard Hooker highlighted the belief in God’s special providence for


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England. It was the business of the Church to see that England, and every other country as well, should become a regnum Christi. As Michael Fixler observes, “at certain stages the Holy Spirit assumed an almost Hegelian character as the divine idea of history making itself manifest through the sanctification of men and institutions; and like Hegelianism, Calvinism could, by its conception of history, become a revolutionary ideology” (Fixler 26). In such a setting, the personal, the national and religious calling coincided in the Puritan and that is what happens with Milton in his anti-prelatical tracts. Like most Puritans Milton reads the history of reformation as evidence that God’s providential favors to England were not properly acknowledged by the responses of the English people. In his earlier poetry, particularly in the youthful poems of the English people celebrating Guy Fawkes’ Day, and in the early polemical prose he emphasizes the idea that God favors the English above others in the advancement of reformation. But at the same time he comments upon the ingratitude for these favors shown by his countrymen, as in Elegy IV written in 1627 to his self-exiled tutor Thomas Young. The nature of providence for Milton at this stage is regeneracy and an active progression towards Christ’s spiritual kingdom. Consequently, it is an appeal to the community of the faithful, the outward fellowship that marks his earlier writings. He recognizes that religion and politics are inseparably linked together but rejects the argument that a revolution in the church would entail a revolution in the state as a prelatical subterfuge—”a trimme paradox.” In sum, the greater part of the anti-prelatical tracts relies on the virtues of custom and patristic authority on one hand and of the reason of state, or policy on the other to affirm the claim that monarchy and prelacy is indissolubly linked. The ethics of cooperation and authority are firmly Christian and as such, are to be implemented in civic life. The State is looked upon merely as the authority necessary to enact and maintain a congenial, stable structure for the work of regeneration. It is a Christian commonwealth of fellow beings that is being celebrated, and the dialectic of the republican tracts that we have discussed from the secular angle is missing in general. Milton, much as Harrington did in his Oceana (from a secular angle), is trying to free England permanently and prematurely from the cyclical revolutions of the past and in the process is flouting one of the first principles of Classical republicanism: discordia concors—to meet each and every issue up-front, discuss them among the members of the household or polity and then come to a political decision. The lure of establishing the harmonious “good society” leads to a premature totalization in these early poems of Milton, and leaves the dialectic between liberty and faith hanging. At this stage theocratic values rather than civic ones guide Milton’s conviction of piety. Not pragmatism but


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a peculiar conviction of ideology directs his sense of virtue. Milton’s earlier poetry does not show the mature centrism that Milton would perfect later. It is with Areopagitica that Milton turns to the other major Puritan ideal, that of Christian liberty which, like the liberty of the Spirit, had also certain eschatological implications. Christian liberty, as explained by Calvin in his Institutes, was understood as a conscience of faith, not bound by or dependent upon law, whether as originally defined by the Old Testament, or by the legalism that a theological doctrine of works might develop.23 It means that the free Christian voluntarily submits to the divine law as defined by revelation, the illumination of the Holy Spirit and the dictates of Charity. Moreover, it is a kind of liberty that forestalls indifference in matters of moral concern. To sum up, Christian liberty underscores individualism and the fellowship of the sect rather than ecclesiastical authoritarianism and the fellowship of a comprehensive social community. This shift leads the priority of the Kingdom of Christ in the sense of the conscience—the kingdom within, as opposed of the church. In a crucial passage in Areopagitica, his defense of “the Liberty of unlicens’d Printing,” Milton writes, “when God shakes a kingdom with strong and healthfull commotions to a generall reforming, ’tis not untrue that many sectaries and false teachers are then busiest in seducing; but yet more true it is, that God then raises to his own work men of rare abilities, and more than common industry not only to look back and revise what hath bin taught heretofore, but to gain furder and goe on, some new enlighten’d steps in the discovery of truth” (2: 566). Just a few pages back he asserted that “God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of necessity to be his own chooser” (2: 513–14). The nature of providence is now individualistic through an appeal to Christian liberty. Freedom of the press is necessary for civil reasons but it is also required to make Christians choose between right and wrong, something that cannot be imposed outwardly by authority. The only protection against the censorship of truth is to allow truth and falsehood to “grapple . . . in a free and open encounter” (2: 561). Indeed, Milton did lean heavily on the rhetorical appeal of the holy community in Areopagitica, but this was mainly to strengthen his argument for Christian liberty as a normative bridge that helps achieve a successful national reformation. He stops short of espousing a sectarian standpoint but looks instead towards the Parliament as a guarantor of spiritual liberty for all professing English Protestants. A similar kind of contractual liberty works in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. The immediate occasion of The Tenure was the backsliding of the Presbyterians who, during the civil war, had supported the parliamentary


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cause against the king. Yet in 1648/49 they urged mercy for Charles on the eve of his execution. Milton reserves a profound distrust for the tradition of typology as a process of exegesis. His humanism seldom overlaps with the metaphysics of Christian Neoplatonism. It was instead the spirit, faith and charity that propels Milton’s radical Protestant beliefs.24 But his faith also works on the level of the Covenant: God’s contractual relationship with man with regard to both law and grace could appear in political terms. The Tenure is ultimately a metaphorical reading of grace, something which the likes of Hobbes utterly distrusted. Victoria Kahn, in her essay “The Metaphorical Contract in Milton’s ‘Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’” has shown that Hobbes realized quickly that the metaphorical reading of the covenant will “license antinomianism and thus rebellion against an earthly sovereign’s literal or actual kingdom. Thus, it was important for Hobbes to declare that the covenant between God and Moses was a literal one . . .”(Kahn 88). Milton was doing exactly what Hobbes had feared. In The Tenure, the covenant of grace is conditional since no sacrament is efficacious in itself. Rather the power of the sacraments is itself conditional upon the faith of the believer. The individual agents and not the sacraments get priority. Milton argues for a jus populi (the right of the people) and appeals to reason and natural law in order to support regicide. What is important to note with respect to Milton’s republicanism is that he construes biblical covenant and political contract in similar terms. Both are designed as open-ended and revocable agreements that depend for their realization on the performance of the contracting parties. Indeed, Kahn has noticed that the word tenure itself has legal and contractual connotations to it, often meaning a title holding or a condition or period of service. But this is not a pure contract in the libertarian sense since the covenant element brings back the ethical norm into the picture. Here lies the tract’s compatibility with republican aspirations. Milton is not simply justifying tyrannicide; he is arguing for the abrogation of monarchy itself. He is drawing the republican conclusion through his exclusive rejection of any compatibility between monarchy and Divinity: “Therefore he who is our only King, the Root of David, and whose Kingdom is eternal righteousness, with all those that Warr under him, whose happiness and final hopes are laid up in that only just & rightful kingdom (which we pray uncessantly may com soon, and in so praying wish hasty ruin and destruction to all Tyrants) eev’n he our immortal King, and all that love him, must of necessity have in abomination these blind and lame Defenders of Jerusalem” (3: 256). But it is not only a pure metaphorical contract that justifies the republican moments of The Tenure. The covenant that has been struck between the


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“people” and God is complemented by the rule of the aristocracy, which would be guided by virtuous and godly men. The ideal free government is a complex balance between liberty and virtue. In his latter tracts Milton, in order to resist a theocracy, steadfastly rejects the Fifth Monarchist community claims by pointing out that the magistrate’s power was basically that of the outward matters whereas Christ’s kingdom was a matter of inward spirituality. Even if he does operate within a religious schema, as a proper republican, Milton is striving for a dialectical balance. When threatened by a purely secular argument (like the Levellers’) or a contractual argument (like the Hobbesian), Milton professes the virtue of the community. When threatened by the yoke of the theocratic community that challenges individual liberty, Milton argues for the value of deliberation and debate within the various members of the community. In The Readie and Easie Way, in order to support his argument for a perpetual senate, Milton refers to the Jewish Sanhedrin and to the Areopagus of Athens, the Ancients of Sparta and the Senates of Rome. He appeals to various secular orders in order to justify a Christian republic. At this later stage, his Arminianism makes Milton acknowledge free will. By then he is sufficiently dejected by all kinds of false saints and charlatans, and he feels that the only way out from both Fifth Monarchy millenarianism and other saintly pretensions is to seek refuge in Arminianism. And at this stage, it is through Arminianism that he tries to seek a balance between saintliness and demonstrable merit. For instance, Considerations Touching The Likeliest Means To Remove Hirelings Out Of The Church demonstrates both the inherent limitations to Milton’s advocacy of theocracy and his seeking of Christian liberty within the scope of that limitation. Thus, he writes in the context of how to choose from the different competing models of the commonwealth that it should be “interpreted” as the “duties of a Christian to offer what his conscience perswades him” (7: 275) and that “may be of moment to the freedom and better constituting of the church” (7: 275). Milton reacts sharply against the private endowments to the church that come from taxes and tithes: “how could these endowments thrive better with the church, being unjustly taken by those emperors, without suffrage of the people, out of the tributes and publick lands of each citie . . . without the peoples consent, unjustly, however to publick ends of much concernment to the good or evil of a commonwealth” (7: 306–307). But Christian liberty is still the guiding beacon: “let this be considered first, that it concerns every mans conscience to what religion he contributes; and that the civil magistrate is intrusted with civil rights only, not with conscience, which can have no deputy or representer of it self, but


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one of the same minde” (7: 308–309). Liberty is the crucial issue on which the Likeliest Means stands, but there is also a continuing anxiety over the safety of that very liberty. In A Letter To A Friend, Milton writes pointedly “The terms to be stood on are Liberty of Conscience to all professing Scripture the rule of their faith and worship, And the Abjuracion of a single person” (7: 330). And yet he adds in a resigned tone that he has been submitting his “self to the wisdome & care of those who had the government, & not finding that either God or the publick required more of me then my prayers for them that govern” (7: 324). As far as The Readie and Easie Way is concerned, notwithstanding its rigid political framework, Milton claims again and again that Liberty is the National Privilege, not harking back as in a jeremiad, but still believing that God’s law offers the same freedom and iterates the same preference as the rules of the highest commonwealth. We come back to the notion of Thralldom uttered in the civil context. Rituals like Lent enthrall us because they “permitt us a little Shroving-time first, wherein to speak freely, and take our lawes of Libertie” (7: 408–409). People must lay aside their prejudice and impatience and hark unto the voice of liberty. The idea of the perpetual senate is not advanced in order to enslave people via a top-down oligarchy, since the greatest who rule, “are (ideally) perpetual servants and drudges to the public at their own cost and charges” (7: 425). It is crucial to understand that even in his most politically pessimistic moment Milton is not ready to turn “all vertue into prescription, servitude, and necessitie, to the great impairing and frustrating of Christian libertie” (7: 445). And at the concluding pages of the tract Milton clearly looks afresh, discussing at length the original dialectic that the whole of freedom of man consists in both spiritual (meaning freedom of conscience) and civil liberty. I would contend that the issue with the Republican vision in the latter tracts is not a conceptual conservatism or political nostalgia on Milton’s part. Milton is steadfast in his belief in forging a synthesis between outward and inward liberty. The problem is that he wants to hasten that vision, given the anarchic political realities of England during the 1650s. The difficulty arises because he presses for a readie and easie way and the speedie and immediat settlement towards a firm and free commonwealth. In the process, he elides a central Republican tenet: that of discordia concors. He is blinded by fortuna and hence is loathe conceding even a partial rotation of the Council since that would have “too much affinitie with the wheel of fortune” (7: 435). Milton’s heart and mind are in the right place as far as liberty is concerned, but he fails to appreciate (possibly it was impossible to appreciate owing to


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the pressing political situation) that there cannot be any readie and easie way for a republic to burgeon and flourish. The strongest liberal element in Milton is natural rights thinking often coupled with images of the ancient rights of Britons. However, when Republicans like Milton speak of natural rights they do not merely refer to oligarchic or bourgeois right. Rather they meant to argue for certain legal and political rights that are essential for achieving freedom as non-domination. These rights are not honored as fundamental norms in a deontological fashion. It is here that the Republican vision of Milton comes closest to the more radical vision of the Levellers. The concept of virtu for a Republican like Milton has been, for the most part, rather pragmatic and non-teleological. Whenever this belief flagged, that is to say in times when he thought that non-domination is caused by outside bodies or independent authorities and is not institutionally constituted in legislative bodies like the Parliament, it led to objectionable arrangements like the one propounded in The Readie and Easie Way. However, I have tried to argue that, even in such a situation, Milton did not lose faith in a Christian Liberty and the language of reason. At least one end of intellectual intervention is to inform public debates and policy decisions. This is at least a modest beginning for radical thought and action to burgeon. At the same time, in radical liberals like Milton, there is often an awareness that the worlds of intellectual inquiry and political action do not always match. Each has to be tested on the grounds of the other. Political problems are resolved not when the intellectual comes up with theoretical answers, but through the messy give-and-take of political conflict and deliberation, subversion and civility. Republican political philosophy in early modern England in general and the life and works of John Milton in particular, provides this lesson to the generations of would-be radicals.


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Chapter Two

Natural Law as a Radical Weapon: John Warr, the Levellers and John Locke

When the four Leveller leaders—John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Richard Overton and Thomas Prince—were imprisoned in March 1649 by the consent and approval of Lord Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, it became quite manifest that truly radical innovations in political and administrative matters would not be tolerated any more. The revolution would not be allowed to extend beyond a certain point. Soon Leveller mutinies in the Army were suppressed in London and at Burford in April and May. As a reward for these activities, the City of London entertained Cromwell, Fairfax, the chief Army officers, and the Council of State to a sumptuous banquet costing 3,500 pounds and gave 1,000 pounds worth of plate and money to the five Army generals. Oxford University bestowed doctorates of civil law on Cromwell and Fairfax. Of course the spirit of leveling continued to inspire radical activities and many pamphlets appeared during and after this time denouncing the new regime. But this is perhaps an opportune moment to pause and notice that Oxford University, headquarters of the Royalists during the civil war, bestowed degrees of civil law on the top figures of the “Revolution.” It is not difficult to see the symbolic importance of such a conferral. It was absolutely logical that the civility of the Roman jurists—the likes of Gaius and Justinian—should guide parliamentarians as well as royalists. Enactment, that watchword so dear to any top down order, was also the basis of law to Cromwell and Fairfax, as it was to the royalists. The question of law is the fundamental organizing principle for governing a polity. In times of civil unrest, that question becomes much more immediate and pressing. During the 1640s, especially after the death of Charles I, the nation was looking for an alternative paradigm, a fundamental 57


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law in the true sense of the term, which could go beyond the idiom of royal prerogatives. The people of England, and especially a few legal reformers, realized that the normative basis of law could not possibly be strictly positive.1 Positive law refers to a set of codified or enacted laws, largely determined by political prudence and by the will of the lawmaker or the civil government. That would mean abandoning the fate of the nation to other forms of legal absolutisms, the main contenders being the Anglican ecclesiastical order, the common law tradition and the emerging individualism based on property rights. Each of these options was restrictive and anti-humane. The main rival to these was “natural law.” The nature of the debate about “natural law” took a dramatic leap during the seventeenth- century, and three English thinkers—Richard Hooker, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes—were instrumental in advancing that polemic. But it was the legal reformers of the seventeenth-century, steadfastly shunning any easy political pigeonholing, who most radically challenged the ecclesiastical, common and individualist positions on legality. In this chapter I will focus on the seventeenth-century legal reformers and the Levellers, who took an extremely novel position and who, brought back the metaphor of “natural law” as an effective tool in order to question the existing legal basis of the English polity itself. R.H. Tawney in the Agrarian Problem in The Sixteenth Century notes that the term Leveller was used to describe the rebels in Leicestershire and Warwickshire in 1607 who would engage in leveling “not social inequalities but quicksett hedge and park paling.” (338). The term was resented by the Levellers themselves who felt that it was formed and cast upon them by people who had a vested interest in trivializing their cause. The O.E.D dates the word to 1644. But leveling found its true connotation in the last five years of the 1640s. David Wootton in an important essay titled “Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution” points out that “The Leveller leaders of the mid seventeenth-century came from the lower fringes of the social and educational elite, with enough in common with the poorer classes and small businessmen to act as their spokesman, but at the same time with the educational confidence which would make them potential leaders” (413). John Lilburne described himself and his fellow Levellers as “the hobnails, clouted shoes, the private soldiers, the leather and woolen aprons, and the laborious and industrious people in England” (413). The novelty of the Levellers’ strategy, from the moment they appeared as a political movement in 1646 until their final destruction as a unified force by Cromwell in 1649, was that they advanced a program based on


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“natural law” that had little to offer to any political establishment then in the fray. To some they seemed to be anarchists (and were thus described pejoratively by numerous conservatives then in England), in the sense that they had no long-term strategy for consolidating power and preparing the ground for election. The Levellers did not see themselves as a political party and they constituted, as Wootton has argued, a kind of “petitioner party” rather than a prospective party of government. Also they derived much of their support from the tolerant religious sects and the army—both anathema to the Presbyterian majority in the Commons. To describe the Levellers as revolutionaries and democrats raises certain complex questions. The Levellers realized quickly that what they were witnessing during the mid- seventeenth-century was essentially a republican oligarchic revolution carried out by a House of Commons seeking to restore the ancient constitution and its attendant rights. But they did not challenge the framework of common law immediately. In fact, it is here that the Levellers were crucially much more complex than the parliamentarians. They were, during the initial phases, firmly bound to the ties of the ancient constitution and especially to religion, which played the crucial role in undermining men’s faith in the common law. At the same time, within that framework, the Levellers brought in a culture of innovation (and not mere restoration) that stunned the parliamentarians, and that is indeed revolutionary even in the modern sense of the term. The parliamentarians saw this innovative spirit of the Levellers as anarchic, an abortive attempt to return to a “lawless equality” that supposedly existed before sin entered Eden. This was an argument that would try to thwart any attempt to differentiate “natural law” from property rights. The position of the Grandees during the Putney debates largely depended on this kind of an argument. NATURE AND NATURAL LAW At this stage it is important to underline that the word “nature” has been primarily used in this chapter in order to express the general relation of fitness in the dynamic entities ordered into the world or cosmos. The word also signifies the form or definite structure of a finite entity which determines its basic tendencies and the kind of activity that would fittingly complete these tendencies. But the word nature also denotes not just form but also the actualization of the tendencies determined by this form. Such inclinations or tendencies strive toward a fulfillment that is in accord with human dignity. I use nature in the sense Ernst Bloch has used it in Natural Law and Human Dignity in order to recognize the human right to “walk upright.”2 According to


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Bloch, it is this natural pride to walk upright with human dignity which is at the core of all radical praxis. Human dignity, thus finding its basis in “natural law,” is finally an existential condition, in the sense that the whole of human nature gets manifested first at the individual level and then is used for the betterment of humanity via meaningful practice. In Bloch, nature is not opposed to history. The transformations in relations between man and society are instead linked with transformations in nature and man’s relation to nature. Nature is a dynamic category in Bloch, something that gives rise to hope in the revolutionaries and crucially helps develop the ontology of “not yet”: “Freedom . . . is only founded contra fatum, thus in a perspective of a still open world, one not yet determined all the way to the end. This is where the continual revolutionary accent on freedom comes from . . . only a partial determinability of the world, thus an as yet unclosed possibility, makes freedom possible in this world” (162–63). The effort to establish this concept of human possibility and dignity, I think, lies at the core of the English sectarian thought of the mid-seventeenth century. The Levellers and certain legal reformers give it a most concrete shape through their attempt to revive “natural law.” Applying such basic ontological conceptions to the specific case of man as a part of nature leads to an ethics that has ontic or empirical consequences. The first fallout is that a politics and ethics built upon “natural law” are in no sense arbitrary constructions based on human wish or decree. It is founded on the specific nature of humans and tendencies determined by this nature. As such, though it takes individuals as the basic unit, it applies equally to all humans everywhere. The other implication is that since human nature is incomplete and tendential, fulfilling these tendencies require certain methods or basis. This basis, in the best cases, is an exercise of rational reflection and choice, free from automatic determination and physical constraint. Finally, the human good is also the existential fulfillment of the human individual. Since each individual shares certain traits with other members of the species, this fulfillment will mean (a) acts elicited by his particular circumstances and traits and (b) acts required for the completion of common tendencies he shares with other members of the species. The idea of “natural law” goes back at least to Aristotle.3 Aristotelian ethics assumes that human beings have a nature and that this nature can be known. However it does not regard the essence or nature of a being as some metaphysical constituent. Rather, a being’s nature constitutes its mode of existence and allows for the possibility of its growth and development, most notably towards realizing a good human life, often described as eudaimonia, a state of well-being which is achieved by self-actualization and characterized by maturation. In Book V, chapter 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, for instance,


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Aristotle claims that certain aspects, notably the political ones, of any society have a “naturally best” way of functioning while other aspects may be only grounded in the traditions and customs of that particular society: “What is natural is what has the same force everywhere and does not depend on people’s thinking . . . Similarly, things that are not just by nature, but are just for a particular group of people, are not the same everywhere, since political systems are not the same either, though only one is naturally the best everywhere”(Aristotle 93–94). Here we see the root of the “natural law” tradition, according to which certain claims about right and wrong can be based upon a general account of human nature, arrived at by rational reflection and also by empirical survey of numerous kinds of social order. Human nature in Aristotle also needs to be actualized, since actualizing one’s natural inclinations fulfils its natural ends—in a word, teleology. However, Aristotle does not describe explicitly how to arrive at such a concept of “natural law.” He does not prescribe, for instance, whether nature works at the individual or at the social level or whether divinity has any role to play in actualizing such natural inclinations. In Thomas Aquinas reason and faith, human nature and the supernatural are fundamentally in harmony with each other. The key motif of his speculations is ‘Gratia non tollit naturum sed parficit’: grace does not abolish nature but perfects it. Human values and truths are necessary for building up Christian civilization. With this is the recognition of the existence and dignity of a purely natural sphere of rational and ethical values. “Natural law” is the pattern of all positive legislation—the duty of the State, the right of the Christian individual. The State finds its raison d’etre in the naturalis ratio because man is animale politicum et sociale, a direct echo of Aristotle’s definition of man as a civil animal. To Aquinas, the nature of law is overdetermined so that there was no need for a social contract. So, he proposed the concept of triplex ordo—whereby reason, divine law and political authority come together. Consider this from Summa Theologica: There is a threefold order to be found in man. The first is that which derives from the rule of reason: in so far as all our actions and experiences should be commensurate with the guidance of reason. The second arises from the comparison with the rule of divine law, which should be our guide in all things. And if man were actually a solitary animal, this double order would suffice: but because man is naturally a social and political animal, as is proved in I. Politics, chap. 2, it is necessary that there should be a third order, regulating the conduct of man to his fellows with whom he has to live (Aquinas 109).


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The Levellers and independent reformers of law like John Warr were operating at a crucial juncture of history where the Aristotelian and Thomist “natural law” tradition was being challenged both by the conservatives who wanted a status quo in legal affairs and also by the new contractualists like Thomas Hobbes, who were employing a one-dimensional logic of the individual to challenge the hierarchy present in the “natural law” tradition. On one hand were the apologists for “common law,” who sought to create a legal order based on precedents. On the other hand were the proponents of “positive” or “enacted law.” At the conceptual level, however, both common law and enacted law join hands in order to facilitate a structure of legal framework that would be bound, inflexible and finally illiberal. Looked from this angle, a legal order based on precedents, as well as one based on a strictly codified structure, are in fundamental conflict with “natural law.” This is because common law as well as enacted law primarily are defined by a set of rules and encourage uniformity in political affairs, whereas “natural law” widens the scope of legality by making individual choice and inter-subjectivity primary concerns. This emphasis often helps “natural law” to respond to other notions of legality than a mere set of strict and binding dictums and precedents. More fundamentally, enacted law begins with an assumption that humans are primarily corrupt and the function of law is to keep that tendency in check. “Natural law,” on the other hand, believes a human to be basically inclined to act reasonably. It envisages law as one important facilitator in leading individuals and social groups towards gradual betterment, flourishing and ultimately, to perfection. The common law theorists and the contractualists were both helping to facilitate a top down legal order. It is my contention that the legal reformers were reacting to this dual challenge and in the process, trying to restore the “natural law” tradition with some significant amendments. But the Aristotelian and the Thomist tradition of “natural law” was itself in dire need of being refashioned, in order to (a) make it less hierarchical and paternalistic and (b) make it compatible with the language of individual political rights. The primary amendment to the Aristotelian and Thomist “natural law”—and this is also the other major contention of this chapter—is that the early modern reformers were beginning to argue firmly and clearly in favor of individual freedom, something that the classical “natural law” tradition precludes or at best considers secondary. This is an enormously important step for two reasons. First, such a measure modifies and makes the Aristotelian tradition more humane and democratic. And second, it challenges the absolute self-regarding theories of law at their root: by demonstrating that individualism does not make any sense without natural


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and political freedom. For reformers like John Warr, participatory liberty of the individual, in which freedom means active participation in self-government, is the basis of all legal norms. Such a proposition has radical implications for early-modern times (as also for the modern and the postmodern) because conservative forces have appropriated the word “liberty” to such an extent that it is often equated with the acquisition of power. Radical forces have pessimistically come to accept and believe that “liberty” and equality are incompatible bedfellows. The Levellers and reformers like Warr initiated a vital process of establishing individual liberty at the center stage of the political process during the mid-century, a process that will see its full fruition in John Locke towards the end of the century. The Warr–Locke approach inaugurates the modern “natural law” tradition. JOHN WARR IN CONTEXT John Warr and the Levellers were the first to provide a viable blueprint for such an alternative legal system based on “natural law.” Historians know Warr (1642–86), as Christopher Hill puts it, “ as a legal writer who advocated fundamental reforms of the law” (The World Turned Upside Down 218). Three of his pamphlets, on which his fame rests, are extant: Administration Civil and Spiritual, The Privileges of the People and The Corruption and Deficiency of the Laws of England. In these tracts, Warr denounces the concept of fundamental law as an attempt by antiquity to disguise oppression. These pamphlets are remarkable testimonials to a legal theory based on inner light and natural inclinations of human beings. Warr saw legal history as a dialectical interaction between two forces: outward forms and inward reason or Equity. Legal reform to Warr was a prelude to spiritual reform and the attainment of an ultimate condition of enlightenment in which equity would prevail. Among other things, Warr urged “ . . . codification of the laws, decentralization of courts, simplification of procedure and greater authority for juries.” (Greaves and Zaller 292). He was certain that in the last analysis law could not be reformed by more law. It was rather a sense of justice that validated all laws, and such a justice was the birthright of all. It is known that Warr was a purchaser of expropriated crown lands in Southwestern England and Wales, but as Hill points out “ . . . he too like (John) Wildman, had a legal living to earn” (The World Turned Upside Down 222). Warr’s legal philosophy, on one hand, is engaged in challenging the prevailing trends of constitutional and common law, which makes him one of the important legal reformers of the time. On the other hand though, his mythological use of the Bible and prophetic utterances brings him closer to


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Winstanley than to the Levellers. Warr was also a firm believer in the process of gradual reform rather than in the overthrowing of existing institutions, a concern that he shared with Milton. At the core, Warr was a perfect Aristotelian in the English context as far as legality is concerned, though he never mentions Aristotle by name. He instead mentions Cicero, who is perhaps the greatest Roman who shares the Aristotelian way of explaining “natural law.” He refers to Cicero’s De Officiis in the context of equal distribution of the assets of the state, the most distinct and lasting contribution of Aristotle. He again refers to Cicero (90) in order to strengthen his minimalist stance as far as positive, written law is concerned. People can redress their wrongs after consulting with “some just and good man” (90) and only if they fail in that pursuit should they turn to law. The basic assumption of Warr is an optimistic evaluation of human beings. The goodness of men is accepted and celebrated, and human beings, not laws, become the fundamental normative yardstick. Consequently, the governing of the polity by the common people becomes the most natural thing in Warr as it was in Aristotle. It is a classic humanist move: the basic thrust comes from the triune of clear light, equity and reason, abstracted from all other human constituted forms, but leading to the spirit of humanism (32, 41). Warr explicitly asks the question whether it is the “principles or persons (that) are fittest to determine?” He answers, in a dialectical maneuver, that persons, whom he equates with the shadow, are important and helpful until the substance itself arises, which is the power of pure reason. Here are the seeds of a profoundly liberal realization, that for a steady operation of an egalitarian democracy, the importance placed on individual decision makers within the polity has to be balanced by certain “natural” principles, which will act as countervailing forces, in case the politics of such a democracy is run and justified at the whims of the majority. John Warr is convinced that the price of achieving full political freedom is much blood and hazard. But he never endorses violence. He makes a paradigmatic shift in the “natural law” tradition in the early modern world, but mostly that shift had to be made gradually, through legal and administrative reforms that the new parliament during the early 1650s England was routinely overlooking. He is not naïve and realizes that the unjust powersthat-be will not “eclipse themselves or their own pomp unless by the violent interposition of the people’s spirit” (90). But it is the robust spirit that interests him, not actual physical violence. Instead, the crucial category for Warr is perfection. This is the classic Aristotelian move. He is extremely careful about “overthrowing” form and its attendant vices. It is a gradual transition


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through which outward form is perfected and “shadow expires into substance” (36). It is certainly not the natural withering away of unjust forms. Human efforts must be taken in order to reform the legal and political apparatuses, but not by taking refuge in violent antinomian means. He is envisioning a world based on equity and reason but they would rise only after meeting headlong and gradually with the existing formal system. He is extremely cautious of any premature totalization in the theoretical level, lest in practical terms such ideas become merely a short-lived, top down, vanguard experiment: “the world comes out of its chaos, in a gradual perfection and ascent; so that forms are purified by degrees” (43). Indeed, looked from this angle, Warr’s gradualism brings him very close to the classical republicans. This cautious reformist attitude parallels in legal terms what Milton proposes politically. From a methodological viewpoint too, going back to “natural law” could be a most fruitful way to bridge the unfortunate hiatus that has developed between a liberal and a socialist interpretation of the role of the Levellers in the history of political thought in the past 350 years.4 In the twentieth century, serious Leveller scholars have often taken two divergent routes. On one hand is the liberal tradition inaugurated by C.P. Gooch’s History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, published in 1898. It devoted a chapter to the political opinions of the Army. T.C. Pease’s The Leveller Movement, a study published in 1916, followed this up. Both Gooch and Pease found liberal rather than socialist virtues in Leveller teaching. Essentially, their argument rested on the fact that the Levellers were among the first to advocate a democratic English government, limited and bounded by law. The argument for legality is made in terms of constitutional rights. On the other hand stands the Marxist historian David Petegorsky, who in his study Left-Wing Democracy, found the preoccupation of the Levellers with “constitutional mechanisms” to be their limitation. To Petegorsky, as to many Marxists after him, the Levellers represented the petty bourgeoisie, a class doomed to division and impotence since it was sandwiched between the big bourgeoisie on one hand and the landless peasants on the other. It must be said that both the camps recognized that the Levellers combined their individualism most radically with a sense of communal responsibility. But no one looked into the origins of their radicalism: a steadfast belief in “natural law.” Had they looked there, I contend, the language of liberty and equality would not have appeared to be so far removed from each other as they do. At this juncture, a caveat is in order. The major studies on the Levellers, by critics both sympathetic and unsympathetic to their philosophy and


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political practice, have focused primarily on questions of property and the franchise, with issues of legality finding only an occasional mention. I am contending that at the core of their political philosophy lies the idea of “natural law,” from which evolve their radical ideas about property and electoral rights. It is true that John Lilburne owes his celebrity status to constitutional issues raised by his trials in 1637, 1649 and 1653, to his spirited performances during the trials, and to the popular clamor that they aroused. Indeed, interest in Lilburne’s afflictions was strengthened by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century concerns about the right to trial by jury, of which he was a stalwart champion. But this interest—rather this stereotype—of Lilburne as tireless champion of the English tradition and constitution, does little to illuminate the reformer’s appeal to the “natural law” tradition during the mid seventeenth-century. In fact, such a projection clouds legality in constitutional terms and helps blunt his radical edge. It helps to sustain and further foment the myth of the Leveller leader as violent and self-indulgent demagogue rather than seriously engaging with his legal and political thought. This chapter emphasizes the role of “natural law” as a fundamental way of organizing early modern society. To that end, what follows has been divided into three sections. The first part deals with the issue of religion and “natural law.” The second compares the traditions of “natural law” and “common law.” Finally, the last third engages the “natural law” tradition with the emerging language of “natural rights” during the seventeenth- century. NATURAL LAW AND RELIGION The language of “natural law” has been a part of the Catholic tradition since Catholicism accepted the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas as the basis of teaching in the seminaries. In his fourfold classification of law, Aquinas placed “natural law”—lex naturalis—as one of the fundamental principles to the whole idea of legality in human affairs, the other three being eternal law, human law and divine law. To Aquinas, the essence in nature was the dispositional properties of matter. Disposition in matter means natural proclivities, which in turn leads towards a dynamic concept of nature in the sense that nature is not frozen in time and space and that there is scope for a certain Aristotelian idea of development and innovation in matters natural. “Natural law” in Thomistic tradition means tendencies of properties to develop in a structured way. Certainly there is a telos as well as a hierarchy in this scheme but the important aspect to understand is that by appealing to “natural law” and by giving it an equal position with the eternal, divine and


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human laws, Aquinas is providing an ethical grounding to a Christianity that would not be solely based on grace and faith. His repeated appeals to practical reason for the first time allow Christianity to conduct a dialogue with the Aristotelian concept of “natural law.” In Aquinas’s discussion of “natural law” one can see three closely connected structural tendencies. First, to preserve the being that possess a concept of “natural law.” Second, a fervent attempt to realize the potentialities of reason. And third, to preserve the species in general based on inter-subjectivity. Question 94 of I-II of Summa Theologica deals with “natural law.” Aquinas begins by asserting that habit and “natural law” are not one and the same thing. He is categorical that habit, when considered as a matter of faith, cannot be a part of “natural law.” He goes on to declare, “whatever is a means of preserving human life and of warding off its obstacles belongs to “natural law.” Secondly, there is in man an inclination to things that pertain to him specially, according to that nature which he has in common with other animals; and in virtue of this inclination, those things are said to belong to the natural law” (Bigongiari 46). The most important principle in Aquinas that guides “natural law,” however, is reason. He makes a crucial distinction between two kinds of reason—speculative and practical. In Aquinas’ words: “Speculative reason is concerned primarily with what is necessary, that is, with those things which cannot be other than they are . . . the practical reason, on the other hand, is concerned with contingent matters, such as human actions” (49). Matters related to “natural law” lie in the speculative area, where reason advances gradually from the imperfect to perfect. Of course, at this level, the move towards perfection seems to be preconceived within an already bound and static speculative area. However, there are other important dimensions of Speculative Reason. For one, it is also a generic affair and is common to all humans, and in that sense, provides a universal dimension to legality and politics. On the other hand, practical reason deals with the peculiar and specific. It is in practical domain that the human laws are promulgated. Practical reason and the diversity of positive laws are necessary on the account of the great variety of human affairs. But “natural law” still guides all human laws: “every human law has just so much of the nature of law as it is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point it deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of law” (58). But there is a still higher level in Aquinas as far as “natural law” is concerned, and that is his insistence on the collaborative efforts of human beings. It is natural that social processes imply human communication and collaboration, not merely of one generation or one nation but of all humans at all time. Being indispensable to the state, humans will be furnished by nature.


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This collaborative aspect in Aquinas closely adumbrates the republican notion of conversazione civile, which suggests that a heightened communication between individuals within the civil society will lead to political and social solutions. To St. Thomas discursive rationality implies progress: “It is not possible for one man to arrive at a knowledge of all these things by his individual reason. It is therefore necessary for man to live in a multitude so that each may assist his fellows, and different men may be occupied in seeking, by their reason, to make different discoveries—one, for example, in medicine, one in this and another in that” (Aquinas viii). Importantly, “natural law” principles also played a significant role in the Catholic theory of property. The mediaeval idea was that property was a departure from the original state of community of possession, made necessary by sin. Aquinas, however, influenced by Aristotle, argued that property was an addition to “natural law” for the convenience of men. He adopted Aristotle’s formula of “private property, common use” to insist that property had both an individual and social aspect, so that the property holder must observe social responsibilities which come from its possession. We shall soon see how that chimes perfectly with the Leveller and Lockean ideas of natural rights. It is with the magisterial Protestant reformation and especially Calvinism that the radical insufficiency of man’s reason and weakness of his will as a result of sin would tend to produce a certain pessimism about the possibility of finding values in nature by the use of reason. Instead, the emphasis was now on scriptures as a sole arbiter of religious, moral and social truth. However, it is difficult to extend across the board this general tendency in the reformed religion. For one, there is specific Scriptural reference to “natural law.” For instance, St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans (2:14–15) speaks of the Gentiles as having “the work of the law written in their hearts.” More generally, reformed religion does not ultimately believe in the irrationality and utter corruption of human reason, since that would destroy its whole moral structure. However, the mainstream Protestant ambivalence towards “natural law” cannot be denied. The crucial difference between the Aristotelian-Thomist conception of “natural law” and the magisterial reformers’ view lies in the fact that unlike the former, the magisterial reformers believed that human nature exists only after the Fall and hence is inherently corrupt. Martin Luther, for instance, maintained that while “natural law,” as given by God is morally unalterable, human reason is a defective organ of its expression since human reason is impaired by corruption and sin. Luther does embrace within “natural law” some precepts of Christ as well as the Commandments, but it is more the


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“natural law” of mutual love—something working purely at an instinctive, personal level—rather than reasonable human reciprocation undertaken for public, political reasons, that interests him. Referring to Luther, John T. McNeill writes, “In writings of the twenties he employed a natural-law argument against rebellion, and in his stress upon obedience to authority he recognized the emperor as having a divine commission” (171). Melancthon and Zwingli too, stand close to Luther on “natural law.” Melancthon begins as a Thomist in Loci Communes (1521) as he makes the threefold scholastic division of law into natural, divine and human. However, unlike Aquinas he soon lays down that through man’s Fall, a certain dimness clouds our natural inclinations and weakens our power to discriminate between the honorable and the base. There is also a constant tendency to differentiate between moral philosophy (the domain where he thinks “natural law” belongs) and the gospel. As a consequence “natural law” is always a part of divine law. This never happens with Aquinas, who is ever careful to balance natural and divine law, so that one does not get any undue priority over the other. In Zwingli too, despite his love of the pagan masters of morality, we see a consistent attempt to embrace reason and “natural law” within the bounds of grace and divine faith. Consequently, Zwingli restricts the sphere of “natural law” and subjects it to divine will and the spirit of God. He asserts in his Sermo de Providentia (1530) that law is the constant will of God. Though Calvin’s view of “natural law” has been variously interpreted, one can see from the fourth book of Institutes, where he outlines his theory of law, that “natural law” for him is really an aspect of common grace (gratia generalis). Wherever Calvin discusses politics and public law, the emphasis is on conscience and love. This marks a sharp break from the Aristotelian and medieval emphasis on natural proclivities and collaborative reason. With the advent of the Levellers and the radical Protestant reformers we notice a renewed emphasis on the traditional scholastic expositions of reason. However, often commentators have refrained from associating the idea of “natural law” with the religious position of the Levellers. J.C. Davis, for example, in his essay The Levellers and Christianity, concludes that the Leveller doctrines of equity and what he calls practical Christianity come from a Puritan idea of grace and not from reason and “natural law.” Davis traces the moral imperatives behind the Levellers and other ‘antinomians’ to be divine rather than from “natural law,” which is really a false opposition. Having such an assumption, he can conclude: “Since all men were saved, divine law, God’s law made known to the elect, became the universal prescript. Thus “natural law” and “divine law” had to be seen as complementary, or rather as mutually inclusive, since both applied to all men” (Politics, Religion 231).


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Davis and others who attempt to bring back the legal reformers and Levellers within the ambit of mainstream Protestantism consciously try to deduce that the Levellers always had a limited faith in human rights and choice. Thus it is a language of grace in the Levellers that such critics highlight. But they contradict themselves when they say that the Levellers believed that all men were saved and still subscribe to orthodox Calvinism. That would be utterly blasphemous and radically incompatible to the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination, since that would mean undermining the idea of human fallibility and depravity in the first place. The sectarians in general and the Levellers in particular stand testimony to an alternate tendency in Puritanism which leads in terms of religion to deism and natural religion, where the rationality intuited in human beings and in human deliberation was no longer limited by a pessimistic sense of the innate corruption of human nature. In the process of positioning themselves against the official varieties of the Reformed religion, the Levellers were often inadvertently recovering the logic of the Thomistic position. But they were doing so without accepting its hierarchical and strict Catholic reception. Such arguments can be traced in Richard Overton, the son of a midlands clergyman and a refugee with the General Baptist congregation in the Netherlands in 1615–16. A matriculant at Queen’s Hall, Cambridge and a professional actor and occasional playwright in Southwark, Overton began his writing attacking Catholicism, the Anglican establishment, monopolists and king’s counselors in 1640–42. In January 1644, he published Man’s Mortalitie, arguing like Milton and Hobbes against the separation of soul and body. There has been a lively ongoing debate whether Overton’s naturalism was religious or secular.5 There is no doubt that the heretical idea of Christian mortalism—that according to divine revelation the soul does not exist as an independent, conscious substance after the death of the body—does challenge magisterial Protestantism from within. In the words of Norman T. Burns, “Christian mortalism was a threat to the orthodox position chiefly because it was developed and supported by Christians within the framework of Christian thought and feeling” (Burns 10). In that sense it would be unwise to call it secular, more so since in the immediate context the whole idea of mortalism is closely connected to Anabaptist thought. More historically, the idea of soul sleeping is attributed to the Christian heretic Origen, who actively disseminated it in Arabia in the middle of the third century. At the same time though, mortalism—both in its moderate soul-sleeping variety and the more extreme annihilationist version—does indeed adumbrate the deism and natural religion of Shaftesbury and Locke. Indeed it would be a false dichotomy to characterize Overton as either a materialist or a spiritualist. His materialism is certainly not a sign of


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unbelief. In Chapter III of Mans Mortalitie, Overton uses “Naturall Reasons” in order to prove the idea of soul-sleeping. He writes: “man is but a creature whose severall parts and members are endowed with proper natures and Faculties, each subservient to other, to make him a living Rationall Creature, who degrees or excellencies of naturall Faculties make him in his kind more excellent then the beasts” (Mans Mortalitie 22). Burns makes the point that while Overton might include man as a naturally reasonable creature, the latter does not think that the whole cosmos is so endowed. This, Burns feels, makes Overton’s ideas significantly inconsistent with “natural law” thinking. The point, however, is that in the Aristotelian “natural law” tradition it is the human beings whose natural inclinations are of prime concern. It is the idea of concerted human action in the polis that interests Aristotle in the final instance. From that angle Overton’s idea of humans as naturally rational sounds extremely consistent with the “natural law” tradition. Within a few pages in the same chapter though, Overton broadens his idea of natural endowment into other objects which he calls receptacles or subjects: “this Facultive Gift, or Natures endowment can be no more be said to be subsistent living Spirit, without its Receptacle, the Sun-beames without the Sun, which are the gift or property of the Sun, But the Being of this communication must be in the Subject, as levitie in the Fire, ponderositie in the Earth: And though the natures of things be immediate communications of Gods Power to Nature, yet disjunctively those communications are of no Entities” (Mans Mortalitie 25). In his more political writings, however, Overton is much less ambiguous about his enthusiasm for natural reason. In “An Appeale for the Degenerate Representative Body of the Commons Of England,” he has to say this: “neither Morality nor Divinitie amongst Men can be made to transgresse the limits of right reason, for whatsoever is unreasonable cannot be justly termed Moral or Divine” (Wolfe 158). He goes on to assert, “ . . . that it is firme law and radicall principle in nature engraven in the tables of the heart by the finger of God in creation for every living moving thing . . .” (Wolfe 160). Nor was Overton content with mere “spirituall warfare” against magistrates who extend oppressive force under the pretense of religion and conscience. In a brilliant amalgamation of the natural and the human, he commends that “ . . . human naturall warfare, humaine and naturall weapons may and are to be used, each according to its kinde; so that neither the one nor the other, in their distinctive propriety and administration is distructive or contradictory one to another, but both may properly meet and stand together in one individuall, without the least incroachment or prejudice to each others propriety” (Overton 182).


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The normative basis of all morality is reason and a radical principle in nature. In his An Arrow Against all Tyrants, Overton pictures every man as naturally a king within his own “naturall circuite and compasse” (Macpherson 141). Divinity does sanction such natural freedom, since God has implanted humans as creatures in the first place, though human inclinations towards natural right and freedom are enough reasons not to be enslaved or encroached upon by kings and by “neighbours craft”: “And from this fountain or root, al just powers take their original; not immediately from God (as Kings usually plead their prerogative) but mediately by the hand of nature, as from the represented to the representators” (Macpherson 140). The destructive power of tyranny is unnatural, irrational and sinful. To exercise such a destructive power was illegitimate since it would amount to appropriating the office of God who alone is the supreme power. Tyranny then must encounter resolute opposition from those who count themselves as God’s servants. The connection between what was unnatural and what was sinful is precise and neat. Such an assumption was precisely the offence of the leading political and military personnel of the Commonwealth. In one of the most celebrated of all Leveller publications, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens of 1646, Overton calls the members of the House of Commons to account for the ways in which they discharged their duties to the people. The appeal to the people relies directly on the power of divinity, from which the MPs derive their power and political legitimacy. In this context, John Sanderson in his investigation of the philosophical basis of the Civil War in But the People’s Creatures, traces an “ascending” theory of politics in the Leveller belief in Man’s God-given reason, which is the measure of rectitude in all things human. An appeal to the “natural law” of reason is certainly the fundamental basis of challenging magistracy and privilege. As Overton saw it, the first imperative of rationality was self-preservation and the creation of magistracy was a joint exercise in human self-preservation. In The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke, C. B. Macpherson argues that Overton and Hobbes came from the same political tradition since both defended an instinctive need for self-preservation and an instrumental reason as a part of the law of nature. The crucial point to understand however is that there is a vital difference between the Leveller and a Hobbesian idea of self-preservation. While in both Hobbes and Overton the powers of the magistrate do not originate immediately from God but are mediated via the represented to the representatives, in Overton the covenant is negotiable and renewable by the common people. In fact, unlike Hobbes there is no schema of an explicit covenant between the represented and the representative in Overton so that the liberty and political freedom of


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every man lies within himself and is not surrendered to any authority in order to safeguard one’s economic security. Overton’s individualism is rather Lockean in the sense that one’s individual rights cannot be transferred. It follows that, for Overton, any man was authorized to resist when magistrates themselves become a threat to self-preservation. One way to understand the Leveller ideas about natural religion is through contrast. Richard Hooker in many ways comes close to a comprehensive understanding of the concept of “natural law” in the seventeenthcentury. But he is also an instructive contrasting example for understanding what the Levellers and reformers like Warr thought connected religion and “natural law.” The contrast is sharpest in the matters concerning rights and religion, since Hooker stops short of endorsing the individual as the ultimate bearer of sovereignty. Book I, chapter 3 of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is an apology for the laws of nature which Hooker calls “the principle and mother elements of the world” (60). He acknowledges his intellectual debt to the scholastics, especially to Thomas Aquinas. For Hooker too, there is a hierarchy of laws ranging from Divinity to specific human societies. He retains the eternal, divine and human law of the Thomist system, but he calls the ‘law of reason” what Aquinas would call the “natural law.” Hooker also seems to adumbrate Locke in the first book of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The first commandment of “natural law” is most certainly the love of God but the second great commandment of “natural law” is the love of neighbor, and he argues about his desire “to be loved of my equals in nature as much as possibly may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to them-ward fully the like affection. From which relation of equality between ourselves and them that are as ourselves, what several rules and canons natural reason hath drawn for direction of life, no man is ignorant” (Hooker 80). Aristotle’s idea of distributive justice and the natural equality of Aquinas have often been used in the natural law tradition to argue for a general theory of community consent and collaboration. Hooker’s “them-ward duty” seems to be a vital link between the ancient and medieval natural law tradition and the modern Lockean doctrine of consent to government, especially since Locke, not unlike Hooker, cited the duties of mutual charity, forbearance and justice, when he made his case for a contractual legal system. But this connection with Locke is extremely tenuous and ultimately false. Hooker had a strong historical bent of mind, something that made him acutely suspicious of a certain kind of theological Puritan mindset (the Laws was primarily directed against Presbyterians). Experience and tradition were important categories for him. Two things can be concluded from such inclinations. One, that he was ready to believe in traditional ecclesiastical


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concept of reason whose basis would be broader than that of scripture. From this angle, Hooker vindicates human laws and institutions in perfect harmony with the “natural law” tradition. But the other side to such traditional outlook was authoritarian and detrimental to any kind of sensible, radical politics. His sense of continuity in history and tradition was so overpowering that Hooker began acutely to distrust the forms of individualism, which he saw as the dangerous fallout of taking the doctrines of Calvinism too seriously. And here he is at complete odds with the contractarians like Locke as well with the Levellers. The basis of political obligation in Hooker therefore is neither Church Covenant nor Social Contract, both of which were the bedrock of many democratic ideas during early modern times. The consent that Hooker describes instead, like Hobbes, is original consent at the time of the formation of the government rather than the periodic renewal of that consent— the latter so vital for the liberal contractarians and independents. In Hooker, the community of individuals cannot withdraw its consent to law and government once set up, and hence the members are bound to obedience rather than to reason, as we know in the Aristotelian “natural law” tradition. Consent is corporate rather than individual and the basis of “natural law” finally conservative in intent and effect: “the act of a public society of men done five hundred years since standeth as theirs, who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal: we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still” (Hooker 193). Laws of reason in Hooker ultimately do not mean mutual communication or political freedom but rather refers to communal common sense. It is an open and shut case in favor of timeless traditions. There is undeniably a tension between constitutionalism and power in the Laws. But though there might be germs of constitutional and popular sovereignty in Hooker, finally the timeless traditions lead to a theory of royal absolutism. Each member of the multitude had the power to set up any form of government it chooses but since the power originally vested in the society could be so divided, the society might be torn asunder. Hence it is only fair to have pactum subjectionis—a pact to remain subjected to the sovereign— not unlike the one that Hobbes will give a more clear expression soon. God not only bestowed power but also, sometimes by a special appointment, nominated those who were to exercise it. Besides, a concentration of power is necessary simply to expedite public affairs and check the inconveniency resulting from general confusion and delay if the multitude of equals deals in legal and governmental affairs. More importantly, Hooker was extremely critical of what he regarded as the separatists and schismatics. He was extremely wary of any social


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upheaval and felt that the logical outcome of the disciplinarian principles of reformation is religious separatism. This is because the separatists take the attacks on the established church so seriously that they eventually quit it. Addressing the magisterial reformers in an almost heresiographical vein, Hooker forecasts in Chapter 8 of the Preface to the Laws that there would be “the manifold strange and dangerous innovations which are more than likely to follow if your discipline should take place” (Hooker 35). Such separatism will eventually lead to absolute anarchy since each of the groups will have “ . . . secretly framed [their] own Churches according to the platform of the word of God” (Hooker 35). It is then unnatural to separate oneself from the English Church system which is ultimately based on willful consent of the laity. Thus Hooker challenges the “natural law” tradition from inside, via a protracted conciliatory exordium in the Laws. He uses the language of reason, nature, constitutionalism and tradition to actually challenge the primary principle of the Aristotelian-Thomist “natural law” legacy, namely, a continuous communication between the individual and the society/polis for the betterment, flourishing and finally perfection of both. It is an ingenious ploy because Hooker has primarily taken Divinity as his point of departure. It would seem that the traditional ecclesiastical law, which might eventually lead to a royalist legal framework, is but the most reasonable and natural thing to happen to the social man. Such a notion of the “ecclesiastical law” was not acceptable to the Levellers and to the radical legal reformers. This is primarily owing to the fact that the Levellers in the middle period of 1640s realized that the Presbyterian establishment (including the MPs at Westminster) was intending to give religion a fixed and disciplinary dimension, as strict as that sought by William Laud and his Arminian associates in the 1630s. As an answer to that threat, the Levellers came up with the “natural law” argument: the right of the unmolested individual to serve his God. In the words of the anonymous pamphleteer in the tract The Vanitie of the Present Churches: “ . . . some men will neither stir, nor take anything of any nature, Civill or Naturall, but as they are prompted thereunto, (as they imagine) by the Spirit” (Haller 259). And Walwyn states the same position in his characteristic conciliatory tone in the brief pamphlet simply titled A Manifestation: “And though we are not so strict upon the formall and the Ceremonial part of his Service . . . yet for the manifestation of Gods love in Christ, it is clearly assented unto by us . . . as being the most eminent and the most excellent in the world” (Wolfe 393). The reformist position was that to leave the civil magistrate so that he can compel or prohibit in matters of faith was equivalent to destruction of the


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Christian moral world itself. The offices of privilege and prerogative ought to be leashed since the individuals running them are often fallible and liable to corruption, especially since they begin to think that they possess the license of legal power. The religious profession cannot be used for extraneous reasons like worldly advancement. It should work in consonance with the “natural law” of individual right and inter-subjective reason. Interestingly, on the question whether the reformed religion was compatible with “natural law,” the Levellers often found sympathetic friends from the high cultural establishment: the Latitudinarian churchmen and the neo-Platonists and Aristotelians in Cambridge, all agreed that there indeed was a strong symbiotic relationship between the two. As a left Arminian who gave free reign to the democratic logic of Protestantism, Milton himself was also immensely sympathetic to the “natural law” argument. So also was Locke, Shaftsbury and Algernon Sidney—all of them sought in some way or the other to find a common ground between religion and reason based on a “natural law” argument. For the Whigs, natural religion was a code of conduct for utility. For the reformers it was an issue of an impetus for a radical social change. But both the groups agreed that Christianity was not merely a matter of religiosity. Thus the “natural law” debate broadened the very idea of theology and helped build up a genuine public sphere.6 In John Warr we see this very broadening of the concept of the divine, the very obverse of what we have seen in Hooker. Divinity is seamlessly tailored within the general scheme of “natural law” in Warr. This is especially evident in the pamphlet Administrations Civil and Spiritual. This is a superb structural achievement in itself. The overall scheme works within a dialectical tension of civility and spirituality. The word administration itself is chosen advisedly in order to widen the net beyond mere legal aspects of a society. Administration in Warr has philosophical and theological dimensions to it. The whole pamphlet is divided into two subsections—”The Dispute Betwixt Equity and Form” and “The Dispute Betwixt Form and Power” respectively, each having its own dialectical progression. In the section dealing with Equity and Form as far as administrative affairs go, Warr defines form as the outward idolizing. It is compared to the externalities of religious worship: sacraments, preaching, expositions and such other ritualistic forms of devotion. In worshipping forms, “ . . . man becomes a law unto himself “ (31). As opposed to such formality there is an administration based on the principles of “clear light, equity, reason and understanding of things themselves” (32). It is clear from his including “equity” in this radical vision of administration that Warr is looking not for mere codified law, which might be corrupt and preoccupied with mere civility, but with the


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idea of justice. And equitable justice can be reached through the theological if the theological is understood as working in tandem with nature and reason. In fact God is necessary to help humans break free of the superficial administrative chains. Thus Warr proclaims: “But God will break the iron yoke, and go forth with zeal and indignation against tyrant form . . . this is the ground of the controversy between reason and form, and God himself is on reason’s side” (35). God will help perfect reason. This is in the best traditions of Aristotelianism and Thomism, in which “natural law” leads humans towards perfection through the divine. But Warr goes farther than mere assertion of the divine in the “natural law” schema. He builds up the dialectics by pointing out that form is also another kind of principle. He is extremely critical about the managers of the ecclesiastical form, the “pope, synod, council” though he concedes that one would possibly require human agents in some form in order to get into religion (37). However, he wraps up the argument by explaining that such persons who conduct administrative functions must always be true to the first principle, which is “natural law”: “true subjection is rational, not brutish, and carried on in the light of reason and equity of the thing” (38). The second dialectical movement in the pamphlet is that between Form and Power. It is here that Warr elaborates on the spiritual side of the administration: “ . . . it is the design of God to purge the civil administration from its dregs and filth” (49). After much outward labor man will reach the period of rest, which is the pure divine moment. In fact, Warr is spurred by the idea of the Everlasting Gospel, the same millenarian vision that we shall see in Winstanley. In Warr there are three stages in the genealogy of humanity: that of the paradisical (the age of the Son, characterized by faith and filial obedience), the legal (the age of the Father, its chief features being fear and servitude), and finally the evangelical (the age still to come, that of the Holy Ghost, which would be the age of love and spiritual liberty). In this stage the veil of outward forms will be “ . . . rest asunder and way made to the holy of holies or the naked glory by the power and purity of the spirit” (50). It is this third age that Warr is looking for as his ideal spiritual world. But this spiritual world is in no way something outside of human nature and reason. The existence of the supreme being is grounded on the observation of divergent tendential structures, requiring one another for their origin and completion. Thus it is not the reactionary spiritual naturalism of Hooker that Warr advances. Quite the contrary, nature is not something static and existential as man converses with the divine. God is rather the facilitator, a spark through which man might reach his natural tendencies


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and at the same time be at peace with his ontological self. Warr could not have put it in a more lyrical fashion when he declared: “ This spark is the image of God in the mind, which is indeed the man” (79). THE COMMON LAW MIND (1) The Fundamentals: The felicitous phrase “the common law mind” has been made popular by J.G.A. Pocock and has been immensely influential and controversial in explaining the basis of the English law in particular and of various other legal practices. In the introductory chapter to The Ancient Constitution and The Feudal Law, Pocock says that, despite the likes of Justinian and Ulpian, there existed “in a number of European nations a kind of political thought which cannot satisfactorily be termed ‘constitutionalism’ since it involved a more intensive use of historical and antiquarian thinking than the use of that term normally implies” (The Ancient Constitution 17). This is what Pocock termed the municipal law of the country that observes custom, prescription and authority to be cohabiting with, if not preempting abstract political concepts involving law, rights and sovereignty. In France, taking Francois Hotman’s Anti-Tribonian (1567) and Francogallia (1572) as typical cases in point, Pocock traces what he calls a “prelude to modern historiography,” one that sought to restore “the original freedom of the Gauls . . . virtually destroyed by the Romans” (Pocock 20). Like many other humanists of the time, Hotman challenged the methods of the legal study associated with the name of Bartolus, methods that overlaid the original Justinian text with “an unmanageable wealth of glosses and commentaries” (The Ancient Constitution 9). Simultaneously, his works emphasize the fact that Gaul was a feudal society of non-Roman origin, with its own ancient constitution. Though Pocock concedes that Hotman was sufficiently neo-Bartolist in his attitude towards Roman law, yet he interprets Hotman to be a pioneer in advancing a customary definition of the French Law. Taking Hotman as a case study, Pocock concludes that by late medieval times there existed or emerged in a number of European nations a way of legal thought that went beyond Roman constitutionalism: “It may be provisionally defined as the attempt to settle fundamental political questions, notably those involving law, right and sovereignty, by appeal not directly to abstract political concepts, but to the existing ‘municipal’ laws of the country concerned and to the concepts of custom, prescription and authority that underlay them, as well as reverence which they enjoyed by


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reason of their antiquity—an attempt which necessarily involved the study, critical or otherwise, of their origin and history.” (The Ancient Constitution 17). This was “common law,” according to Pocock. Pocock transfers this continental idea to England and traces it especially in works of Edward Coke and John Davies during the seventeenthcentury. The belief in the ancient constitution in their works, according to Pocock, was beyond party polemics, universal and as far as England was concerned—unchallenged and unaffected by the Justinian civil law. But there is a pressing problem at this stage. On what judicial principle did the common law exist? Pocock says that the medieval mind “ . . . did not find it necessary to say very clearly from what authority other than God or nature—the law in question derived”(The Ancient Constitution 51). Pocock’s thesis of the ancient constitution immediately seems to be problematic. Actually, he takes a particular strand of English legal jurisprudence as authoritative and representative of the English mentalite simply because it fits better with his thesis of an unalloyed common law mind. It is to this end that he begins The Machiavellian Moment, taking John Fortescue’s Laudibus Legum Anglie (In Praise Of The Laws Of England ) as his point of departure. Fortescue is important to Pocock because the former found Aristotle’s idea of “natural law” and the principles of universal justice to be insufficient. What matters to Fortescue is rather the special character and circumstances of England. The common law then is geographically and spatially limited and justified. To this is added the corollary notion of tried or artificial reason. Artificial reason is nothing but laws and dictums whose basis was consistent and repeated usage. It is founded on a static notion of generic and communal experience and is often used in order to describe situations when use becomes another nature. This is the nature of experience, the reason of trial and error. The concepts of the ancient constitution and the common law mind are not only complicated by the Platonic question whether only the exceptional philosopher king should promulgate law but are far more problematized by the idea of the inclusion of Christianity. Within the medieval context Fortescue had to proffer a kind of Christian Aristotelianism while framing the incipient ideas of an English common law. Divine law had to be made an integral part of the common law. Also problematic are two related concepts. First, within the framework of common law, how should extraordinary and contingent cases be resolved, especially those that have no precedent? This was resolved to a certain extent by C.H. McIlwain through the distinction he drew between jurisdictio (the saying of the law) and gubernaculum (the holding of the tiller).7 Jurisdictio is the established common law whereas gubernaculums


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deals directly with unfamiliar legal complications where common law ways do not provide a solution. Gubernaculums provide ad hoc decisions. Many common law thinkers, including Pocock, felt that since common law is always evolving there cannot be any pure gubernaculum. Common law subsumes all contingency into experience by adapting any new legal idea to the existing law. There cannot be any new law, just a new amendment to the existing jurisdictio. The common law theorists then must reject gubernaculum as a dangerous intrusion into their general thesis. But they cannot avoid the direct connections of gubernaculum with divine law and medieval Christianity, since the contingent and unforeseen situations where providence was invoked was crucial for medieval Christianity. Thus in explaining the quasi-divine authority of the arcana imperii of such successful rulers as Phillip II of Spain or Elizabeth I of England, Pocock writes: “The sphere in which they operated was that of the inscrutable providence of God, and success in that sphere seemed providential; it argued that they were divinely commissioned to exercise power . . . it was a mysterious, in a sense an irrational, art of coping with the unique, the contingent, and the unforeseen, at the point where all hope must be abandoned of bringing things under legal control” (The Machiavellian Moment 28). Pocock feels though that such a notion of contingency is an aberration that confirms the more settled rule of common law. What he cannot ignore anymore is the constant infusion of divinity in the matters of law of the land. It is thus highly problematic to exclude the political domain from the medieval mind, which Pocock seems to be doing, as it is to believe that introduction of the idea of saeculum (human time organized around happenings in the social world in the patristic vocabulary) from Machiavelli onwards would help completely to reject other-worldly issues in matters political. In fact, the early modern mind gets farther entangled precisely in such questions. (2) Reforming Common Law Since the time of Henry the VIII’s reign, common law worked as a bulwark against all kinds of legal and political prerogatives. As the split between the parliament and the king appeared irrevocable by the early 1640s, the parliamentarian side realized the need to erect and nurture a concept of a fundamental law that would challenge the royal position on legal affairs. Fundamental law to the parliamentarians was the decrees of the ancient constitution and an advocacy of mixed government. One of the best pamphlets from the parliamentary point of view was the anonymous tract entitled Knowne Laws, published in January 1643. Known law was an expression like common sense that every party used in order to justify its own standpoint. The author in this particular pamphlet


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went on to clarify what he meant by known law: “It is knowne and agreed by all the learned in the laws of this Land, That the Lawes are the bounds of the Kings power and command: and of the Subjects Allegeance and Obedience in their Oathes and Protestation intended” (Prall 26). The chief point is that the positive law would at once act as a bulwark against the legal activism of the rulers and as a rigidly codified set of dictums to which the subjects would willingly owe their allegiance. The king was considered the chief executive officer and the highest judge but could not interfere with the law of the land: the fundamental ancient law, which was equated with the “natural law.” Some Royalist pamphleteers, of course, based their case on the scriptures according to which Royalty was the power ordained by God. In short they worked on variations of the divine right theory. Next to the Bible as a source of justifying royal supremacy were the references to Roman legal digests. The Chancery and the prerogative courts, abolished by the acts of the Long Parliament, were quasi-Civil in nature. Until accession to the Woolsack of Sir Thomas More, almost all chancellors had been clerics, with training in the Canon Law, which was Roman. All these stoked a popular feeling that England was receiving a foreign legal system. In such circumstances, the reformers of the legal profession during the early days of the Long Parliament fell back time and again upon common law along with their demands for curbs and checks on prerogative. Why did this happen? Where was the source of appeal for common law that even John Lilburne vouched by the name of Edward Coke? Sir Edward Coke is often described as the chief proponent of the ancient constitution. There is obviously much truth in that in the sense that he reserved a deep-seated suspicion for any change and alteration to the common law. And such a notion of common law worked for a while as a bulwark against parliamentary privilege and kingly prerogative. But Coke, in his system of ancient constitution, was also extremely ambivalent about the role of statutes, parliamentary sovereignty and the kingly edicts. As far as positive law or statutes, he often tended to believe it had a reciprocal superiority with common law at times. “Statute law,” he writes, “ corrects, abridges, and explains the common law” (Burgess 175). One suspects, as did the reformers, that Coke was thinking primarily of advancing a rule that required statutes to be read as supporting rather than undermining common law. Glen Burgess sums up Coke’s position as “ . . . whenever possible an innovatory statute should be seen as plugging gaps in the common law and not altering it” (Burgess 190). Not only that, Coke figured soon enough that the parliament had to be treated as a sovereign court if not a sovereign legislator. He writes in the Institutes: “Of the power and jurisdiction of the Parliament, for


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making of laws in proceeding by Bill, it is so transcendent and absolute, as it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds”(Burgess 175). Parliament was a body that might do “judicial reviews” by enacting laws, but that must be done in order to improve the fundamental common law of England, not in the name of “natural law” or natural equity. Finally, Coke’s common law assumptions were not inherently in conflict with or opposed to the idea that the crown possessed absolute discretionary power. Coke proposed a theory of royal prerogatives, couched as “natural law.” These were inseparable prerogatives so essential to the nature of monarchy, that they had absolute immunity from interference from any human or natural authority. It was a pure inversion of the Aristotelian “natural law” tradition. Such a theory of royal prerogatives had nothing to do with natural human inclinations and actualization of such inclinations based on reason. But the greatest source of authoritarianism in the very idea of the common law, as Coke understood it, lay within itself. English common law, unlike Roman law, did not make a distinction between the private and the public. It cannot be denied that Coke and the Common’s increasingly vigorous assertion of property rights came in sharp opposition to Charles’ attempts to exact levies by royal decree capable of freeing the crown from dependence on Parliamentary subsidies. Common law, for all its seeming public nature, was essentially a private affair in the sense that it was often used merely to enforce laws protecting private property. Common law provided absolute guarantee to the individual’s private property, inheritance, and birthright. One cannot but see that with issues like prerogative, privilege and positive law, the power of the common law lay in its capacity to exclude these external factors from interfering with property and not in any particular ways that common law allowed to these other legal forms. Common law was in principle the sole definer of “private right” and said very little about the political rights of the individual or about the public sphere. Common law of the kind that Coke advanced did not work in practical terms on any notion of a hazy ancient constitution, as Pocock seems to suggest. It worked with an infinite number of particular cases (the gubernacula); it was the ultimate guardian of a bundle of private property rights. It needed to specify these private rights through the convoluted logic of artificial or accumulated reason so that it might not be liable to discretionary interference from the king, the parliament or the people. The notion of common law was the ultimate safeguard for maintaining the legal and political status quo. Towards the end of the Civil War, the reformers like Selden and Warr realized these hidden agendas of common law and began to distance themselves from it conceptually. The Royalists too changed tack. They understood if they were to gain some sort of political legitimacy, it was wiser to be the


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champions of common law and mixed monarchy. In 1647 David Jenkins, one of Charles I’s judges in the High Court of Justice at Westminster argued that according to the fundamental law, the government of England was already a Royal government, and that the monarch was not an institution but a living person. He appealed to the “Common Usage” of the kingdom for legitimacy. Jenkins then went on to show the place of the two houses of the Parliament according to “Common Usage.” The duties of the Commons were to present grievances, grant financial aid, and assent to the making and repealing of laws. The duties of the Lords were to be the high court of appeal, to assent to laws, and to advise the king. Jenkins summed up his position appealing to the common law mind: “The lawe is not knowne but by Usage, and Usage proves the Law, and how Usage hath beene is notoriously knowne” (Jenkins 18). The royalists were now arguing from a very solid ground indeed, virtually attempting to beat the opposition at their own game: by appealing to the reasons of the ancient constitution. As the end of the war approached the Royalist plea was that the whole body of law—the common usage for centuries—decreed that the king and the parliament together govern the realm, with the king having an edge in lawgiving. Clearly, such Royalists benefited from the latent ambiguities in the common law framework as proffered by the likes of Coke. Cromwell and Fairfax seemed to have underscored a similar sentiment based on common law when they put a stop to farther innovations after the civil war. The reformers who were trying to radicalize common law soon found out that they were at the wrong end of the debate. They felt, not unlike many commonwealthmen, that the immediate threat was from an overmighty parliament. In the perception of both groups, parliament was becoming something like de facto executive. As Pocock perceptively observes: “as the century progressed assertions that the law was immemorial tended to be replaced by assertions that parliament, and especially a house of commons representing the property owners, was immemorial. One of the underlying themes in the history of seventeenth-century political thought is the trend from the claim that there is a fundamental law, with parliament as its guardian, to the claim that parliament is sovereign”(The Ancient Constitution 49). It was thus necessary to invoke a still more fundamental concept of law in order to stall the onslaught of the expanding powers of the prerogative and the privilege. Invoking the “natural law” of equity and liberty was the best possible option. (3) Farther Reformation: Leveling The Law The radical attack during the second half of 1640s took a different direction and the targets were at least four: the common law itself, the Chancery, the


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legal profession and the administration of justice under both monarchy and Commonwealth. The first attack, that against the common law tradition, took the Norman Conquest as its point of departure. There was an essential difference in perception between the great lawyers of the gentry—Coke, Selden and Whitelocke—and a reformer like John Warr, about the essentials of common law. The likes of Coke, as we saw, gloried in the legal traditions beginning with the Norman invasions and traced the rights of Englishmen by studying the development of the law from Magna Carta and earlier. The idea of conquest itself was repugnant to this camp since they had to accept then that the beginnings of the English government had been grounded on the fact of sovereignty and not Common Law. In fact, their own biographical trajectory as privileged lawyers had much to do with such a line of thinking. Stuart Prall writes in this context, “those privileged to receive a legal education were often propertied and the education they received was by its very nature one which would exalt the Norman contribution to the glorious thing that was the English common law” (37). The independent radicals, the Levellers and the Diggers, held precisely the opposite view. To them the Saxons were honest, simple and straightforward folk whose customs were based upon reasonable and equitable settlements of disputes. It was the Normans who produced the jarring note. John Warr wrote in “Corruption and Deficiency of the Lawes of England” that the Normans were responsible for establishing the courts of justice at Westminster which led to the disuse of the courts in the shires. Thus a man must seek justice no longer at home but travel to the metropolis at great expense to pay off his travel and fees to the officials of the crown and then plead his case in a foreign tongue, which again meant additional expense since he then has to employ a new class of professional pleaders. Not only that, the malaise spread into administrative matters as well. The Norman reliance on the sheriff followed the withdrawal of the earl from shire affairs in the years after the Conquest. Radicals like Warr perceived such an arrangement as a Norman sheriff replacing the Saxon self-government. What the Levellers owed to the common law tradition in the deeper sense is that they all supported the “Norman Conquest thesis,” which said in effect that the English legal system after William the Conqueror tarnished the true British laws. It was to that pristine legal and political world that the Levellers wanted to return and it was that which was equitable, divine, and natural to them. Lilburne, as has been noted time and again, was hugely fond of Coke and often quoted him on legal issues. Actually it was from Henry Parker and St. German that Lilburne derived the law of reason and


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conscience and from Coke’s Institutes the spirit of the common law, and added to both the idea of a pristine pre-Norman time. Although Richard Overton does not explicitly talk about common law, he does more than once assert that his project is “for the inheritance of us and our children after us” (Overton 183). Clearly he too was deeply interested to see a viable legal tradition within the local and geographical framework too without simplifying that to mere common law. What Coke found as the heart of common law—accumulated wisdom from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries, a great body of precedents upon which he built his case against the abuses of royal power, seemed to the radical reformers as a fundamental yoke. The heart and core for Coke was land law, or feudalism. The Royalty, on the other hand would rather accept the classic French definition of feudalism as explained by Pocock—that the sovereign or suzerain owned the land and the part of the sovereign’s estate which was not retained by him was parceled out to the tenants-in-chief and then was farther sub-infeudated. The royalty would argue for a restoration of the good old common law of Edward the Confessor (before the advent of William). They would farther argue that the Confessor’s laws were already restored in a purer form by Henry I and had been confirmed anew by Stephen and Henry II in coronation charters. The binding principle for such a definition of “common law” was sovereignty and conquest. This Royal justification of common law would be unacceptable to Coke, especially since he would not accept the fact that William I had actually “conquered” England. He was surely not surprised by the fact that certain characteristics of the English tradition paralleled some European customs, but he was never concerned with the means by which the Normans arrived in England. The parliamentary forces would also not split with the aristocracy on the anti-Norman issue. In fact, in England, unlike France, the landed aristocracy and the parliament were never (except in the early Stuart years) in competition with the Crown. Ellen Meiksins Wood aptly sums up the situation in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: “As the unitary state was consolidated, the supremacy of the common law over other legal systems became essential to Parliament’s own claims to the rightful share in sovereignty, as an instrument for ‘declaring’ common law” (47–48). Rather than seek to overthrow the existing power structure of the English government, the Parliamentarians merely sought to break into the hallowed circle of those who wielded the National power. For the Levellers the principles on which common law stood—feudalism and sovereignty—would be unacceptable and marked the fall of the true


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English liberty. The Levellers realized that common law was actually becoming intrinsic to the process of state-centralization and would prove instrumental in establishing a unitary sovereignty in England if left unchecked. With the ascension of Cromwell and the establishment of the Commonwealth, the split between the Levellers and the common lawyers reached a culmination. By the time the split became pronounced, the idea of a “fundamental law” in the Leveller lexicon shifted towards a more Aristotelian concept of “natural law.” This idea of “natural law” challenged prerogative and privilege in all forms. In legal terms it meant that natural law was by now a potent legal weapon among the reformers against both civil and common law. The legal reformers had a more specific grievance too. They not only criticized the origin of feudalism, but also the subsequent feudal tradition. In this pursuit they were utterly loyal to the personal liberty of the common man. One primary problem with the existing laws was their “formal” nature. We see this theme appearing time and again in the three pamphlets of John Warr. Though Warr was probably not directly linked to the Leveller movement, his major concerns echo similar reforming ideas of the Levellers. He contended that the formal structure of law, more than anything else, makes it unnatural. Form is outward manifestation of law—which might be the positive civil laws, codified and unbending, as well as the stratified usages of custom and tradition. In the case of actual written law, form is but the “ . . . uncertainty, nicety, ambiguity and delay that the poor people are ensnared in” (101). Law itself then becomes a sin, a crime that “ . . . entangles the small flies and dismisseth the great” (102). In other words, Warr is asking for a radical simplification of codified, enacted law purged of the complicated web of “references, orders and appeals” (102). On the other hand lies the formality of the English usages and customs. Warr’s response to them is more nuanced. He distinguishes between just and unjust customs. The unjust customs are the most rigid ones, what he calls the “fundamental laws” (96). He proffers instead a custom of freedom. In other words, customs should be evolving and malleable. Warr quickly adds that the various historical modifications in the English customary laws were not the result of genuine reform but rather of abrogation based on the will of the conqueror. It is neither the natural rights of the people nor the due judicial process that brought in these changes within the customs, but the sovereign’s will. This, according to Warr is not only a far cry from any natural and popular diachronic evolution of laws but also dangerous since it plays with the just and communal nature of customs from outside, thus disturbing the peaceful balance of harmonious customary laws. In such cases


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the monarch and his cohorts use custom as a tool for power, a power so ‘sweet’ that it is “not easily wrested or extorted from them” (35). The formal legal and political strictures might come from an outside authority, but the yoke imposed is often from our inward darkness: “this darkness is within, and consists in a nescience of the first principle, and an idolizing of form” (34). “True freedom is in mind,” writes Warr, “and its proselytes are but few” (79). It is this essential spark that is required to challenge form in all its manifestations. Warr’s attack on formal “common law” was very much in keeping with the radical Protestant attacks on spiritual formality. The Protestants were constantly emphasizing the New Law spirit as opposed to the Old Law. “Natural law” to Warr was this very New Law that would successfully challenge the old common law and constitutionalism. However, Warr shows an acute sense of practicality even in matters formal. He is not at all an anti-systematic thinker or an anarchist. He realizes that some amount of formality in law giving is unavoidable: “But yet some reverence is to be given to the form, either for order’s sake or for necessity” (41). The normative basis is of course reason, “but order may command reason to desist sometimes” (42). This is because Warr realized that often a formal political and legal order has a strong foundation of its own, however ill founded those foundations might be. Reason and equity must first therefore gather and consolidate their strength before attacking formal order. Otherwise, the challenge to formal orders might be premature and backfire instead. In other words, one must wait for the opportune moment and desist from premature forms of violence and reformist actions. NATURAL RIGHTS AND NATURAL LAW One of the central questions that have engaged Leveller scholarship for decades is whether the Levellers, and especially the Agitators at Putney, were liberals of the rising bourgeoisie or radical democrats of the poorer and middling sort. (Of course not every agitator was a Leveller and such chief protagonists like Maximilian Petty and John Wildman were not agitators.) The polemic essentially centers around two concepts: political rights (ius) and property rights (dominium). At Putney the Levellers were seeking enfranchisement of all freeborn English men over the age of twenty-one who were not servants, and regardless of property-holdings. This question of choosing one’s political representative becomes central to any debate on political liberty and human agency especially since early modern times. Surely, the Agitator-Grandee dialogues are crucial testaments to that changing contour in the political discourse in the West. For the Agitators the central issue was


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that of political rights. On the other hand, the Grandees stuck to the point that there cannot be any compromise on the issue of property rights. Their fear was that allowing political rights to the populace would eventually hinder the accumulative rights of the propertied class—those that have “permanent and local interest,” in the words of Ireton. So what is the normative basis of a rights-based social theory? And how can individual rights be accommodated within society? Part of the problem lies in the fact that classical liberalism tends to systematically confuse rights (which impose duties of non-interference on others) and liberties (permits acts that can be interfered with by others). The terms are also often expressed as active and passive rights: to have a passive right is to have a right to be given or allowed something by someone else, while to have active right is to have the right to do something oneself. Now, classical liberal theory believes in active rights, so that each individual is ultimate sovereign in his capacity to make moral choices. That would be true liberty. Liberalism, in so far as it designates the individual as the final arbiter in political and social matters, is thus making a paradigmatic shift from the Aristotelian household economy. However, all kinds of problems arise when it is realized that we do not work in social isolation and individual wills must form some sort of contract with other individual wills in order to maintain its sphere of active rights. The actual issue is now transferred to the question of what constitutes the social contract. Liberalism has taken two routes. One way is to think in the manner of Grotius and Hobbes that active rights constitute absolute self-interest and economic and political security. One may, if need be, abrogate one’s political rights while entering a contract in order to achieve security and peace. The other school, with John Locke, looks for maintaining political liberty along with economic and individual security. Those who think in Lockean terms believe that political liberty of the individual is essential for a lasting social peace even as one enters into a contract. The Levellers, I would contend, were thinking like Locke before Locke. It would be unwise to group the Levellers, Hobbes and Locke into a single category of proto-bourgeois possessive individualists, as do C.B Macpherson and Richard Tuck.8 This is because the Leveller concept of liberty was ultimately not merely based on economic and political security; it was rather based on a theory of natural rights of the individual in the political sense. On the other hand, it would be erroneous to brand them as left totalitarians, since they would not, under any circumstance, abrogate their individual rights to any everlasting representative body, be it the parliament, any political party or the state itself. Rather, a radical concept of natural rights based ultimately on natural laws allows the Levellers to challenge both absolute


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self-regarding liberalism, embodied in the Hobbesians, and absolute otherregarding and pantheistic relativism, embodied in the Ranters. The Leveller standpoint about individual rights has been discussed in connection to the Putney debates. But that story takes a radical color in the light of “natural law” arguments. Richard Gleissner sums up the salient features in the argumentative scheme of the Agitators in Putney as “(1) that all men share an essential structure that determines certain fundamental human inclinations or tendencies; (2) that the good for all men is the realization or fulfillment of these inclinations; (3) that norms or moral laws are derived from man’s nature and his efforts to achieve authentic fulfillment” (77). The basis of the “natural law” argument among the Agitators is that all freeborn men essentially posses the human inclination to be a zoon politikon, a political animal. It is not just the men of “permanent fixed interest,” as the Grandees would have it, who possess these inclinations. The Agitators make a classic Aristotelian move. Even before Putney, the Levellers were thinking in these terms. Overton, for instance wrote in An Arrow Against All Tyrants that to every adult male “is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded, or usurped by any; for every one as he is himself, so he hath a self propriety, else could he not himself, and on this no second may presume to deprive any of, without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature” (Aylmer 69). One can see that the Aristotelian metaphors of the household and polis in the “natural law” tradition are being exchanged in favor of the primacy of the individual. It is individual liberty that is first and foremost natural. However, that liberty was reciprocal and had to be shared. Lilburne, writing from the tower of London in 1646, where he had been sent for denouncing parliament, proclaimed that nature had engraved on the soul of man “that this golden and everlasting principle, to do to another, as he would have another to do to him” (Aylmer 71). It is this notion of reciprocity that leads to the authentic realization of human nature in the sense that man is a social being without compromising his independent decision making capacities. The sense in which Overton and Lilburne refer to property and liberty is signified by something more than mere safety or a mere comfortable existence from arbitrary and/or repressive laws. It is political liberty that kindles their rhetoric, something that will lead to an existential fulfillment of the human nature. And this existential fulfillment is one of the cornerstones of “natural law” philosophy. At Putney, the law of nature becomes a pivotal issue. The fundamental question was whether the moral conduct of the citizen or the subject derives solely from positive or divine law, or whether it derives from the very nature of man. Cromwell was from the very beginning trying to make a case for the


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Grandees when on October 28, 1647, at Putney he argued that the Agreement drafted by the Levellers seems to have forgotten why the army was fighting against the king: for faith. Rainsborough and Wildman immediately made divinity an issue of conscience and objectivity, something beyond the concerns of mere irrational faith. In the initial stages of the debate Henry Ireton tries to preempt the idea of “birthright” as a fundamental issue, by which he meant the ‘birthright’ of the propertied Englishman. He places “natural law” against “civil law,” the latter being the existing English constitutional law: “If you will resort only to the Law of Nature, by the Law of Nature you have no more right to this land, or anything else, than I have”(Woodhouse 26). Not only that, he tries to make a clever distinction between the abstract validity of “natural law” and its necessity in the Civil war context: “If you . . . set up, as a thing paramount, whatever a man may claim by the law of nature, though, it be not a thing necessary to him for the sustenance of nature” (60). Ireton then goes on to make the case for enacted law: “I think we ought to keep to that constitution which we have now . . . because it is a civil constitution—it is the most fundamental constitution that we have, and which is, above all, that constitution by which I have any property”(60). He was essentially rallying for freehold tenure and for corporations based on such tenures. This he called “permanent interest” and the birthright of the individual: “those people that have freeholds and those that are freemen of corporations, were looked upon by the former constitution to comprehend the permanent interest of the kingdom” (57–58). As opposed to such men, he pitted the man who paid rack rents (the copyholder), a man prejudged as having itinerant interests: “If a man be an inhabitant upon a rack rent for a year, for two years, or twenty years, you cannot think that man has any fixed or permanent interest” (62–63). In other words, Ireton wanted to perpetuate the freeholder/copyholder dichotomy instead of abolishing it. Moreover, he would grant franchise to the freeholders on the basis of this very dichotomy. The Levellers were trying precisely to stem this rot and bridge this dichotomy by appealing to “natural law.” The Levellers were thinking about a class of the population which would include copyholders and tenant farmers and those dealers, tradesmen, and independent/journeying craftsmen who were neither part of any trading guild nor had any freehold land. Thus Thomas Rainborough was arguing for inalienable people’s rights by bringing together divinity and nature: “I do think . . . that every man born in England cannot, ought not, neither by the Law of God nor the law of nature, to be exempted from the choice of those who are to make laws for him to live under” (59). Cromwell


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quickly realized what was at stake for the Levellers and made a calculated appeal to the copyholder’s rights. Referring to “The Heads of the Proposals” he said: “ If the thing there insisted upon be too limited, why perhaps there are a considerable part of copyholders by inheritance that ought to have a voice” (73). In other words, he was arguing for leaseholders and other free forms of tenancy and not for the itinerant and unfree copyhold tenant—one certain to fall under Rainborough’s “the poorest he.” But Ireton was not ready to “admit any man that has breath and being” within the bounds of law (63). Law of the land, according to him “does lie in the people—but by ‘the people’ is meant those that are possessed of the permanent interest in the land” (63). In other words, the law of the land then lies with the landowning gentry. He was neither willing to draft a new constitution nor innovate within the existing framework. Richard Gleissner has rightly traced a parallel between Hobbes and Ireton “ . . . in the matter of permanency of government by consent, and the absolute need to perform contracts” (Gleissner 83). Though Ireton did not invoke “natural law” like Hobbes, he made it clear like Hobbes that in order to guarantee justice and stability, political participants must abjectly submit to a positive legal framework and to the irrevocable covenant established between the participants and the government. In fact, as both sides stood their ground at Putney, Ireton gradually but surely takes a procedural, constitutionalist turn, so that by the end he comes to declare both against nature and divinity that “The Law of God does not give me property, nor the law of nature, but property is of human constitution. I have a property and this I shall enjoy. Constitution founds property” (69). On the other hand, the basic legal and constitutional tenets of the Levellers can be derived from the program of the First Agreement of the People (November 3, 1647). The agreement is the first proposal in English history for a written constitution based on inalienable natural right: a true representative assembly, manhood suffrage, and principles of natural justice were its three cornerstones. At Putney Rainborough proclaims that the existing “ . . . law of the land . . . is the most tyrannical law under heaven” and asserts again and again that they fought the royal forces for this law. Petty goes a step farther and argues that contrary to what the Grandees feared, providing every Englishman with a voice to choose his own representative will lead to a preserving of property rights. Wildman makes it amply clear that the Army was reneging on the principles it first stood for “ . . . that they stood upon such principles of right and freedom, and the Laws of Nature and Nations, whereby men were to preserve themselves though the persons to whom authority belonged should fail in it” (24). He farther asserts that it is the natural inclination of the people to


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elect and govern, rather than procedural laws that is more fundamental: “It (the issue) might rather be thus: whether any person can justly be bound by law, who does not give his consent that such person shall make laws for him” (66)? Ireton, as we have seen, went to the heart of the matter when he argued at Putney against the prescriptive rule of a law of nature since it would threaten order and stability and in particular property rights. Government to Ireton meant independence from the people as well as perpetual freehold tenure. Thomas Hobbes had published Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642) by then, and it is interesting to see the parallels between Ireton and Hobbes in the matter of permanency of government by consent and the absolute need to adopt a contract. However, unlike Hobbes, Ireton did not invoke “natural law” in defense of the status quo or as an adjunct to civil law in controlling society. He was more direct in adopting and prescribing a more controlled legal set-up. As we saw, the Agitators continuously countered Ireton by pointing out that it is rigid civil law that might threaten peace and stability in the community, because it might lead to unjust destruction without considering wider legal ramifications. War is such a consequence when the government perpetrates injustice since it limits men in their pursuit of their natural end. To the radicals, enfranchisement of all freemen was the best way to prevent such an abuse of power. Though the Levellers never openly laid claim to the suffrage by “natural law,” it was in perfect accordance with man’s natural tendency toward an existential completion. In the ultimate consideration, political liberty was a natural instinct and the individual was more important than property. Every adult male had the right to consent to positive law or withhold his consent. It was not socialism, not moderate liberalism—it was humanism at the most basic level, pure and simple. The Levellers come closest to realize what Bloch has called the content of freedom or the unalienated humanum, “ . . . an inclination towards human identity that has yet to arrive, namely, that identity which always threatens, always glimmers, like the harmony of men with the image they have of the humanum, a harmony in which they are postulated as one” (167). Bloch was referring to a freedom that always threatens and glimmers even after a society becomes classless. Political liberty to Bloch was not merely massification but rather a movement leading to fraternity and camaraderie. The Levellers envisaged a very similar future where individual liberty will lead blossom into an ensemble, a polyphony of social relations. It is Hobbes, however, who has most ingeniously toyed with the idea of “natural law,” so that at the end, by a brilliant cunning, he could overturn it to mean exactly the opposite: absolute legal positivism. It is Hobbes, and


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Hobbes alone, who must qualify as the chief ideological antagonist of the Levellers and the legal reformers of the seventeenth-century. Thomas Hobbes marks the transition from the classical and medieval conception of “natural law” to a modern approach in two ways. First, he fundamentally seeks to change the rules of the game by changing the concept of natural itself, something that was taken for granted in the “natural law” tradition. And second, Hobbes was the first modern who attempted to build a deductive legal system derived from secondary prescriptions (the derived natural laws) from an original ethical postulate (the fundamental laws of nature).9 The most basic tenet of a traditional, Aristotelian “natural law” outlook is that there is no generic state of nature before the state is instituted. In other words, there is no radical split between a pre-political state of nature and a political civil society. Man, according to Aristotle is zöon politikon, a political animal. Indeed, in the Aristotelian context, in order to be a citizen, to enjoy the freedom of the polis, is to be free of economic necessity, which, in a sense, means being free of the household or oikos. The household is the site of domestic and agricultural labor, performed by women and slaves, and providing the material ground of the head-of-household’s status as zöon politikon, his enjoyment of the freedom of the polis. Also, there is no denying that Aristotle’s justly famous definition of “man” as zöon politikon applies only to propertied males, and absolutely not to the women and slaves whose lives are inescapably “private,” deprived of public and political being in the privacy of the oikos. But in spite of these inequities, Aristotle firmly puts man into the household, the original “natural” association which then leads to the associations in society, state and finally in the international arena. This Hobbes does not, in whose philosophy there is scant opportunity to theorize community—or even account for the formation of the social contract. By contrast, in Aristotle, the relation between the original society—the family— and the perfect one—the polis—is that of continuity, development or progress. The natural condition is not one of isolation. The natural organizations of the family or the state are not merely aggregations of individuals. There is at best a vibrant communication and deliberation between individuals about legal and political matters in these organizations and at worst relationships of hierarchy between superiors and inferiors. The most significant consequence of such a conceptual framework is that the principle of legitimation of a political society is not consent, but rather a natural necessity (or natura rerum). This idea comes very close to the classical Republicanism. The other fundamental and psychological assumption of the Aristotelian viewpoint is an ethical one: that human beings are primarily good


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and reasonable. This does not mean that there is no room for human positive law or secondary “natural law.” Indeed, the primary job of the legislators is to see that good has to be done and evil avoided—bonum faciendum, male vitandum. Hobbes struck at these fundamental premises of traditional “natural law.” To begin with, the state of nature, which is a non-political and even anti-political situation, is his starting point for the analysis of the legal and political foundation of the state. Civil society arises in antithesis to the state of nature, in order to rectify and eliminate the shortcomings of the latter. Moreover, the constitutive elements of the state of nature are primarily and fundamentally individuals, who do not live in a society but are loosely connected with each other (although there might exist natural societies like families, that accept the preeminence of the individuals). The passage from the state of nature to civil society does not occur by any natural necessity, but rather takes place through conventions and consent. They are deliberate and apparently voluntary acts, performed by individuals interested in abandoning the state of nature for reasons of safety and security. Consequently, all political and civil societies are conceived as “artificial” beings, the product of culture, so to say, as opposed to nature. It would then seem to be absolutely counterintuitive to consider Hobbes to be the first modern “natural law” thinker. Yet, there is no doubt that he is because, in spite of his drastic revisions of the “natural law” tradition, Hobbes is primarily seeking his legitimation from human nature in order to erect an airtight system of legal positivism. Furthermore, whenever he had a chance, even after erecting his system of civil legality, he did not altogether dispense with “natural law,” but set it side by side with positive law. In fact Hobbes’ definition of “natural law” is initially quite close to traditional definitions since he bases it on right reason. The point of divergence is the notion of reason, which in Hobbes, is rational calculation. It is only an instrumental and not a substantive value. Reason is a methodological tool for Hobbes, a means to arrive at a society based on strict and binding political order. Thus he writes in Chapter II of De Cive: “By Right Reason in the naturall state of men, I understand not, as many doe, an infallible faculty, but the act of reasoning, that is, the peculiar and true ratiocination of every man concerning those actions of his which may either redound to the damage, or benefit of his neighbours” (52). Thus, while naturae ratio (natural reason) or recto ratio (right reason) for traditional conceptions means what is good or evil in itself, for Hobbes it indicates what is good or bad in relation to a given end: “for they are but Conclusions, or Theorems concerning what conduceth


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to the conservation and defence of themselves” (Leviathan 216–17). The fundamental problem in understanding the law of nature is now shifted to locating the realm of the end, which is security and peace, and not human flourishing and perfection, ideas absolutely central to the Aristotle scheme of things. It is with this end of permanent peace as his end that Hobbes posits the famous transfer of the individual right: “The right of all men to all things ought not to be retain’d; but that some certain rights out to be transferd or relinquisht” (De Cive 55). Thus, civil society is born and through it is born the first positive law. It is “natural law,” Hobbes will assert, that seeks the abdication of inalienable individual rights so that positive laws may govern human beings. In a more radical way, it can be said that the law of nature in Hobbes is the dictate of reason, which suggests to human beings that they obey only positive laws if they want to attain lasting peace. And once the covenant between the individual and the sovereign is made, it cannot be broken without the consent of the sovereign, which essentially is now his command. Hobbes has thus cheated the natural law tradition not because he postulates debatable definitions of nature and reason, but because he relies on the law of nature as a mere device, thus emptying it of its content and depriving it of prestige. Hobbes’ most acute tactic has been to use his adversaries’ categories in order to demonstrate a thesis contrary to theirs. For Hobbes the laws of nature are indeed generic, empty formulas to fulfill the manipulative whims of the sovereign figure or body. Hobbes writes, in an intense campaign against natural law without apparently even realizing it in Chapter VI of De Cive: “Theft, Murther, Adultery, and all injuries, are forbid by the Lawes of nature; but what is to be called theft, what Murther, what Adultery, what injury in a Citizen, this is not to be determined by the naturall, but by the Civil Law” (101). The relationship between natural law and civil law becomes completely non-reversible. To leave any scope of reversing this relation will mean leaving a vent for reforming or even divesting formulated civil codes of its contents, something manifestly liberal and potentially revolutionary. Such a prospect was not acceptable to the fundamentally illiberal Hobbes. However, one must be cautious about branding Hobbes as a positivist tout court. A legal positivist holds that there is the so-called empty legal space where positive law has not yet made its inroad, that is, the space where there is a more or less broad freedom of action. Hobbes, on the contrary, holds that natural laws are in force wherever civil laws are not yet in control. This conclusion has far-reaching implications. This will essentially mean that the laws of nature will provide juridical solutions to cases which positive law has


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not expressly regulated. However, the problem is that, since we have already entered civil society, it is the sovereign state and its apparatus that would tell us what is natural. The individual right in the traditional “natural law” sense is still violated. The Hobbesian system is particularly challenging once again because the whole normative basis of his system stands on a definition of nature that is rational in the individualistic sense. It is perhaps here that we should draw a line between Hobbes and Locke. The publication of the Two Treatises of Government in 1689 represents the single most effective statement of the radical position to appear in print in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. There is an urgent need to confront the interpretation of the Two Treatises as a piece of “conventional constitutionalism” or merely as an exclusion tract.10 Since Filmer figures so prominently in Locke’s argument, one might begin by pointing out that both the defenses of monarchy in terms of divine right or as an extension of patriarchal authority predate the publication of Filmer’s Patriarcha, and both arguments relied upon an appeal to nature, if not “natural law.” What is interesting, though not very original in Filmer, is that he joined these two defenses into one unified argument for the continuation of absolute monarchy. In establishing patriarchal and divine authority through Adam, God provides Adam with the authority necessary for the execution of “natural law.” Whig thinkers like Locke, Tyrell and Sidney quickly understood the power of the divine argument in Filmer. The Whigs were compelled to counter Filmer’s natural argument with one of their own. Both opposing theories rested on the interpretation of the Law of Nature. The Whigs developed their position around three major tenets of “natural law” theory. First, that the Law of Nature was given by God to preserve mankind and common good. Second, “natural law” requires honoring covenants and contracts. And finally, the community and individuals have a right to preserve themselves against the unauthorized use of force. To the conservative question whether the government can be safe without a power to exclude a person principled to destroy it, the Whigs answered in the negative on the basis that the people were the original source of political power. Locke phrased the general point in the Second Treatise: “In transgressing the Law of Nature, the Offender declares himself to live by another Rule, than that of reason and common Equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of Men, for their mutual security” (272). Especially during the Exclusion Crisis such a transgression would come from the “papists.” For Locke and Tyrell, Filmer’s ideas provided a basis by confronting which the clergy could be defeated in their own game. It had to


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be done by claiming that “natural law” and divine law essentially had no conflict, especially if legality works itself through the reasons of the community without compromising individual rights. Property is the most important issue in Locke even in legal terms. One might venture to say that the same socioeconomic groups who had provided the audience for the Levellers in the mid seventeenth-century also dominated the radical position reemerging in the 1680s in its composition. One obvious example of this connection is, of course, John Wildman, one of the chief actors at Putney, who was reaffirming in the 1680s what he had said forty years before. Historians have identified Locke so much with Shaftesbury and other such Whig leaders that to assert these leveling tendencies seems farfetched. However, it does not seem so ridiculous a proposition when one notices the Tory response to Tyrell and Locke. John Inett, a Tory supporter, for instance, in his tract A Sermon in Warwick warned that the country was threatened by those who “would revive Lilburne’s name in a new race of Levellers” in order to “parcel out [the gentry’s] estates and level their persons with the common crowd” (Ashcraft 249). We clearly hear echoes of Ireton at Putney. The Whigs of course denied such intentions. Property rights would be secure, not “resolved” into a “commonality.” This was precisely what Petty was arguing for at Putney. The Whigs needed some means to reconcile the language of equity and natural rights with a justification of individual property rights in order to defend themselves against the accusation of a design to level men’s estates. The defensive language could not be at the expense of a natural rights argument in practical terms too, since the price for such an action would be to alienate Whig supporters among artisans and tradesmen. Such appeals to equity and natural rights often found a very strong resonance with the latter. The Whigs had another theoretical problem in matters regarding property rights. They were arguing for a government based upon consent, but in what sense could property ownership be said to be based upon consent? Who would be the consenting parties in the first place? One way out was to turn the Hobbesian concept of pre-political nature upside down. Tyrell and Locke did precisely that. They argued that the primal stage was not a wild and anarchic state of nature but was rather a common stock granted to mankind. When the individual established a contract with civil society, he claimed to remove his personal possessions. This is essentially a stagist argument about human society but it enabled the Whigs to posit a natural rights claim on behalf of the individual without doing away with the communal aspect altogether. The argument rested on a concept of limited property rights, which would come close enough to the Leveller and natural rights position.


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Two things must not be lost sight of in connection with Locke’s position vis a vis property rights. Locke’s position on the relationship of labor to property cannot be divorced from its theological underpinnings. This is a crucial dimension of his radicalism. In his Essays on the Law of Nature written in 1663–64, Locke described how the right that the Creator had over his creation could not be done away with: It would be wrong to doubt . . . that some divine being presides over the world—for it is by his order that the heaven revolves in unbroken rotation, the earth stands fast and the stars shine, and it is he who has set bounds even to the wild sea and prescribed to every kind of plants the manner and periods of germination of growth; it is in obedience to his will that all living beings have their own laws of birth and life (Political Essays 81).

Creation is being used by Locke as the primary metaphor in order to reject Filmer’s definition of political authority. God is the great proprietor of this earth. Man can use things that are committed to him by the allowance of God’s providence. Creationism thus sets forth the reasons for our obedience to the Law of Nature and also describes the individual’s relationship to God as part of a theory of property. In putting the problem in this way, Locke is fundamentally challenging Filmer’s argument, for Filmer claimed precisely that God had delivered a definite and positive instruction to man (Adam) that conferred on him the absolute political authority necessary to treat other human beings as his property. Moreover, Filmer was willing to generalize the position of Adam to that of all fathers, who as creators of their children could rightfully exercise authority and destructive power over the latter. Locke’s scheme would essentially make Filmer (and Hobbes too) guilty of blasphemy: neither monarchs nor fathers have a right to destroy God’s workmanship, since such a right belongs in the first place with the maker of all property. This is the negative contribution to Locke’s theory of property laced with the theological argument against Filmer. There is also a positive aspect to his religious argument. Locke pointed out in the First Treatise that God did not give Adam any private dominion over the inferior creatures and that as a consequence, property was given to mankind in common. The labor of individuals that guarantees them a claim to property represents the positive fulfillment of a divine command. To Locke God intends man to be active, in short, to labor. Locke’s radicalism is not limited to this. Too often Locke’s commentators have concentrated on the problem of explaining his theorizations on the relationship between the individual and property.10 In John Locke and


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Agrarian Capitalism, for instance, Neal Wood has argued against a “natural law” interpretation of The Two Treatises especially on the basis of Chapter 5 of that book, which deals with the issue of property. Wood’s arguments rely on the fact that Locke had sufficient links with the sympathizers of Bacon and Hartlib and their agrarian project of improving land. Wood feels that the Second Treatise was such an improver’s discourse, written from such a natural historian’s angle. Locke was not only a firm believer in productivity, wage labor and enclosure rights but “ . . . justified slavery and invested in slave trade, approved of indentured servants and the apprentice system, charged interest on loans to close friends and was always tight-fisted and demanding in money transactions, recommended a most inhumane—even for his times—reform of the poor laws, and bequeathed only a minute proportion of a total cash legacy of over 12,000 pounds to charity” (74–5). This is an extraordinary litany betraying an ad hominem attack on the man. Locke, Wood concludes, was not a radical “natural law” theorist but was rather a bourgeois egalitarian who “ . . . wanted to create a free and tolerant political society conducive to unfettered action” (99). Contrary to his belief, Wood’s thesis is not at all incompatible with the “natural law” tradition. Aristotle and Aquinas, as well as the Levellers, have time and again postulated the requirement of cultivating a rational understanding of property relationships and the need to be innovative and industrious in order to guide the polis or any other human community towards perfection. What Locke added to that tradition is a morality of enterprise and perseverance and an unfailing trust in individual agency. He certainly thought beyond mere self-interest. Throughout the chapter on property, for instance, laboring activity is extremely important. In A Trumpet of Sedition, Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood find no commonality between Locke and the Levellers on property issues. To them Locke is preserving a delicate balance by being a radical anti-absolutist on one hand and by limiting democratic implications of property right on the other. But throughout the chapter on property Locke encourages the idea of improvement by highlighting the usefulness of labor, something close to the heart of the Levellers. Notice the kind of labor Locke is celebrating in the chapter on property: It is “the labor of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber,” and “the ploughman’s pains, the reaper’s and the thresher’s toil, and the baker’s sweat” that provides the “useful products” for “the benefit of mankind.” Labor and human industry are lionized like nothing else. The chapter is a celebration, above all, of self-propriety and the person and not of property per se as Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood appears to suggest.


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Not only is God’s design realized in and by the industrious; the practical benefits of industriousness are shared in common: “ . . . in Land that is common in England, or in any other Country . . . none can inclose or appropriate any part, without the consent of all his Fellow–Commoners: Because this is left common by Compact, i.e. by the Law of the Land, which is not to be violated. And though it be Common, in respect of some Men, it is not so to al Mankind; but is the joint property of this Country, or this parish” (The Two Treatises 292).

In practical terms, such a standpoint reminds us of the Diggers’ squatting and invading the Surrey common. It is not only a clear endorsement of the “natural law” of commonality but also an appeal to just common law. A deeply moral use of property (and labor) motivates Locke. Given his faith in the enclosing system, obviously Locke is not exactly advocating a return of the Diggers. Two things are germane here though. One, that in Locke individuals ordinarily could not override the legally established property limits within society. And two, the Diggers maintained that they did not intend to meddle with anyone’s property (though in a way, as we have seen, labor withdrawal in effect does meddle with property) or to break down enclosures. Rather they were merely claiming the right to cultivate what was common and untilled in order to make it fruitful for the use of man. So, both Locke and Winstanley fundamentally agreed on putting limits to individual property acquisition. The right to cultivation also conceptually presupposes that every individual had the natural right to produce his own subsistence. This is also a fundamental assumption of Locke. He is not interested in individual motivations for property development. Clearly that would violate “natural law.” He argues strongly against self-preservation in the Essays on the Laws of Nature: For if the source and origin of all this law is the care and preservation of oneself, virtue would seem to be not so much man’s duty as his convenience, nor will anything be good except what is useful to him; and the observance of this law would be not so much our duty and obligation, to which we are bound by nature, as a privilege and an advantage, to which we are led by expediency (Political Essays 116).

The picture gets complicated with the invention of money—a crucial category in Locke. Money does not, however, mitigate his moral and political argument. Indeed money and certain demographic changes occurring with commerce can be viewed as consistent with the “natural law” command


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to provide for the common good. In fact Locke is considering the idea of money from the perspective of a developed society. The invention of money can be only made in terms of social benefits and would be morally indefensible on the grounds of hoarding by an individual. Indeed Locke begins with a discussion that money allows men to “enlarge” their possession. But such a discussion is not to supply a justification for extreme individual possession but to show how disproportionate and unequal possession of earth has come about due to a lack of the “express consent” of men. In paragraph 38 of the chapter on property, he writes: But as Families increased, and Industry inlarged their Stocks, their Possessions inlarged with the need of them; but yet it was commonly without any fixed property in the ground they made use of, till they incorporated, settled themselves together, and built Cities, and then, by consent, they came in time, to set out the bounds of their distinct Territories, and agree on limits between them and their Neighbours, and by Laws within themselves, settled the Properties of those of the same society (The Two Treatises 295).

Here is an evolving society where property regulations are based upon consent and laws that emerges at some point in history in the form of complex interrelated factors. The invention of money is one such factor. Exchange of money is for social usage because it is primarily an instrument of developing trade. Locke’s evaluative criterion, productive labor, remains constant. But if labor has to go beyond familial consumption and indeed if labor has to retain a greater social character, it must be viewed in relation to the world of commerce. It is not unlimited appropriation, but rather the extension of trade that interests Locke. Winstanley too, among others, was not dismissive of trade per se and he is close to Locke in this respect. It was Hobbes who would emphasize self-interest at the cost of human cooperation and community. This is a crucial distinction Macpherson fails to make when he groups the Levellers, Locke and Hobbes as possessive individualists within the framework of an emerging market society. In its negative application, Locke’s chapter on property in the Second Treatise constitutes a scathing critique of the feudal landowning aristocracy of the seventeenth -century. Positively, Locke’s arguments attempt to prove that the laboring activity—cultivation of land and commercial exchanges—are socially beneficial activities and perfectly in tune with the proclivities of “natural law.” Locke also has a very radical notion of political association, but unlike the Levellers he does not provide any institutional expression of the people to


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defend. His theory of resistance is framed rather nebulously in terms of a moral community. The category of Whigs in 1680s is much more amorphous than the category of Levellers in the 1640s. Locke’s writings entrust the lowest social classes with radical legal and political reform and yet the terms of these reforms are targeted to the individual rather than to any concretely designated social group. The Whigs could not finally avoid an appeal to an associative body: the parliament. But Parliament was a fiduciary trust, not an inherent attribute of the monarchy. It was decidedly not an arbitrary power of the executive. It is here that Locke comes closest to John Warr because both realize that they cannot function according to a radical anti-systematic anarchist agenda. Instead there is an urgency in both to erect a Protestant Association of self-defense against the use of arbitrary power, force and religious formalism. If the offender has made use of force in order to rationalize legality and challenge the Law of Nature, every man has the common right to punish the offender. Herein lies the radicalism of Locke. The association of parliament will ensure such mutual defense and assistance against all encroachments and usurpations of arbitrary power. John Warr is skeptical about the corruption of the parliamentarians but not about the institution as such. Much before Locke, he would also be the one to affirm that such offenders are no longer under the common law of reason. We can see that Locke is challenging Hobbes in more than one way. John Warr and the Levellers already understood the Lockean position during the mid-century and posited them in a legal framework. The central difference between the Leveller-Locke approach and the Hobbesian one is that the former affirms time and again that one must distinguish between the dissolution of society and the dissolution of the government. Society continues to exist even after the dissolution of government, and even in the state of nature. This is because political and legal power returns to the community of individuals, which is the creation of the original social contract among them. Such a conclusion is impossible in the Hobbesian scheme of things. The individual, in perfect harmony with the Aristotelian dictum, remains in the final instance a zoon politikon, a political animal, in both Locke and Warr. For Hobbes, the state, rather than the individual or the community is finally the basis of all politics. Warr is also closer to Locke than to Aristotle in a more fundamental sense: in the issues concerning human rights. Warr does not profess any kind of idealistic ethics of self-realization, or eudemonism, as does Aristotle. From the standpoint of post-Hooker “natural law,” this kind of teleology would be closely related to utilitarianism. That would amount to providing “natural


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law” with a quantitative bias, since good in utilitarianism is conceived quantitatively as a maximizing of purposive realization. The idealist who thinks in these terms would often sacrifice the self for the good of the greater community. When early in “The Privileges of the People,” Chapter I, in the third section titled ‘Of Liberty, or the People’s Interest,” Warr declares that “true freedom is in mind,” we get a glimpse of the idea that, unlike Winstanley, it is not exactly freedom from economic insecurity, that Warr takes as the defining quality of individual freedom (79). It is rather the “spark” of freedom, an intuitive but potent ontological notion that galvanizes Warr’s idea of freedom. It is closer to the notion of negative liberty in keeping with the classical liberal tradition—the enjoyment of personal rights secure from the intrusion of arbitrary rule. But at the same time it is not individualism but participatory liberty that he holds onto. This crucial dialectic is apparent when Warr cites Cicero from De Officis in Chapter II of the same pamphlet. In this section Warr is explaining the people’s right and choice and he chooses Cicero, a classical republican as his spokesperson. Not only that, the passage he quotes from Cicero spells out that the people have always sought “right, or an equal distribution of things” (82). Warr is not ready to spell out whether human rights or a just economic distribution is the more consonant with the values of “natural law.” In fact, he does not see any clash between the two. Both the idioms of natural right and equity speak the language of nature; both are crucial natural predispositions among human beings that cannot be allowed to be trampled upon by the representatives of privilege and prerogative. Thus, crucially modifying the Aristotelian “natural law” tradition, both Warr and Locke separate essential needs and rights from incidental interests. The good is not a mere maximizing of quantitatively indifferent purposes, but a maximizing of those tendencies which conform to the nature of man and which arise through inter-subjective deliberation and free choice. Such a conception of nature lies at the root of fellow feeling and obligation. The ultimate basis to natural rights is “natural law,” which is common to the species being. It is in this way that both the language of individual rights and determinate human tendencies get fused in Warr and Locke. Both Locke and Warr understood that rights and duties are dialectically embedded into each other. One cannot overestimate the value of this dialectic. It is a revolutionary transformation in the history of “natural law.” For the first time individual rights get recognized as a fundamental human tendency, an existential inclination that all human beings share. It is revolutionary because this would mean snatching away the language of human rights from the conservative


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and acquisitive camp of Thomas Hobbes. It is not an accumulative predisposition that connects the Levellers and Locke as Macpherson and Tuck seem to imply, but a desire for reasonable deliberation and a free political choice. This standard finally rests on a law of nature which would persist as long as the human species-being persists, and which is incorruptible and inalienable. It is this natural tendency that justifies the right to revolution against a corrupt and tyrannical social order. But if natural right becomes an integral part of modern “natural law” from Warr and Locke onwards, it cannot be upheld at the cost of the welfare of the polity. One such misuse of individual right in England is the corruption of the lawyers themselves. The lawyer is only an oracular figure who pretends to resolve doubts. But what they instead have in mind are rigid “ideas of right and wrong,” a strictly theoretical sophistry, which they seek to use in legal practices (107). It is this complete break between theory and praxis that Warr is reacting against when he seeks a minimalist legal order, “first decided by neighbours of the hundred,” which might ultimately lead to a situation when “a man might be his own advocate” (106). Here is a radical notion of individual human right, which at the same time confronts the alienating aspects of that very individualism by accepting just customs of the community. Another crucial factor that thwarts a legal order based on reason and equity in Warr is the people themselves. It is not crass populism or majoritanianism that ratifies the legitimacy of the polity or the administration. Quite early in Corruption and Deficiency of the Laws of England, Warr points out that “obsequiousness, flattery or compliancy of the spirit” are as much to be blamed as the principles of self-interest, force and power (93). Often people swim with the tide and accept formal and binding legal dictums. Often people are neglectful of their rights and through their meekness accept laws that breed unfreedom. But, in a wonderful rhetorical flourish, he adds: “ ’tis one thing to be deflowered, but to give oneself up to uncleanness is another” (93). Warr’s normative foundation of “natural law” lies not really with the people but with the ideas of freedom and reason itself. He contrasts the “seeing force” of reason with blind choice. It is not populism but principle that he finally leans on to. This is because he realizes the crass populism and a liberal idea of abstract choice might lead to chaos since it was possible “for a people to choose such laws as were prejudicial to themselves” and this in turn would amount to forsaking their own interest (92). So free choice is not the ultimate safeguard for bringing forth a perpetually free society: “choice abstracted or considered in itself is no undeniable badge of a just law, but as it is mixed with other ingredients” (92). Chief among these other ingredients are obviously reason and equity.


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REFASHIONING THE NATURAL LAW TRADITION The Leveller and Lockean idea of “natural law” was actually the normative basis for the English radical sectarians to function. In Winstanley, the idea of “natural law” found an expression in the more collective practice of political and more importantly, economic freedom. As we shall see, the cornerstone to Winstanley’s human community is always an idea of reason and inter-subjectivity, very similar to the ones propounded by legal reformers like Warr. In Republicans like Milton, the idea of “natural law” found expression in a remarkable concept of human communication based on pragmatism. Such pragmatic approach is again very close to what Bloch has proposed about the citoyen side of the bourgeoisie, which he feels to be the root of revolutionary idealism. The common thread that binds the Republicans, the Diggers and the Leveller legal reformers is this bedrock of “natural law,” in its feelings for human dignity, in its appeal “ . . . toward human rights and toward juridical guarantees of human security or freedom as categories of human pride” (Bloch 205). But one cannot also miss the ontological dimension of this attempt to refashion the English legal system. In keeping with the best traditions of “natural law,” John Warr and the Levellers were concerned ultimately with the nature of existence, for it is in the light of such a basic analysis that the ethical structure of human life can be more clearly understood. They realized that the best legal option that would recognize and perfect a universal order of nature as well as inspire dissent and innovation in legal affairs was “natural law.” They understood that ultimate basis of all legality is to give primacy to life and mind. On this ontological level, existence is naturally good and genuine norms must be founded upon the fact of such an existence. From this individual existential level “natural law” makes a move toward the human species, since the dispositional character of human nature is shared by all humans everywhere and are universally valid. Modes of action must fulfill the nature of the humans as the species being. In legal terms, that would mean an egalitarian society based on individual human rights.


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Chapter Three

The Universal in the Local: Digger Radicalism Revisited

Two issues must be addressed in any assessment of Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger project in mid-seventeenth-century Surrey. This is especially important if one has to reassert that early modern England was not a consensus-based polity, that there were indeed conflicts—communicative as well as confrontational: one, how important were localist agitations such as the Diggers’ from the national and Civil War point of view? And two, what were the nature and role of religion in such movements? The trajectory of Gerrard Winstanley’s life and especially the Digger phase is important within the context of the Civil War not just because his works and activities successfully tie everyday local concerns of a representative early modern English parish with a tremendous religious breadth of vision, but because by doing so they broaden the scope of both: the idea of community and that of religion. Such a breadth of vision is simply nonexistent among the mainstream English Protestant writers of the mid-seventeenth-century. In the recent years a particular approach to local studies, especially county studies, has made important contributions to the ways of understanding the English Civil War. More often than not, the obvious thrust of such studies has been to discredit general theories explaining the origins of the Revolution. A classic account is Alan Everitt’s study of Kent.1 Everitt’s early modern Kent is harmonious, happily patriarchal, bound together by elaborate kinship ties, patronage and neighborliness. It is indeed the epitome of the traditional pre-political society of classical sociology. Such an account immediately does two things. It papers over all distinctions among moderate, conservative or progressive politics. Indeed, it slides over the idea of the political itself. Second, it emphasizes the insularity of the county communities or 107


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their lack of any understanding of national politics. In other words, it divides the local and the whole. Everitt’s work is a particularly extreme example, but local studies tend to overestimate the county’s importance in the lives of seventeenth-century men and women. The idea is that each county is unique and so no generalization is possible. The local communities were in fact not unitary entities to be sought in counties, parishes or villages. In fact, communities were overlapping entities on which people based their social, economic and religious affairs and as such cannot be easily opposed to the nation state. However, as Ann Hughes has observed, this “fragmentation of analysis . . . is often coupled, though, with a covert generalization, designating the overall provincial response to the cleavage between King and the parliament as localist and neutralist” (231). The idea of neutrality is however, contentious. Brain Manning has convincingly argued that in the context of the civil war it is misleading to characterize those who avoided commitment to any one side as “neutrals,” since they often took side with moderate Parliamentarians or with moderate Royalists, depending on the situation.2 Manning specifically argues that the rise and revolt of the apparently “neutral” clubmen, comprising mainly of the “middle sort,” in Somerset and Wiltshire, who spoke against arbitrary government and popery, as well as against radical sects “ . . . gave peasants and artisans the will and courage to stand up for themselves against “all superiors whatsoever” and to redress their grievances by direct action” (Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution 85). So, the idea of “neutrality” is not only exaggerated, but also helps to cloud important developments during the Civil War that the “neutrals” may have inspired. Structurally speaking, “neutrality” could be often constructed (as opposed to natural) as specific response to certain situations, especially the levying of heavy taxation. Besides, as the clubmen revolts show, such neutrality moves were often stratagems to gain time, not at all pacific in their intentions. There is a fine delineation of the various shortcomings of a purely localist approach while dealing with the Diggers in James Holstun Ehud’s Dagger, Class Struggle in the English Revolution. Holstun rightly underlines the dual dangers of reductionism and celebration of deference to which such a slant in scholarship might lead. He further traces an unholy nexus between postmodernist celebrations of micropolitics, cultural anthropology and the revisionist critics of seventeenth-century England, all of whom stress the immediate and the local at the cost of class warfare, literary exchanges and national politics. However, while Holstun concentrates on Winstanley’s shifting the localist interests and the “definition of freedom from a national and political to an economic basis,” my concern is to look into the role of religion in the Digger project (Ehud’s Dagger 395).


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To that end this chapter addresses the crucial role of radical Protestantism in the context of the general religious ferment in which the mid-seventeenth-century found itself. As far as religion is concerned, historians like Jonathan Clark, Conrad Russell, John Morrill, John Fletcher and J.C. Davis have projected a consensual English society that reluctantly argues religious issues unless fired by “the belief that it must be enforced” (Russell 102–5, 198). These historians, also known as revisionists, owing to their penchant to reconstruct the past in its own terms by looking at documents previously ignored, generally reject Whig and Marxist explanations of the English Civil War on the grounds that Whigs and Marxists elevate methodology and opposition at the expense of empirical evidence and consensus. But inconsistencies in the revisionist position get clearly manifested in the accounts of religious developments in the early seventeenth-century. On a general level, authors like Clark stress seventeenth-century “theology” as an undervalued ecclesiastical phenomenon that requires renewed attention but he stops short of relating theological concerns to political or social issues. Puritans are at once depicted as a minority of busybodies, and as a part of a broad united spectrum of Protestant opinion. Arminianism, on the other hand is presented as a near Catholic challenge to this broad consensus. But the continuity of Arminianism with earlier conformist views is also stressed. (It is astonishing how the revisionists overlook divergent varieties of Arminianism—the old Arminianism of the Laudians and the new Arminianism of John Goodwin, Milton, Richard Baxter and the Quakers, long ago noted by Christopher Hill in God’s Englishmen.) In this latter context the traditions and the paraphernalia of the Catholic system is emphasized in order to stress the importance of the consensus-based local community. The emphasis on Puritanism as the ideology of discipline and order is too simple. Puritanism did produce the radical godly saints. But it also had the potential to become a more disruptive and radical influence in the local communities. At this more radical level, where the Diggers belonged, both the godly attempts at moral reform and the communal solidarity expressed in ceremonial worship were unacceptable. As far as his religious sensibilities are concerned, there have typically been two directions in which Winstanley scholarship has moved. One is the direction taken by the likes of Paul Elmen, Winthrop Hudson, Lotte Mulligan, John Graham and Judith Richards.3 All of them try to pry open the theological basis of Winstanley’s philosophy and action. They see the Digger project as a mystical endeavor and the digging at St. George’s Hill as a symbolic rather than a political act. Winstanley was, according to this school of thought, literally waiting for the second millennium to arrive—with meekness, patience and


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quietness. While the transformation in humans was to be inward and immanent, it was to be brought about by a transcendental God through an outward miracle. Nicola Baxter, for one, stressed Winstanley’s quest for an experimental knowledge of God and strived to associate the perception of the Spirit to the acting of Reason in Winstanley’s writings. But despite this spirited attempt to embrace the breadth of Winstanley’s vision, she concluded that Winstanley was eventually interested in transcending all matter. In other words, Winstanley was more or less a mainstream Protestant with millenarian aspirations. Nigel Smith has underlined time and again the importance of the written and the printed word in Winstanley’s oeuvre but his reading is mostly hermeneutic, and consciously avoids getting too much into the political implications of the Digger tracts. On the other hand we have critics like Edward Bernstein, L.H. Berens, Perez Zagorin, David Petegorsky, Margaret James and George Juretic who underscore the fact that Winstanley was neither a mystic nor merely a millenarian but was primarily a man of action.4 Above all he was a materialist, a rationalist and a modernist. According to this school of thought, in Winstanley’s writings God was located in man and in this world and redemption could only come by the application of the law of reason. It was left to Christopher Hill to highlight that neither transcendence nor immanence should be the issue in identifying the true nature the Digger project. He placed the project within a heritage of radical theology that extends from the Donatists and the Nestorians to William Blake and farther. But he too stressed the general importance of reason in Winstanley’s writings, the overwhelming significance or the idea of liberty of conscience, and the doctrine of perfectibility on this earth. This chapter tries to examine the social relationships and alliances revealed in the local pattern of resistance by the Surrey Diggers. One major limitation of a pure local study is that it is next to impossible to define what exactly qualifies as local. Even at the grassroots level of a “locality,” the everyday concerns, demographic distributions and agricultural gradients often tend to overlap. The parishes of Walton and Cobham in Winstanley’s Surrey, for instance, were not nucleated villages, that is, they did not consist of one central concentration of houses surrounded by large common fields. Cobham and Walton were artificial municipal entities made up of several separate population centers, or townships, called tithings. The region was also decentralized in the agricultural sense, because unlike the Midland system, both Cobham and Walton had hybrid field systems with many common fields along with quite a few separate farmsteads or severalties, called “tenements,” in this region.


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Critics have noted the problems in identifying each individual Digger in that region. This difficulty has been ascribed to the unavailability of an extant court rolls or parish registers (they exist only in eighteenth-century manuscripts), though David Mulder has gleaned useful information in identifying many of them “in decreasing order of certainty” from the Surrey Hearth Tax lists of 1664 for the manor of Cobham as well as in Walton. Winstanley himself says little about their origins or social status. He simply refers to their local origin at one place, meaning Cobham: “Thereupon at the Command of this Parson Platt, they [Platt’s henchmen] set fire to six houses, and burned them down, and burned likewise some of their householdstuffe, and wearing Clothes, throwing their beds, stooles, and householdstuffe, up and down the Common, not pittying the cries of many little Children, and their frighted Mothers, which are Parishioners borne in the Paris” (Sabine 434). John Gurney mentions in his two detailed surveys of the local activities of the Diggers: “The Cobham Diggers included not only landless labourers and cottagers but also at least one member of the middling sorts” (93). Brain Manning, in 1649: The Crisis Of English Revolution, informs us that “Some of the Diggers were themselves small tenant farmers so they knew well these experiences of humiliation and helplessness” (116). It appears that they were a motley group consisting mostly of copyhold peasants with some from the middling sort. But patterns of local politics can always be connected to the national as well as to the more universal levels. Though “local” is often used as a geographical as well as a cultural marker, its domain can more often than not be extended to other localities and other cultures, based on various structural trends and affinities. More importantly, the local can be interpreted with relation to issues such as class, caste or demography. There is no denying that a microscopic study brings up certain details that a sweeping glance might miss. But a detailed look at the micro-level must be woven into wider patterns and currents. That there was a distinct political macro-picture in midseventeenth-century England is at least clear. Both Leah Marcus and Ann Hughes have noted in the context of Civil War that the Englishmen could rise above micropolitics and local loyalties to join the conflict based on two divergent ideological affiliations—as royalists or parliamentarists.5 At the other end of localism stands the human being, the individual, who as a social marker at an even more micro-level also challenges the idea of the local. Studying the individual, his thoughts and decisions, the progress of his career, are as important as the examination of more overall issues. In fact, to merely examine the Digger activities as isolated local phenomena begs a series of questions. For one, their intention was to usher in radical social


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changes at least all over England, not merely in Surrey, though it all began at Surrey. Winstanley himself was a most pacific humanist in his earlier writings and a practical utopian thinker of universal dimensions in his later tracts. He had definite ideas about British history which were consciously made to wander way beyond immediate space and time. He had a keen sense of what the English nation would look like if his vision got translated into reality. If we are to understand why Winstanley felt the need of looking beyond purely local concerns while defining his radical vision, it will be important to remember that his career is divided between an early, tumultuous life in London as an apprentice and a later, more constructive and eventful existence mired in the political and religious life of rural Surrey. The lesson that he gathered from both these experiences is that the plight of the “middling sort” in the city as well as in the county was not dissimilar; that the artisans in the city and the copyholders in the countryside were both being exploited in a similar fashion by the landholding gentry and the parliamentarians. The specifics of those tales of exploitation might be different but the moral was the same: the best way to maintain status quo and consensus is to govern from above. Once he recognized the structural similarities in this split, Winstanley felt the need to identify a somewhat overarching category in the life of the “middling sorts” that could be tapped to counter such exploitation. This totalizing ideology, Winstanley discovered in the radical form of Protestantism. Not content with merely identifying this ideology, he sought to strategically deploy his radical vision of religion for political purposes, so that the “middling sort” was not left behind, and instead could reap the benefits of the English Civil War. Winstanley was also acutely aware that local deferential structures also, as a rule, led to the glorification of a timeless society. In such a circumstance the discourse of religion was being used not only by Anglicans, but also by all forms of mainstream Protestants as an arena that would help fortify such a timeless, status quo-based social set-up. It is for the benefit of those who govern from the top that religious issues were consciously left to remain personal and general, never integrated with larger historical questions. This is where radicalizing Protestantism made sense to Winstanley. It was a strategic warfare against the local religious power structures but it was not a mere stratagem or exploitation of people’s feelings: it was not politicizing aesthetics for the sake of greater social aims. In this crucial sense Winstanley was a liberal. Winstanley realized that unless the scope of Protestantism was elaborated and made to merge with national, European and indeed universal concerns, there cannot be any kind of advancement for the copyholders and the artisans at


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the grassroots level. Gerrard Winstanley’s oeuvre proves that religion was, in addition to other things, the name of a principle of methodological totalization in the mid-seventeenth century England. It is precisely that which resists by its very nature the idea of purblind localism, and demands a vision of things beyond the parish. In practical terms, such a radical notion of religion steps beyond purely local concerns because the Digger project does not limit itself to making customary claims to local common right and also because it points toward a network of communities, even an imperialist/missionary expansion to Europe. One of the central aims in this chapter is then to recode the claim that the defining trait of early modern religion was that it had to be enforced. I would rather say that radical religion demanded that it be totalized, worked up into an open-ended praxis. In the Diggers’ vast armory of response lay not only active resistance but also attempts at selfexpression and cultural assertion, or negotiation and contestation of power through ritual and symbolic struggles. For the Diggers, religion worked as the liberal ideological basis; it stood as a storehouse for deriving practical consciousness, which in turn assisted in their social activism. In concrete terms Gerrard Winstanley’s social activism can be summed up as a challenge to two social phenomena of early modern England: against commercial malpractices and against the practice of enclosures in the English countryside. And sometimes the two are connected. I would also like to argue that at his heart Winstanley was a liberal who was extremely sympathetic to the considerations of class struggle. The connection among Winstanley, Milton and the Levellers is not merely that they share a common project of creating and enlarging the public sphere, as Warren Chernaik has suggested, but that they are all radical liberals who had the vision and sense to look beyond the issues of individual rights towards a more radical social program.6 The digger colonies were the concrete manifestations of such a vision. THE CHEATING ART OF BUYING AND SELLING Gerrard Winstanley wanted to make the Earth a common treasury. As opposed to that state of affairs, he pitted “buying and selling,” something that he equated with unrighteousness and covetousness (Sabine 188, 382). It has been asserted that Winstanley spoke out against trading (at least till 1650) for biographical reasons, because he was an unsuccessful businessman. Indeed, it would appear, from his poignant address to the city of London in the short piece titled To the City Of London, Freedome And Peace Desired, that he was forcibly driven away from her “by thy cheating sons in the thieving


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art of buying and selling, and by the burdens of, and for Souldiery in the beginning of the war, I was beaten out both of estate and trade, and forced to accept the good will of friends crediting to me, to live a Countrey-life” (Sabine 315). The extent to which a biography or a narrative is a reliable source/backdrop for interpreting someone’s writing is a much-debated question, historically and philosophically. I believe it is tenable with certain caveats. It is my contention that biography is certainly one element that had affected Winstanley’s activist positions on matters commercial, but the conclusions drawn from his life, especially by the revisionist scholars of the English Civil War, has been unduly harsh and has generally missed the mark. I also contend that Winstanley did not become bankrupt and subsequently did not develop his economical thoughts because he lacked business acumen but because he was honest in his dealings. He believed in the good intentions of his business partners and was defrauded. Making him naïve or gullible puts an easy, and ultimately misguided, onus on Winstanley. Rather he believed that speculative trading creates false-spirited men. It is remarkable that Winstanley did not lose faith, at least in urban phase, in the basic goodness of man even after successive cases of fraud against him. On March 25, 1630, Gerrard Winstanley began an apprenticeship with one Sarah Gater of the Merchant Taylor’s Company in London. He served this apprenticeship till February 20,1638, when Peter Smith of Middlesex took his spot. Both J. D. Alsop (Ethics in the Marketplace) and G. E. Aylmer (Gerrard Winstanley, What Do We Know About His Life) have pointed out that, despite Winstanley’s distrust of trade and commerce, he displays unreserved admiration for the practice of apprenticeship in his model society, basing their arguments on a section in The Law of Freedom (Sabine 548–50). This praise of apprenticeship (although this word is never mentioned in the tract) is however, not unreserved as Alsop and Aylmer suggest. The use of the word Trade in that section is extremely ambiguous. It is tied with labor and science and as such does not mean the word in the common sense of the term. Trade in Winstanley often gets connected with “families” of shoemakers, smiths, weavers, and keepers of storehouses, but it is never used in the mercantile or speculative sense of the term. For Winstanley trade primarily meant prying open the secrets of nature and using that knowledge for commonweal. Trade would never include explicit buying or selling but nevertheless, some form of trading was necessary to run a political system successfully. In The Law of Freedom, he is extremely particular that children should not turn out to be bookworms and idle scholars. That kind of a training he associated with monarchical governments: “Children shall not be trained up onely to book learning, and no other imploymemt, called Schollars as they


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are in Government of Monarchy, for then through idleness, and exercised wit therein, they spend their time to finde out policies to advance themselves” (577). Idealness is dangerous and to stave such inclinations “ . . . after Children have been brought up at Schools, to ripen their wits, they shall then be set to such Trades, Arts, and Sciences, as their bodies and wits are capable of ” (577). Ideally, each family would specialize in a trade and the fruit of their know-how and labor would be displayed in the shops and saved in the storehouses for direct consumption: “Every particular house and shop in a town or city . . . shall be either furnished by the particular labor of that family according to the trade that family is of, or by labor of other lesser families of the same trade, as all shops in every town are now furnished” (593). Besides, there will be an office of Overseer for Trades that will keep an eye on the overall running of trading activities in the community. Winstanley explicitly delineates the kinds of trades that his commonwealth will have and these he called the “ . . . five Fountains from whence all Arts and Sciences have their influences” (577). The first fountain dealt with husbandry, which would include land usage and reform as well as gardening. The second fountain will consist of mining and mineral employment—and in this category, such traders as the chemists and gunpowder-makers, masons and smiths would be very much in demand. The third fountain concerns itself with dairy needs and animal husbandry: tanners and clothiers, shoemakers and dyers would be useful in this grouping. The fourth and the final fountain will look after forest and natural resources management: plow makers and carpenters, lumbermen and joiners will be useful to unearth the secret of the forests and other green resources. One can see that trade in the Winstanley’s sense of the term was entirely need-based and not profit-oriented. But he was a man who prudently understood that property and riches and codes of honor cannot be totally done away with and so the requirement to regulate their usefulness in his utopian society. He comes to compromise. A man has certainly the right to be rich but he must share his riches with his neighbors, especially if others have contributed to gather him the riches: “No man can be rich, but he must be rich, either by his own labors, or by the labors of other men helping him . . . if other men help him work, then are those Riches his Neighbors, as well as his; for they be the fruit of other mens labors as well as his own”(511). Winstanley was no market socialist, but his enunciation of the use of shops and storehouses in his ideal community comes very close to elucidate a certain kind of guild mentality. Recent works on the guild system in Europe during medieval and early modern times have often stressed the corporate organization of guilds and the society it represented.7 Liana Vardi sums up


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the basis of such a critique by pointing out that the “ . . . guilds kept prices unusually high and represented unwarranted monopolies . . . such closed, oligarchic bodies kept out able craftsmen by preposterous entry fees, fought endless lawsuits with neighboring trades, stifled innovation, and ensured neither quality nor adequate productivity. The key was privilege, its antithesis, liberty—with the physiocratic concern for low-priced manufactured goods” (706). Critics of the guild system also emphasize some kind of confraternal solidarity based on social order, strict hierarchies and status consciousness of the people who actually ran such guilds. There might be some truth in such a cultural assessment but it is wide of the mark from an economic point of view since such views, almost as a rule, homogenize the guild system across time and space. As Vardi again rightly points out: “The confusion [of a blanket critique of the guild system] stems from the identification of artisanal production with the corporative system. One should be careful to dissociate the two, for it is clear that small workshop production continued to thrive on both sides of the Channel . . . without need for special monopolies”(706). In fact, Norah Carlin makes a strong case for the mid-seventeenth-century London artisans working within the guild system, as being bearers of individual liberties guaranteed by fundamental rights.8 Carlin argues that organized membership in certain urban artisan guilds provided them with a collective political consciousness, which proved effective in fighting at once the oligarchic guild hierarchies and the emerging industrial capitalists. Winstanley’s The Law of Freedom was advancing this very idea of organized workmanship without compromising the rights of the freeborn Englishmen. The Law of Freedom advances the urban phenomena in two crucial senses. One, it attempts to carry forward the fraternal guild ethos to the rural sector and ultimately envisages a society based on such small production houses, which might in fact, prove to be instrumental in stemming privileged monopolies. Second, while the artisans in London wanted more regulation and generally agitated against the multi-occupationist structure of the corporations, Winstanley projected a more sophisticated community structure, whereby the practitioners of the different crafts will be interconnected and dependent on each other for the good of the community. In The Law of Freedom Winstanley would categorize workers according to economic realities but without any consideration to status as defined by guild hierarchies. For Winstanley, the largest unit of the community where such free trade by small production houses can be transacted is the Family or at most the Parish, never a city or even a county. The thrust of his proposal for apprenticeship then is not to nurture youths for speculative trading (as Alsop and Aylmer suggest), but to stave off idleness in young people (548), to train


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them as masters and governers of the family (550), and most importantly, to make them “learn the inward knowledge of the things which are, and find out the secrets of Nature” (550). “Secrets of nature” is an expression that cannot possibly be confused with trading in the marketplace. It also does not refer to “guild mysteries,” a concept that the members of the guilds often used in order to distinguish the privileged craftsmen from the unskilled and non-apprenticed artisan in the trade. The secret probably refers to the skill consisting of the knowledge of prices, properties, the market and extent of demand for goods and articles they trade in. It is the acuteness and memory that gradually develops in being an apprentice, rather than a category that helps create wedges between the skilled and unskilled laborers. But this does not explain Winstanley’s case against commercial ventures. It is not, as revisionists claim, something that developed after he became a modest grazier in Cobham, Surry in the years 1644–1648. Neither was such an idea a reaction to the death of his cattle in the winter of 1647–1648. As early as 1641, he had a good cause to be radicalized. In London he was twice a victim of fraud: in 1641 and in 1642. The second case hinged upon a fraudulent credit claim against him by a wholesale London merchant. Although he won the Chancery case eventually in 1660, the immediate impact on Winstanley was ruinous, and was possibly aggravated by similar extensions of credit. At one point he was forced to seek parochial charity, which in his case was one shilling and one penny from the parish “poor stock” in 1641.9 This loss proved to be especially ruinous because it coincided with the virtual collapse of the cloth industry in the period 1641–43. Two targets stand out in his various published utterances against commerce: the absence of plain dealing and the oppression of one’s fellow man inherent in business transactions. As J.D. Alsop has observed, “The first indicates a belief that trade had become corrupted; the second asserts that commerce was by its very nature inherently corrupt” (107–8). I would argue that it was the first that Winstanley upheld. He did not banish all commercial transactions from his social world. The anarchist tendencies in his earlier writings transformed themselves into a very constructive attitude in his more programmatic utterances in The Law of Freedom. The real problem, as far as Winstanley recognized it, was with the credit system itself that engaged the London merchants in seventeenth-century England. A self-employed businessman who began with limited capital, as Winstanley clearly did, had no option but to rely on heavy credit. This meant he was engaged in relatively high-risk marginal trade, which, during political and economic crises, compounded the whole situation for men like Winstanley. So Winstanley was not against trading per se. He was primarily


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condemning the dishonest dealing within buying and selling. His general point is rather that the system itself placed unrealistic demands on a junior merchant and in that sense trading was unfair and unjust. In fact, he proposed an alternative way of conducting business transactions in The Law Of Freedom, which would be ultimately based on a guild-based ethical vision. Winstanley wanted to make sure that the earth be “ . . . planted and reaped, and the fruits carried to Barns and Storehouses by the assistance of every family . . . Every man shall be brought up in Trades and labours, and all Trades shall be maintained with more improvement, to the enriching of the Commonwealth, more than now they be under Kingly Power” (526). Trading to Winstanley was indeed an enterprise that would be based on an applied scientific research but that research was to be carried on not merely to improve the lot of the individual, nor for the sake of pure scientific progress, but for social benefit—for enriching the commonwealth. There are also two other aspects in which Winstanley showed a sophisticated understanding of trading in his ideal society. First, he proposed a genderbased division of labor: “as boyes are trained up in Learning and in Trades, so all Maides shall be trained up in reading, sewing, knitting, spinning of Lynnen and Woolen, Musique, and all other easie neat works, either for to furnish Storehouses with Lynnen and Woollen cloth, or for the ornament of particular houses with needle work” (579). Though from a modern vantage point this division of labor might sound quite patronizing, from Digger point of view it shows a real appreciation of cooperative work ethics. More importantly, Winstanley showed a most pragmatic understanding of international trading patterns and hoped to use trade strategically for the benefit of his commonwealth: “Because other Nations as yet own Monarchy, and will buy and sell; therefore it is convenient, for the peace of our Commonwealth, That our ships do transport our English goods, and exchange for theirs, and conform to the Customs of other Nations in buying and selling”(595). This prudence about international trade comes with a caveat though, that such trades should be carried “ . . . Always provided, That what goods our ships carry out, they shall be the commonwealths goods; and all their Trading with other Nations shall be upon common stock, to enrich the Storehouses” (595). The underlying theme in Winstanley’s writings about trade is that this over-zealous enterprising system makes man corrupt and covetous. Otherwise it is impossible to explain why, in his Chancery disposition of 1660, Winstanley laid no blame on the dishonesty of his creditors. Indeed, he valued the honesty of his creditor and did not take any acquaintance, receipt, or discharge from the creditor. The point is that at least in this urban phase Winstanley did not lose faith in the inherent goodness of man. Indeed, as he


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moved on, he became much more cautious and he often pitted imagination and self-preserving human tendencies against the requirements of commonpreservation. But he emphasized that human nature itself has the capacity to be regenerated through its efforts and achievements. When he tried to extrapolate that idea of plain-dealing on his business transactions, he was disappointed at least twice. It is simply not fair to indict Winstanley of naiveté and to insinuate that he deserved to be cheated since he maintained a positive evaluation of human nature. To indict Winstanley of this naiveté is ultimately to uphold a mistrust of integrity in the marketplace. In other words, it would mean that marketplaces are by their very nature, dishonest. The urban phase in Winstanley’s career is important because his life in London crucially inflects his later performance as a prophetic and imaginative writer. The lesson that Winstanley learnt from this first phase of apprenticeship was that in a fiercely competitive society there are high chances that elusive and false expectations of success would eventually lead to corruption, fraud and malpractice. The solution is not to get rid of commerce altogether but to keep some sort of economic auditing and political vigil over commercial activities. Consequently, his utopian society in The Law of Freedom is based foremost on an ethical vision of guild economy. The early experience of commercial malpractice in the marketplace made Winstanley’s vision not only humane but also more pragmatic and practical. It prepared him to be crucially aware of the dialectic that operates between individual freedom and communal good, something that he would formulate elaborately in his later writings. Ultimately, Winstanley did cease trading altogether, recognized his insolvency, and, on November 30, 1643, divided up his remaining stock-in-trade among his creditors. His house, cattle and land in Cobham were either granted or leased to him by his father-in-law, William King, a prominent and prosperous member of the London Barber-Surgeon’s Company and a Cobham yeoman since at least 1621. It was probably King who was one of the friends whom Winstanley referred to as creditors in A Watchword to the City Of London. It is a classic case when the more individualistic the economic conditions in the city, the more people strayed from guild ideology/protection and the worse they became, the more likely they were to rush back to the protective arms and legislation of the city. In Winstanley’s case it was migration back to the country and to the safer hands of small-scale entrepreneurship. THE QUESTION OF LAND When in April 1 1649, Winstanley and his companions began to dig on St George’s Hill, it was a decisive step for two reasons. First, this is their first


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step towards direct action. And second, it underlines the Diggers’ most fundamental convictions about land and its relationship with human beings. It is not that Winstanley’s other major concern—the use and abuse of religion within a community—was isolated from his economic and social viewpoints. In fact they are intricately linked.10 However, the Digger philosophy of land is in many ways the bedrock of ideas and methods of Gerrard Winstanley. By the 1970s, three periods, 1560–1673, 1650–1750 and 1750–1850, were rival contenders for the golden period of the “agricultural revolution” in England. By the end of the decade the second one was the most popular. During more recent times, scholars agree that what one means by the “agricultural revolution,” and the ways and means by which it was achieved, depend on one’s viewpoint on the subject. For instance, Mark Overton, in his Agricultural Revolution in England identifies at least three sets of criteria constituting the grounds for claiming an “agricultural revolution”: a wide variety of changes in farming techniques, a growing population fed by them and an increase in output brought about by improvements in productivity. One immediately notes that these conceptions are concerned primarily with the changes in methods for producing food, with what Marx called the “forces of production.” A wider notion would link these changes to what he called the “relations of production,” dealing primarily with institutional changes. Overton’s third point about productivity as an indicator, for example, depends very much on indices like land use and labor productivity, but these indices mean nothing without connecting them to issues like the establishment of private property rights in land, the replacement of feudal tenures and estates with leaseholds for a period of years, changes in the size of the farms, and changes in the ways in which people were employed by others on the land. In other words, as R. H. Hilton had noted long ago in his contribution to the Brenner Debate, if one is to look at the agrarian questions in medieval and early modern Europe one better look at them in their totality, considering demography, forces of production, relations of production and social struggles and movements. In a way Hilton was critical of both Robert Brenner (for class determinism) and his adversaries, the Annales historians (for a neo-Malthusian demographic determinism). Thus he writes in the Introduction: “For Brenner, the class struggle has primacy. But his Marxist critics are aware that Marx himself, as well as many working in his intellectual domain, emphasize that developments in the forces of production— new technology, new means by which labour is organized, the economic


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success of new social classes—come into conflict with the existing relations of production, and of course, with the legal, political and ideological superstructure (Hilton 7).”

The question of changes in the use and distribution of land can be seen from another angle: by viewing how paternalist critiques reacted to the changes in agricultural patterns during early modern times. Even Marxist observers have conceded that paternalism could indeed sometimes turn apparently conservative concerns, like a plea to an idealized monarch or to a golden age or a timeless religion, into a rights-based model of land tenure. Indeed, it is difficult to dismiss paternalism off-hand. Indeed, as Raymond Williams has observed in his introduction to The Country and The City, demystifying paternalism is not always fruitful since these kinds of nostalgic fictions by recalling an archaic, regulated economy that never really existed, often helped rural people conceptualize and resist real social transformations and real economic and physical violence. A way out of this is to distinguish between kinds of paternalism, for instance, between laboring-class and ruling-class paternalism. James Holstun makes precisely such a distinction: “Whereas rural laborers and artisans struggled first to protect their traditional rights to commons and forests, rural gentry and their city cousins sought primarily to preserve social order” (Ehud’s Dagger 381). However, as Holstun observes immediately, these two paternalisms could and did often coexist. The richest literature dealing with the political consciousness of the peasants and the middling sorts grew out of an awareness of conflicts integral to the agrarian communities in which they lived: peasant and subalterns were neither led like sheep by educated elites espousing changeless paternalisms, nor were they locked in unchanging acceptance of tradition. Tradition in much recent literature appears not as an overarching mode of thought, but as a cultural language or idiom in which working class people expressed conflicting views of the world and innovated new ones. Nor were peasants restricted to using any one of them. They quickly grasped the enormous liberating potential of idealizations, (nationalism for instance, a political language that came from outside of agrarian society) and adapted them to express their own specifically agrarian grievances. For instance, the Diggers used the nationalistic (and apparently paternalistic) discourse of the Norman Yoke to their advantage in resisting the local gentry and other elite forces. Of course, the Diggers predated the nineteenth-century discourse of nationalism that justified its existence on the idea of modern nationhood and often directed itself against other nations based on such a norm. Instead, they strategically used the idea of Norman Yoke against the


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English ruling class by stressing the fact that the latter do not have an AngloSaxon origin and as such were unwelcome foreigners. The moral economy of subsistence is not always paternalistic in the crude sense of the term. It has come a long way since A. V. Chayanov’s and early Eric Wolf ’s neo-Weberian analysis of the defense of unchanging tradition against perceived abuse. George Rude’s analysis of food riots in the years leading up to the French Revolution, for instance, showed essentially the reactions of the traditional subsistence economies that also possessed a considerable class-consciousness, which merged to react against the emerging capitalism: “a massive protest against the new-fangled principle of allowing food prices to find their natural or market level, instead of being regulated by considerations of social justice” (Rude 225). E. P. Thompson elaborated the concept arguing that the moral economy of the poor consisted of ideological innovations fashioned out of components of the dominant norms of patrician societies.11 Scholars propounding either an extreme class-theoretical approach or an unchanging paternalistic viewpoint are often motivated by a desire to restore the voices of the peasants, slaves, subalterns and other non-elites who have remained silent in traditional accounts. The problem, however, is that such scholars assume that these voices will be wholly distinctive, corresponding to the distinctive material experiences of the lower orders of the society. It is one thing to wring out issues of class or tradition, quite another to give overarching explanations to autonomous thoughts and actions on their basis. Such attempts lead to teleology and almost as a rule, preempt the possibility of conflict. We can now see where Marxist historians of agrarian change like R. H Hilton and moral economists like James Scott come together. The thrust in both is to value social interaction in agrarian protest movements: both approaches finally give due importance to the relations of production. It is within the crucible of social interaction, the rough-and-tumble of everyday struggle, that political awareness grows. FIELD SYSTEMS, LANDHOLDING AND TENANCY Understanding the layout and organization of the land (or the field-systems) in the early modern world is of vital importance to understanding of the Diggers’ claims. The layout and the topography of the field system refers to the visible physical features in the landscape: the distribution of fields, field boundaries, and subdivisions within fields while the organization of the field system consists of the rules and regulations that were used to govern land


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cultivation and the legal property rights attached to the ownership and use of land. In seventeenth-century England most fields were generally large, up to several hundred acres in extent, subdivided into long strips of land forming the units of land ownership. These fields are referred to as ‘‘open-fields.” Besides these open fields, there used to be other rectangular fields, surrounded by hedges, ditches or walls, with the whole cultivated with one crop. These fields were what the contemporaries called “closes” or “severalties,” also referred to as “enclosed.” Early modern agrarian scholars of most hue agree that since the thirteenth-century, much of the land of England was not subject to exclusive property rights but rather to common property rights. Even though an individual owned a share of land, other people in the community had specific rights to use that land in certain ways. For pastures this would mean the right to graze their animals, for the woodland, the right to gather fuel (the right of estover), and on arable land the right to graze their animals on the stubble after the harvest (known as the common of shack). It is a popular misconception that “commons” or “common land” belonged to no one, to the general public, or to the inhabitants of the village. The common land had actually little to do with common ownership (and it is part of the radicalism of the Diggers that they wanted to erect such a setup). Such land was owned in the same way as other land was owned, by an individual or an institution. What is important to understand is that common rights still existed over it.12 The changing feudal practice of landholding and tenures themselves are interesting as they can be found in the manorial surveys or “extents.” On one hand, there were Free tenures, which meant that the services rendered in such tenures were both fixed in their nature and duration. The nature of the service was not fixed in case of the Unfree tenures (originally called the villein tenure or base tenure). The villein tenure was held at the will of the manorial lord and could be transferred at will. Besides the agricultural labor on the lord’s land, tenants often had to make additional payments to their lord. These were called incidents of tenure. For example, a fine could be demanded when a tenancy was inherited (an entry fine), or sold to another farmer, when the tenant died (a heriot), or even when the lord’s daughter married (a merchet). The unfree tenants themselves, as accounted in the manorial surveys, were generally divided into three groups: freeholders, customary tenants and leaseholders. Freeholders were those holding land by free tenure, usually with the estate of fee simple (meaning totality of ownership), regulated mostly by common law and outside the reach of the manorial system. By the early seventeenth-century,


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their services were mostly token payments that bore no relation to the value of the holding. Customary tenants were mostly copyholders, but there were also some with no copy and therefore whose title was less secure. The position of the copyholder depended on the local manorial custom. Some copyholders could transfer land as they wished with fixed entry fines and heriots; on some other manors fines were arbitrary, rents were subject to increase and tenants had no right of nominating their successors. Leasehold was a relatively new form of tenancy, usually for an estate of years, but sometimes for a life or lives, and often applied to land that had been part of the demesne and thus not subject to custom. NO RENTS, NO ENCLOSURE The Diggers chose two conscious strategies against their local adversaries. The first was to challenge enclosing as a means of severing property rights and simultaneously to ask tenants to stop paying rents. Winstanley writes as early as in The True Levellers Standard Advanced: “He that works for another, either for Wages, or to pay him Rent, works unrighteously, and still lifts up the curse” (262). And in An Appeale To All Englishmen, a last broadside appeal to common people issued at the end of March 1650, he keeps stressing the agenda of nonpayment of tithes and rents: “The Tenants of Copyholds, are freed from obedience to their lords of Mannors . . . Neither can the Lords of Mannors compel their Tenants of Copyholds, to come to their Court-Barons, nor to be their Juries, nor take an Oath to be true to them, nor to pay fines, Heriots, quit-rent, nor any homage, as formerly, while the King and Lords were in their power. And if the Tenants stand up to maintain their Freedom, against their Lords oppressing power, the Tenants forfeit nothing, but are protected”(411–12). Winstanley was also aware that the short–term reduction in real wages and the accompanying inflation owed mainly to the Civil War. He complained in New Yeer’s Gift that “at this very day poor people are forced to work in some places for 4, 5, and 6 pence a day; in other places for 8, 10 and 12 pence a day, for such small prizes now (corn being dear that their earnings cannot find them bread for their family.” (The Law of Freedom and Other Writings 201). The laborers in Northern Surrey were in a subsistence bind, since the going wage rate was not enough to support the families. Among the sufferers, the Diggers identified mostly the small peasants of the unfree copyhold variety (and not the freeholders), with whom they were in solidarity and who would be crucial in carrying out these revolutionary changes in the landholding system, as they might have envisaged. This is evident from the fact that in Walton-upon-Thames, where they first began dig-


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ging, the diggers complained not so much against the Lords but against the “violent bitter people that are Free-holders” (259). So it is the yeomen elite as well as the landlords who were hostile to the Diggers. As we have seen earlier, the socage tenures and the freeholders were not strictly unfree tenants and were outside the manorial system as in the sense they were guided favorably by the common law in landholding as well as in the paying of rents. William Starr, one of those accused by Winstanley for organizing attacks on the Digger community on St. George’s Hill, was a prosperous freeholder of that area and definitely of the middling sort. It was much later, when prosecutions were initiated on behalf of Francis Drake in Kingston Court of Record in June 1649, that direct gentry involvement took place. This was after the Diggers had challenged the landlord’s right to take wood from the commons and had declared their intention of selling wood to provide funds for the Digger colony. In Cobham, by contrast, it was the gentry and the parishioners, (especially John Platt, the rector of West Horsley and Lord Anthony Vincent) who had direct involvement almost immediately after the Diggers arrived in August 24, 1649.13 On the other hand the middling sort in Cobham were much more divided in their response to the Diggers. However, it is one thing to trace the local nature of the challenge to the Digger project, quite another to say that the reactions were sporadic and wholly contingent and did not follow any social pattern. The yeomen elite and the gentry might have reacted at different intervals in the two places but react they did, as soon as they found out the leveling nature of the Digger enterprise. For the Diggers, challenging the enclosures (with the non-payment of rents) was strategy, a strategy that ultimately failed because they failed to put forth clear-cut agendas and because of a concurrent fear among the local peasants of letting themselves in to an unknown system of landholding. The term Enclosure requires special attention when we are discussing Winstanley and the Diggers. In the early modern context it could be used to denote a number of situations: a) b) c) d) e)

A method for establishing leaseholds. A process that led to the removal of common property rights. A method leading to the changes in form of layouts and field boundaries. A way of amalgamation (or engrossing) of farms. A radical change in the use of the land.

The relationship between enclosure and landholding change is a weak premise (that would rather be engrossing), while that between enclosure and property rights is not. As R. H. Tawney wisely put it a century ago: “What damaged


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the smaller tenants, and produced the popular revolts against enclosures, was not merely enclosing, but enclosing accompanied either by eviction and conversion to pasture, or by monopolizing of common rights” (170). He was referring expressly to damaged property rights. There were indeed a number of legal devices for removing common rights. The first of these were termed the “extinction of common in the ordinary process of law.” Under certain circumstances the common rights could be removed if the rights were previously not exercised, or if the resource over which the rights extended was no longer there. A more frequent method of removal was when “unity of possession” existed so that both the land and the common rights over the land belonged to the same person. Thus an individual could buy up a piece of land and the common rights over it, extinguish common rights, and enclose the land. There was the third and most popular way: “enclosure by agreement.” The agreement could be a genuine voluntary agreement but often the consent of some recalcitrant parties was achieved through coercion and pressure. Enclosures by agreement were also quite often ratified by collusive actions in the Court of Chancery in the form of fictitious disputes to enable the legal recognition of the changes that had been made. When the Tudor enclosures were complemented and finally replaced by the Parliamentary enclosures they not only removed the common rights but also transformed the agricultural landscape. Overton points out that the “Subdivided fields were swept away and replaced with a new landscape of consolidated ring-fenced farms. New farmhouses were built in the centre of the new farms, altering the settlement pattern of the village away from a nucleated pattern to one that was more dispersed. New roads were laid out in conjunction with the new fields, and many of the former paths and trackways over the commonfields were removed” (159). Already in the sixteenth century in the Walton area, piecemeal enclosure of the wastes and common fields took place as both John Gurney and David Mulder have discovered. The ones directly responsible for the Digger activities were the enclosure in the common arable fields. Mulder highlights the fact that “The process of nibbling away at the fields continued right up to the general enclosure in the eighteenth century; the parish lost as a result twenty-three percent of its common field acreage” (274). Such partial enclosing reduced the size of the common fields, which meant a reduction in fallow and stubble when the fields were used for common grazing. This severely restricted anyone in the parish who had no large tenement and was dependent mainly on the total amount of grazing in the commons. The Diggers directly challenged the settled use of the commons and wastes and encroached on the local resources first by digging and planting


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crops, then by grazing animals in the wastes and then by seeking to fell trees and sell the wood. The Diggers’ actual intention was to bring the commons and wastes under cultivation, thus converting the rough pastures into meaningful and intensively farmed land. The Diggers had intended to extend the rights of the poor through a speedy transition to a system of communal cultivation, with only a temporary survival of private property. They were, in effect, inviting the poor to exchange their existing common rights (which they rightly felt were oppressive, threatening and lop-sided) for the expected future benefits of living in a commune in the wastes, where they would collectively and equitably share the produce. Meanwhile, Winstanley for one was clearly aware of the need to reassure his local opponents that their lands and enclosures were safe, and that two systems of landholding could exist in relative harmony, the poor cultivating the commons and the gentry and freeholders their enclosed lands. The strategy was twofold: first, that it would ensure the immediate survival of the Digger colony and second, that the opponents would eventually be induced to give up their lands. Precisely to that end he writes in The New Law of Righteousness: “None can say, Their right is taken from them; for let the rich work alone by themselves, and let the poor work together by themselves; the rich in their inclosures, saying, This is mine; the poor upon the Commons, saying This is ours, the earth and fruits are common” (196). The strategy did not work for three reasons. First, the Diggers fell short in advancing and propagating any comprehensive economic program. The Law of Freedom, which is indeed comprehensive as a social and economic manifesto, appeared quite late (Thomason dates his copy February 20, 1652). By then the Parliamentarians were systematically persecuting the radicals. The Diggers’ identification of the malaise as far as landholding practices went was correct, but the remedies proposed were more often than not, half-baked and simplistic. James Holstun, referring to Winstanley, points out that “His account of enclosure might lead one to view it as a uniform and simple phenomenon: from Eden to the Norman Conquest to George’s Hill, he derives all social conflict from the same struggle between landlords and laborers. Regional variations in enclosure and systematic causes of long- and short-term economic crisis remain quite invisible to him. And the economic status of a metropolis like London simply does not figure in his utopia” (Ehud’s Dagger 407). To this one might add that though cultivating the commons made the Diggers’ survive and endure in the immediate context, such cultivation was not followed or complemented by other productive steps, namely, building and amassing the crop in storehouses, forming some sort of a bureaucracy, dividing the labor among the Diggers in a systematic manner and so on. Winstanley in 1649–50 was a much more anti-systematic and anarchic


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thinker than in 1652. What was lacking in him at that point was a systematic vision of constructing his utopia—the theory behind the practice was not firm and reliable. But since the moment was ripe in 1649, the Diggers jumped into action. The result was a premature totalization at the practical level. Second, the laborers and cottagers valued their unimpeded access to the unimproved commons based on common property rights, which they felt the Diggers were flouting through their plans of collective cultivation. The Digger definition of the commons was for the common people of England (if not for humanity in general) whereas the local definition was based on the assumption that they were common to the inhabitants of such a place. As Brian Manning observes: “The poor were opposed to the big farmers and lords of manors enclosing the commons and wastes and dividing them into private properties, and although the Diggers were against enclosures and private property, they would have as effectually deprived the local inhabitants of their common rights over the commons and wastes as any enclosing landlord” (The Crisis 131). What was missing in the Digger project was an effective public relations program. Winstanley, in spite of his pacifist and democratic approach in his writings until then, failed to convey that very message to the wider population when it came to action. There seems to be a genuine gap in communication between the Diggers and the rest of the population in Surrey, especially on the crucial point that the Diggers’ objective was to enlarge the ambit of people’s common rights over the commons and not reduce it. The model approach would have been to put forth the idea that the rest of the population were really associate producers, who by regulating their interaction with the Diggers, would eventually bring the commons under a collective control, away from the individual monitoring of the gentry and the freeholders. At a more general level, it was necessary to communicate to the people that the Diggers were an inclusive sect, that their radicalism was not merely anarchic and that they had a comprehensive and practical social plan of action. And thirdly, Winstanley’s idea of pacifying all parties by selectively encroaching upon common fields itself might have been counterproductive. In Capital, Volume III, Karl Marx advances a rather interesting proposition about monopoly of landed property. He points out that the reason people want land is never because it is somehow automatically productive of value, but that its ownership enables one to appropriate the labor of others. The possession of the land and the soil and the separation of “ . . . the direct producers from their position as mere accessories to the land” are prerequisites that eventually lead to the expropriation of ground rent and interest from the direct producers—in this case, the copyholders (Marx 616). In other words, land is a fixed capital to the landowner. Though improvements of a chemical


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nature or of more permanently like digging canals, leveling or proper drainage system increase the value of this capital fixed in the land but all common fields in Winstanley’s Surrey were also potential sites for appropriating the labor of others. Winstanley’s promise of not to expropriate enclosed land directly thus might not have cut any impression on the landowners, who felt rather threatened by the Diggers impounding on the commons. This reluctance to take part in direct action, a trademark liberal stance, thus proves to be the limit of active and radical Digger politics. This is the crucial difference between Winstanley in his Digger phase and the Republicans or the Ranters, who would have rather taken decisive, even if illiberal and not so conscientious decisions in order to win the day. Moreover, the Digger claim to common lands, for which no rents would have been paid, came to include the confiscated church, crown and forestlands, as well as monastic lands. This idea was originally put forth in Light Shining In Buckinghamshire. In New Yeers Gift that very concept is followed through: “ if there be a spoil to be gathered of crown lands, Deans, Bishops, Forrests Lands and commons, that is to come to the poor commons freely” (363). And in The Law Of Freedom he extends the idea of confiscation to monastic land: “And in particular this Land is al Abby Lands, formerly recovered out of the hands of the Popes Power by the Blood of the Commoners of England, though the Kings withheld their rights therein from them. So Likewise all Crown Lands, Bishops Lands, with all Parks, Forrests, Chases, now of late to be recovered out of the hands of the Kingly Tyrants” (558). Realization of this claim would have amounted to a large-scale act of expropriation. Parson Platt and Anthony Vincent in Cobham were particularly concerned about threats to church land and timber rights. The Diggers are known to have taken wood from Stoke common, and Winstanley claimed in April 1650 that Platt had promised to leave their houses alone if they “would not cut the wood upon the Common” (433). Winstanley writes immediately “the diggers resolved for peace sake, to let the wood alone till people did understand their freedom a little more” (433). But woodcutting went on unabated and the people failed to grasp the Digger idea of freedom. NO HIRING This was the second strategy: asking the copyhold tenants not to work as hired hands for large farmers or landlords. The idea was that they should live and work in community by rejecting wage labor. Thus Winstanley writes in The New Law Of Righteousnes: “If the labour of the earth, and work for others that live at ease, and follows the wais of the flesh by your labourers eating


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the bread which you get by the sweat of your brows, not their own: Know this that the hand of the Lord shal break out upon every such hireling labourer, and you shal perish with the covetous rich men, that have held, and yet doth hold the Creation under the bondage of the curse” (194). He simultaneously asks the landlord and freeholders: “what would you do if you had not such labouring men to work for you” (195). The landlords would be unable to rent land to farmers who did not have the labor to cultivate it: “Let them labour their own Land with their own hand” he thunders in The New Law of Righteousnes (196). Large estates would cease to be economically viable. And big farmers, socage tenants, and freeholders would be reduced to living off only such land as they could tend with their own and their families’ labor. The assumption was that with a ban on wage labor they would be constrained to give up their individual enclosed lands to the community and thus merge with a collective way of living and cultivating. But trying to gradually suffocate the inflow of labor once again turned out to be a disingenuous strategy. That kind of gradualism could perhaps be successful if Winstanley could communicate his proposals of a future society to the landlords and the non-Digger copyholders without sufficiently stirring the existing power structures. At this point, it was also necessary to simultaneously use at a more active, communicative level, the radical concepts of religion and inspire a wider national and universal consciousness, in order to lure away the self-regarding landlords and freeholders toward a more community based setup. Once the majority would be on board, the Diggers could have pressed for more radical social changes. But these would be designs, stratagems—something alien to the nature of Winstanley’s liberal mindset. Instead, as Christopher Hill has perceptively noticed, the message that came across to the copyholders as well as to the landowners was different and damning: “It was not expropriation, but it would have amounted to a piecemeal deprivation of the profits of ownership” (The Religion 26–27). This reminds us once again the concept of land as a fixed capital asset. If the landlords surrendered their property to the Diggers they would probably receive a life-long annuity but that could never compensate for the lure of ground rent and interest. Consequently, Winstanley’s provision for the gentry to receive compensation if they wished to throw their lands into the common stock backfired. THE LAW OF FREEDOM: A CASE STUDY IN LANDHOLDING AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION In the context of the breakdown of the Digger project, it is imaginatively stimulating to discuss what would it have meant specifically for the Digger


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movement and generally for the political future of England if Winstanley had had the blueprint for his community ready by 1650. Thomason recorded this proposal, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, in 1652. An examination of the pamphlet is also central for evaluating Winstanley as a liberal. One notices a shift from his pacifist approach towards a more programmatic one in this pamphlet. But does it mean that he was turning undemocratic and illiberal? The Digger proposals for an alternative social setup has been severely challenged by J. C. Davis after examining The Law of Freedom.14 Davis’s arguments rest primarily on an apparently autobiographical point, namely that there was a development in Winstanley’s thought process, whereby he moved from millenarianism to utopianism, with a concurrent change in his social outlook from extreme individualism to extreme totalitarian discipline. This change of heart Davis traces to 1651–52, when Winstanley was getting increasingly certain that his gradualism and dual approach to reforming the landholding system were not viable options in the changed political world of England.15 In Gerrard Winstanley and the Restoration of True Magistracy, Davis’ first charge is that Winstanley was a pacifist as far as landholding rights are concerned. Davis tries to prove that Winstanley did not challenge the legal validity of the enclosures since he allowed the landlords to enjoy the already enclosed land. He concludes that Winstanley was therefore no radical as far as landholding rights are concerned. This is a most fantastic argument. Winstanley, especially in his earlier writings, was indeed not a confrontationist, but as both Manning and Hill have pointed out, and as we have seen in the preceding sections, Winstanley’s move to allow the freeholders and the gentry to enjoy already enclosed land was strategic and tactical, however misguided it might have been. Davis does indeed mention the tactical move of labor withdrawal and does see it as a dangerous threat to the landholding middling and upper sort of peasants who would need cheap labor, but falls short of calling it radical enough. To Davis, this whole venture is an exercise in utopianism. The fact that the Diggers made no legal or violent threat shows their lack of radicalism. This claim not only goes against the actual activities of the Diggers (their digging and felling of trees) but also does not fit at all the whole notion of passive resistance. The idea of tactical gestures and acts as subversive does not at all appear to Davis. For him there cannot be any stage of any partial leveling. Either you are guided by an individualistic Protestant ethic or you are inclined to surrender yourself to an acute totalitarian communist state. In fact, Davis is unable to come to terms with the complexity of Winstanley’s approach and is bent on fitting it into a straitjacket.


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The other major charge against The Law of Freedom is that it subjects men to the “secular discipline of the state”(Davis 84). And a system of law in his ideal commonwealth is the metaphor through which Winstanley sneaks in his statist and authoritarian ambitions. I would argue on the contrary that the concept of legality in Winstanley is not only of a corrective nature but also a minimalist liberal framework whereby the rights of the individual will very rarely be compromised. Moreover, on the question of law he is also quite close to the natural law argument of the legal reformers. Davis’s primary objection is Winstanley’s insistence on the economical aspect of freedom. Freedom of trade, preaching and sexual freedom (of the Ranter variety) were all false ideals of freedom. Winstanley, in his quest for a free landholding system, insisted rather that men should be employed in manual work (with land or its products), until the age of forty. Thus, it is law and will of other men that control men in this tract (even the manners of mankind) as opposed to the Spirit within of the earlier ones. Davis finds this dual insistence—on a certain definition of freedom and on an authoritarian legal system, utterly restrictive, since they remove freedom from human dignity and worth in favor of economic and political necessity. There are sixty-two written laws for Winstanley’s commonwealth. Two laws–15 and 16—cover agricultural production. The first requires the individual household to keep and maintain agricultural tools. The second requires every family to assist in ploughing, digging, planting and reaping. A couple of corollaries Davis finds particularly harsh. First, the insistence on punishment if the above conditions are not met with, “ranging from public reproof to servitude.” He particularly criticizes the logic of making slavery legal. Davis is also critical about Winstanley’s making of common idleness and gossip criminal offences. In other words, the charge appears to be that Winstanley gives himself over to the Protestant work ethic in his ideal commonwealth, something that has been a prime target of criticism in his earlier writings. It must be acknowledged upfront that Winstanley is less radical as an architect of his commonwealth than as a liberal anarchist of the earlier writings. Having said that, one must consider that he must provide a rudimentary and minimum legal and political system when he is actually talking about building a society, giving an institutional shape to his ideals. One must understand that The Law of Freedom cannot, by its very nature of trying to provide a constructive blueprint for the future, be an anarchic and anti-systematic tract like the earlier ones. For Winstanley, any future society would be erected for spiritual restoration of the individual, and law was one parameter to the whole scheme. Law was based on each person’s respect toward the


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other. One must also bear in mind that The Law of Freedom was written when the Diggers were being subjected to “economic boycotts, threats, lawsuits, pullings-down of houses, trampling of crops, and vicious beatings—as a result of which one Digger miscarried, while another almost died” (Ehud’s Dagger 426). One would suspect that Winstanley’s hardline approach would have much to do with those legal and physical abuses that were inflicted upon the Diggers for actually undertaking their project. Michael Rogers has argued that Winstanley’s legal vision was more of a corrective nature. The strictures were to be implemented only when there would be lapses stemming from irrationality. Law was a corrective understanding based on cooperation and was applicable until a perfect state of affairs was reached when legal strictures would be by and large irrelevant. One can ill afford to overlook the reformist side of his legal vision. Rogers writes: “like many Leveller writers before and Quaker and Fifth Monarchists authors after him, he advocated decentralization of the court system, popular legal education, self-representation, and other measures that would have democratized the legal system” (5). One may add to that the idea of electing judges. In fact, the legal framework of Winstanley is not merely corrective. Winstanley makes it amply clear that law is ultimately the name of principle that upholds freedom and common peace against tyranny and oppression. A minimalist legal framework is necessary in the ideal commonwealth in order to see “ . . . England as a free Commonwealths” (Sabine 535). He goes a step further and quotes Paul to drive home the point that “The law is added because of Transgression, one against another” (Sabine 536). The emphasis is on two points: first that law is an addition to more basic concerns like economic and political freedom and second that the addition is necessitated so that an individual does not transgress another’s rights. It is clearly a right-based concern for the individual that necessitates a minimum legal structure. Of course, Winstanley does seek the root of his coveted laws in common preservation but such a common preservation can only be attained “ . . . when there is a principle in every one to seek the good of others, as himself, without respecting persons” (Sabine 537). Winstanley identifies such legal rules with natural or inward law: “it is the power of Life (called the Law of Nature within the creatures) which does move both man and beast in their actions” (Sabine 587). In fact Winstanley resolves one of the knottiest conundrums of liberal legal framework of how to reconcile individual rights with self-interest by concluding that there are two kinds of inward, individual laws—unrational and rational. While the former is based on self-love, rational natural law is based on “ . . . the witness or testimony of a man’s own conscience” (Sabine 588). This is one of


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clearest liberal rebuffs to the Hobbesian concept of rational self-interest. In the final instance such a benevolent and “Original law is written in the heart of every man” (Sabine 537). As regards the punishments they were no doubt harsh, but not so if one considers the nature of punishment during that time period. Winstanley insisted that there be no imprisonment in non-capital cases, even for holding the accused before trial. Labor service was also the last resort after private and public reproaches failed. Even as he criticizes the Winstanleyan vision of the commonwealth, Davis completely inverts his earlier thesis of a radical disjuncture in Winstanley’s thought process by the time he came to write The Law of Freedom. Davis now makes the case that Winstanley was never an anarchist but was always “a theorist of a perfect moral commonwealth.” It is, as it were, that the ideas projected in The Law of Freedom were always inherent in Winstanley, ready to come out. It was an expected trajectory from a man who always believed in “‘passive waiting.” Even in the millenarian early Winstanley the idea of waiting for the lord was also a ploy for fulfilling this strict Stalinist social vision. In all this, his initial point of departure, that there is a rupture in Winstanley’s thought process, goes haywire. It is as if the Winstanley of The Law of Freedom was always there, lurking, waiting in the wings to strike as a totalitarian. One wonders how Davis would reconcile Winstanley’s still later Quaker period—as a return to a liberal vision of pacifism and toleration? There was indeed something amiss in Winstanley’s vision but it had nothing to do with a socialist totalitarian state. What he was missing was a coherent and complex economic vision. As a sociologist and human psychologist, he was brilliant but as a practical economist, he seems not as radiant. The main problem with the economic system in his commonwealth seems to be that he was taking the family and parish as self-sufficient units of production and consumption but did not find any essential transition to the next higher economic level. Barns and public storehouses would be the common treasuries but would be strictly used for local consumption. What Winstanley was looking for seems to be a planned village economic structure. But it was never explained in details how that kind of planned economic unit would function with other such economies or form networks of commodity exchange. This might be a principled position but could finally prove to be strategically disingenuous, defensive and not very progressive. International trade is discussed strategically but the intermediate stages—ways the parishbased economy could be connected to regional and national and international levels—are just left hanging. The idea of a closed community that Winstanley so vehemently criticized did not get translated when it came to


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visualizing the development of economic stages in a community, neither historically nor spatially. As regards trading, Winstanley is certainly for some sort of use value but the office of the overseer is created to regulate some minimal trading: “That when Families of other trades want such commodities as they cannot make, they may go to Shops and Storehouses where such commodities are, and receive them for their use, without buying or selling” (Sabine 551). At this level, it does indeed seem like a romantic vision of a subsistence village economy, untarnished by national and/or transnational concerns. But the radicalism of Winstanley’s vision lies elsewhere. One of the most pronounced aspects of The Law of Freedom is the idea of common preservation and Winstanley’s constant emphasis on the social systems of communication and inter-subjectivity in order to achieve such a state of preservation. One might begin with the idea of Platform itself, which is part of the title as well as a recurring metaphor throughout the pamphlet. The commonwealth that Winstanley strives for is essentially a common ground for human beings, a platform on which the different strata of the population of a given society might interact freely—both socially and economically. Since the central aim of such a commonwealth is to “preserve fellowship in friendly love” first and foremost, there should be amity and free communication within the family (Sabine 562). Though the need for a father figure to guide and advise other members of the household seems to be pegged at preserving patriarchy, each member would live freely as individuals “ . . . every man’s particular dwelling is not common, but by his consent, and the Commonwealth Laws are to preserve a mans peace in his person, and in his private dwelling . . .” (Sabine 527). The emphasis on individual political rights in unmistakable. At the bureaucratic level of the commonwealth, effective administrative communication between different kinds of officers is a sine qua non. A flow of administrative information between the four levels of the bureaucracy—Family, Parish, County and Nation—would structurally cohere the ideal society. To begin with, only those officers who are of “peaceable spirits, and of a peaceable conversation” would be chosen for commonwealth duties since such officers need to be “ . . . understanding men, and who are experienced in Laws of peaceable and right ordered Government” (Sabine 543). Winstanley goes on to emphasize, “All these officers are like links of a Chain, they arise from one and the same root, which is necessity of Common Peace” (Sabine 544). The non-hierarchical and inter-subjective facets of the proposed commonwealth do not end merely with the household and the bureaucracy but seamlessly flow to religious matters too. Winstanley envisaged a total democratic set up of the religious apparatus within the


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commonwealth. It would have only a minimal outward structure. Religious ideas would get disseminated freely among all individuals. Every individual would have the right to preach or make religious speeches, but he must undertake such a project in a civil manner: “He who is chosen Minister for that year to read, shall not be the only man to make Sermons or Speeches: but every one who hath any experience, and is able to speak of any Art or Language, or of the Nature of the Heavens above, or of the Earth below, shall have free liberty to speak when they offer themselves, and in a civil manner desire an audience, and appoint his day” (Sabine 564). Inter-subjective communication and religious freedom are cornerstones for a more concrete vision for material progress. It is germane here to see how Winstanley’s utopia tackle the issue of improvement and his constructive vision fare vis a vis the so-called scientific agriculturalists of the seventeenth century, notably Gervase Markham, Walter Blith, Francis Bacon, John Amos Comenius and the members of the Hartlib circle. 16 Indeed there seems to be apparently a strong connection between the Hartlibians and Winstanley, especially in two crucial aspects. First, the eschatological connection. Hartlibians were not Calvinist ascetics. They thought that each step in the conquest of nature represented a move towards the millennial condition. Education is the second connection, the basis of which would be most extensive and eclectic for the Improvers. But the thrust in education is mostly towards knowledge. Communication, for instance, is one of the central categories among the Pansophists. In Comenius, for example, written communication is kind of a universal language that can be integrated into a unified methodological and philosophical system, which in turn will lead to universal reformation. The consequence is that knowledge, a public commodity, becomes a central concern to the Improvers. Indeed, in matters such as agriculture, horticulture, distillation, mining, mills, drainage, chemistry and metalworking, even in telescopy and microscopy, the applied benefits of that knowledge base cannot be overestimated. But the thrust of all these was primarily utilitarian. The Hartlib circle, it seems, was playing the role of a mediator in technology transfer. It seems that the Hartlib circle was quite close to an environment of enterprisers whose proclaimed motives of the advancement of the general good might have been a thin disguise for private profit. In the best known manifesto of the Hartlib circle, Gabriel Plattes’ A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641), for example, one notices a leap from the backward glance of the more ‘rural” humanist to the commodified knowledge of the private enterpriser.17 The dialogue opens with a Traveller and a Schollar, who quickly retire to Moorefields, the quasi-rural


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place of retired thoughts, to discuss in detachment the ideal state of Macaria, recently visited by the traveler. By the end of the pamphlet however, once the traveler has delineated a society in which every department of the government either pertains to trade or to production, the relation between knowledge and the marketplace becomes less ambiguous. The Traveler asks whether the Scholar has any secrets or experiments for which the traveler would be willing to pay gold or other goods in exchange. Of equal significance is the change in venue for their next meeting, which is to be on “next Munday at the Exchange,” trading the pretence of rural retirement at Moorefields for the mercantile bustle at the heart of the city. As Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor accept, “Hartlib and his associates were, of course, aware that the line between the ‘luciferous’ imparting of knowledge to the common good and the ‘luciferous’ exploitation of knowledge for personal gain was a fine one, to be drawn within the consciences and attitudes of each individual.” (Greengrass, et al., 19). The obvious reference is to the Latin original of “Luciferous”—luciferum, or lucre bearing, that puns easily with luciferous, meaning light-bearing in the Baconian sense of the term. In a nutshell, the Puritan drive of the improvers was more towards a utility-based individualistic polity. On the other hand, for Winstanley knowledge for the sake of gathering knowledge, was not only useless, it was dangerous. For Winstanley, the humanist ideal of cultivating virtuosos and eclectic experts would be tantamount to worshipping false prophets. Action would have to be concrete, decisive, and for the common good. In The Law of Freedom there is indeed a passionate appeal for reformed education and a concurrent vision of a coordinated program for practical scientific research and development. But The Law of Freedom is also a particularly instructive contrasting example to the Hartlibian project because at one point in the pamphlet Winstanley actually comes very close to the Improvers but in the last instance distances his visionary commonwealth from their ideals. In that particular section, Winstanley explains why a day in the week may be selected for rest from labor. His general point is that such a day is necessary so that people might recollect and discuss the fundamental laws and principles that govern the commonwealth. During that Day of Rest, “Speeches may be made, of all Arts and Sciences, some one day, some other; As in Physick, Chyrugery, Astrology, Astronomy, Navigation, Husbandry, and such like. And in these Speeches may be unfolded the nature of all herbs and plants from Hypos to the Cedar . . . and hereby men will come to know the secrets of Nature and Creation, within which all true knowledge is wrapped up, and the light in man must arise to search to search it out” (Sabine 563). This eulogy of pure knowledge,


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however, comes with a strict caveat, something that is not a central feature of the Improvers’ jargon. Winstanley writes: “every one who speaks of any Herb, Plant, Art, or Nature of Mankind, is required to speak nothing by imagination, but what he hath found out by his own industry and observation in trial” (Sabine 564). Book learning and rote work within the domain of imagination and preaching or practicing these amount to a betrayal of the ultimate ideal for which the commonwealth stands: common preservation. Just as Winstanley is not averse to commerce per se, he is not blind to the potentialities of improving the land. Thus, in The Law of Freedom, as discussed before, Winstanley proposes five essential Fountains in order to find out the secrets of nature: right ordering of land (planting, gardening and so on), right use of mineral ores, right ordering of the livestock, right ordering of woods and timber trees and finally studying the secrets of nature through astrology, astronomy, physics and navigation. But such a scheme of improvement must always work in tandem with nature’s laws, not against it. And second, these five Fountains have to be utilized ultimately “ . . . for the encrease of fruitfulness, freedom, and peace in the Earth” (Sabine 577). Such a comprehensive and communitarian vision is conspicuously absent from texts like Macaria. In practical terms too, Winstanley was alive to the possibility of applying innovative ideas in his digging experiments. For example, the Diggers proposed to solve the problem of wasteland reclamation by introducing up–and–down (or convertible) husbandry, a modern technique that would ensure increased soil fertility. This was especially important for tilling productively the heath lands of Surrey, sandy and dry at once. So the Diggers began by planting roots on some closes, and corn or beans on the others, with the intention of alternating the usage of each. All these might seem to be sufficiently Baconian. But Winstanley was not pastoral in his critique of private ventures and was especially critical of the “monster” “who is all tongue and no hand” (Sabine 577). Winstanley imagines a community that would appropriate the Hartlibian improvement project without submitting to its technocratic and alienating aspects. USING OTHER METAPHORS FOR RESISTANCE It is remarkable that radical movements often use icons, symbols, and other such ideological forms that usually get connected with conservative politics. In the best of instances such a usage is not a deceptive ploy just to gain some populist mileage. It often comes after a genuine realization that other and apparently irrational and faith-based symbols are important parts of people’s


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lives and these symbols can affect and galvanize a whole people against tyranny and social impositions. One can hardly afford to circumscribe conscious human action in everyday forms of resistance as well as in more organized or spontaneous varieties of political resistance. The relationship between thought and action is a matter of much philosophical debate but it seems that a more sensible approach will be to take note of an open-ended dialectic that works between thought and action. As James Scott has pointed out succinctly: “Acts born of intentions circle back, as it were, to influence consciousness and hence subsequent intentions and acts. Thus acts of resistance and thoughts about (or the meaning of ) resistance are in constant communication—in constant dialogue” (Weapons of the Weak 38). The other reason to study how subordinate groups use ideas is to engage with the Marxist concept of mystification and false consciousness. Certain Marxist scholars stress that elites dominate not only physical but symbolic means of production—and this symbolic hegemony allows them to control the ideological sectors of the society—culture, religion, education and media, for example. Richard Hoggart, captures this thin theory of Gramscian hegemony in his The Uses of Literacy: When people feel that they cannot do much about the main elements of their situation, feel it not necessarily with despair or disappointment or resentment but simply as a fact of life, they adopt attitudes toward that situation which allow them to have a liveable life without the constant and pressing sense of the larger situation. The attitudes move the main elements in the situation to the realm of natural laws, the given and now, the almost implacable material from which a living has to be carved. Such attitudes, at their least adorned a fatalism or plain accepting, are generally below the tragic level, they have too much of the conscript’s lack of choice about them (77–8).

The debate finally pivots around how much the elites are able to impose their own image of a just social order onto the consciousness and behavior of the non-elites. The argument of false consciousness ultimately depends on the symbolic alignment of elite and subordinate classes. In this whole bargain, the members of the subordinate groups often lose all capacity to take political decisions and actions since they are always already implicated in the web of false consciousness. Through their nobility and respect for the privileged, the non-elites are left only to strengthen the existing structures of social deference.


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It could be for this reason alone (that does enlarge and not diminish the more physically manifest matters like sex or hunger) that the categories and values of human beings must be studied. Quite often, radical attacks originate in critiques within the hegemony—in taking the values of the ruling elites seriously, while claiming that they (the elites) do not. It calls upon the elites to take their own rhetoric seriously and in the process, threatens to appeal to the sincere members of the elites from within the system rather than from outside it.18 It is from this point of view that one must look at the hidden transcripts (and often quite glaringly blatant ones) that the Digger world produced and disseminated in the communities of Surry and Buckinghamshire. I am referring to the distinction that James Scott makes between public/official transcripts of resistance and the offstage negation of that very public face whereby the dissenters create a social space for themselves, often through ritual codes and symbolic gestures of reversal like rumor and euphemism, grumbling and storytelling. This second category Scott names as the hidden transcripts of resistance and revolt. One vital characteristic of such hidden transcripts as outlined by Scott is that they are “specific to a given social site and to a particular set of actors”(Domination and the Arts Of Resistance 14). An insurrection based on hidden transcript has to be widely shared, must represent years of common grumbling and frustration and then be expressed as group action. This kind of social cohesion helps create a high moral density, which in turn leads into concerted group action. This takes us to the other trait of the hidden transcripts: that they are never isolated from the official transcripts but often each feeds on the other. In the words of Scott: “ . . . the frontier between the public and the hidden transcripts is a zone of constant struggle between the dominant and subordinate—not a solid wall” (Domination 14). The hidden transcripts may then suddenly burst into official forms and already veiled official transcripts, on the other hand, may quickly develop into intense hidden ones. Finally, hidden transcripts, Scott warns us, are not to be confused with mere speech acts but comprise of a variety of practices. However, Scott includes what he calls “pan-European world-upside-down broadsheets” largely in the category of hidden transcripts. He finds the broadsheets, though in print, not to be classified with public ones because “the element of disguise plays a vital role . . . by the anonymity of their authorship, by the ambiguity of their meaning, and by the addition of obviously harmless material” (Domination 170). Obviously he is giving us a macro picture of the pamphlet culture, more intricate local and regional specifics being beyond the scope of his wider theoretical concerns in this particular book. I would argue in this context that the Digger pamphlets themselves represent the public portion of radical sectarian resistance during the Civil War, which however, is greatly


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enhanced by certain symbolic hidden transcripts, which foment offstage for years and are vitally shared by the whole Digger community. The most obvious ones deal with the (English) Nation and the (Christian) Religion. a) Radicalizing Nation and the metaphor of the Norman Conquest: To invoke the theme of lost rural rights is particularly dangerous with respect to English history since it has often tended to degenerate into folk-nationalism. ‘Merrie England’ has sometimes found an unusual ally in native socialism. One has only to recall J. R. Green’s nineteenth-century invocations (in The Making of England [1882] and The Conquest of England [1884] ) of an Anglo Saxon farmer commonwealth and Freeman’s patriotic orations to the departed glories of Godfric the Sheriff, Aelfric of Gelling and the fallen Senlac. Or more recently, George Thomson in his Marxism and Poetry (1945), conjured up Prospero’s magic island, a vague subconscious world of the poet’s imagination far removed from the unrestricted competition of bourgeois city life. Alastair MacLachlan reminds us that “The theme of racial deprivation and degeneration—of an English character once self-reliant and independent, but now physically and spiritually stunted—had a particular resonance in the late nineteenth-century milieu of Social Darwinism; and it could equally be detected in the ‘poignant chapters’ of the Hammonds’ threnody to the lost manhood of the English countryside, or in Froude’s search amongst the sturdy farmers of “Oceana’ for a free and uncontaminated Anglo-Celtic racial stock.” (38–9). Such an approach could give legitimation to a changeless English political structure that never existed. It is more useful to see how the metaphors of changelessness, etched in the popular memory, were being used for radical purposes. In Puritanism and Revolution Christopher Hill has traced four distinct interpretations of the idea of the Norman Conquest in seventeenth-century England (Puritanism and Revolution 79–80). First, the Royalist doctrine that justified absolutism in the familial situation and then extended the metaphor to the national context (Filmer). The Second would be the Whig version (Coke, Harrington), a standpoint interpreting common law as the embodiment of Anglo- Saxon liberties that backed continuity and the sanctity of property. This is followed by the Leveller version suggesting drastic legal reform—ending all privileges, backing juries instead of judges and rejecting professional lawyers. Finally, there is the Digger version of Winstanley, and to a certain extent Hartlib, that rejected all property rights, demanded total overhauling of law, and found politics and religion to be complementary. In Winstanley, the notion of the Norman bondage and the need to break free of that bondage was based on the claim that all men have individual


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rights. The guild based model of economic redistribution that Winstanley advances must be complemented by a liberal scheme of civil rights. A notion of economic equality must dialectically entwine with a political notion of political liberty. And this scheme of radical human liberty can be best realized if developed from the rough and tumble of the daily practice of the community. Winstanley tried to harness the hidden transcript beneath the popular opposition against the Norman Conquest and sought to galvanize decades of anger and frustration into an idea of radical human rights. This idea of political liberty also gets enshrined into a radical notion of law. Winstanley presents his arguments against the Norman Conquest theme most clearly in the coda to the pamphlet An Appeal to the House of Commons, where he charts four ways through which the Normans helped create social strata and classes “ . . . which William the Conqueror brought into England” (Sabine 311). The first is the creation of the English gentry, through custom and usurpation of common land. He shrewdly uses his hidden transcript version of the Norman Conquest, itself an otherwise romantic, paternalistic idea in order to challenge the customary nature of the English gentry. The second is the vocation of the lawyer and foreign language (He names French and Norman as imported languages. The law was written and administered in Norman French, what came to be known as ‘‘Law French”). The laws were created, and more importantly disseminated in order to create and maintain social and economic hierarchies. Third, the idea of community was nationalized at the expense of its micro level local nature (Winstanley uses the word “neighbourhood” as a positive notion of community) by William’s decree that “Controversies and Causes” have to be tried in Westminster. Finally, William’s introduction of the paying of taxes and tithes to the clergy. He concludes the pamphlet masterfully by appealing to the Nation as a category: “These are some of the Norman Laws and Burthens, which if removed, it would be much ease and quiet to this Nation” (Sabine 312). Behind these four exploitative schemes, Winstanley’s main concern is individual liberty. The Normans have created inequality by undermining individual freedom since “ . . . they will not suffer us to dig quietly upon Georges Hill” (Sabine 311). And the Normans would justify their driving off the Diggers based of the ancient Custom. It is a direct confrontation between Custom and free choice. This emphasis on the Norman Conquest metaphor was a sure way of inspiring popular imagination and then giving it a slow and gradual radical turn. And it was first and foremost a political point. Winstanley attached immense importance to the Rump Parliament’s Act of May 19, 1649 declaring England a free commonwealth which “breaks in pieces . . . the laws of


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the commonwealth” (Sabine 384). He was equally enthusiastic about the Act abolishing monarchy in March 17, 1649 as well as the Engagement to maintain the erected commonwealth. These he interpreted as giving Englishmen the right to exercise their “creation freedom” by cultivating the common land. He was devastated when the Rump also passed an Act to maintain the old laws. He referred to this latter act as “made by a piece of the parliament” (Sabine 302) and warned his people of the Norman Kingly powers reasserting themselves under disguise and subterfuge. In his more optimistic moments, as in the pamphlet England’s Spirit Unfoulded Winstanley urges support for the parliament on the grounds that the two earlier acts declare “plainly that this State Government aims at, and that is, that all English men may have their freedom in and to the land; and be freed from the slavery of the Norman Conquest” (Aylmer 117). At a more radical level, as in An Appeal to the House of Commons, Winstanley shifts the metaphor to make an economic point, that “When William the Conqueror came in, he took the land from the English, both the Enclosures from the Gentry, and the Commons and waste lands from the poor people, and gave our land to his Norman souldiers” (Sabine 304). But even this economic exploitation finally rests on enslavement and ravishing of human liberty. The Normans promised to make the Saxons free people if the latter assisted them “ . . . with plate, taxes, freequarter, and our persons” but instead enslaved them through abstract laws and top-down customs (Sabine 304). And in A Letter to the Lord Fairfax he adds in the same vein that the Norman Conqueror surely “took freedom from every one, and became the disposer both of the inclosures and commons; therefore every one, upon the recovery of the conquest, ought to return to freedom again, without respecting persons, or els what benefit shall the common people have (that have suffered most in these wars) by the victory that is got over the King?” (Sabine 287) It must be underlined that Winstanley was not acting as a vanguard intellectual who sought to instrumentally use the hidden transcript of the Norman Conquest for political mileage. He always considered himself as an insider, as an integral part of the Digger project. He saw himself to be sharing the hidden transcript, sincerely believing in the oppressive nature of the Norman laws and customs. In fact, Winstanley’s reflections on the Norman Conquest metaphor were more than just political. Everything in Winstanley is interconnected, especially politics and religion. His sharing of the hidden transcript was then much more a communal affair in the most liberating sense of the term. The Norman rule has to be abolished not merely for historical and constitutional reasons but for achieving religious freedom as well. In A New Yeers Gift, the Norman Yoke theme is incorporated truly into his


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religious framework. England has been “under the power of the Beast, kingly property” but if it “is to be the tenth part of the city of Babylon that falls from the Beast first,” then covetous royal property must be cast out, and the crown set upon “Christ’s head, who is universal love or free community” (Sabine 385–6). Kingly power is covetous power, not unlike the ways of false religion and hence can be legitimately equated with the equally false and tyrannical notion of the Norman Yoke. Once again we notice the emphasis on “free community.” Winstanley never uses the transcript of the Norman Conquest in the narrow paternalistic sense. Instead, he constantly modifies it to suit his own radical agenda, co-opting the idea of the Nation as a necessary step to achieve his goal of common cultivation and individual liberty. James Holstun has observed rightly that Winstanley constantly undercuts the image of pre-conquest English golden age even as he uses the very same trope in his arguments: “his anti-Normanism seldom becomes philo-Saxonism . . . Winstanley uses a historical rhetoric to fashion a natural rights argument” (Ehud’s Dagger 395). b) Radical Christianity and the Diggers: Norman Cohn begins The Pursuit Of Millennium, his long and sweeping survey of the apocalyptic and messianic traditions in the Christian West, by mentioning passages in the Judaic Prophetical Books dating from the eighthcentury B.C. which foretell how, after the Day of Yahweh—a Day of Wrath—a righteous and saving remnant of Palestine will be rebuilt for the chosen people. This version of the rebuilt Jerusalem, a Zion which would “ . . . become the spiritual capital of the world and to which all nations flow” was mainly “ . . . directed to the lower strata of the Jewish population as nationalist propaganda” (Cohn 20). Soon, as spiritual responses to political threats (like those from the Maccabeans and the Romans), crucial passages were detected in the Book of Daniel and in the Book of Revelation which dealt with themes of the Second Coming and the Apocalypse. The paradigm was being set: as the tyranny of a demonic power of boundless destructiveness pervades the world, an hour would strike suddenly when the Saints of God would rise up and overthrow it. The question was the spirit with which this vision would be employed for practical purposes in the future. This early vision has more often than not been fuelled by fantastic and reactionary zeal among believers. But millenarianism was not always been used for reactionary purposes, as Cohn seems to suggest. Sometimes, these apocalyptic themes were being successfully used for more humanistic and radical purposes. Till early modern times through the Middle Ages, parts of


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Gaul, Flanders and the Rhine valley especially was witness to peoples’ crusades, headed by messiahs or living saints who drew their inspiration from Hellenic Judaism (Sibylline or Johannine prophesies) concerning the Last Days. One way this dichotomy about the usage of the apocalyptic vision originated and spread was through an opposition that developed between Tertullian’s historical interpretation of scripture and Origen’s allegorical approach during the early Christian era.19 Tertullian’s wish to preserve the full historicity of the Scripture prevailed, but Augustine preferred to keep Origen’s purely spiritual method alive in his attempted compromise. Though Augustine favored a figurative reading and rejected the purely abstract spiritual interpretation, his idealism removed the concrete event from history and “transposed it to a perspective of eternity “ (Auerbach 42). During the middle ages, often the opposition between the literal and the figurative became blurred, so much so that the figurative exercise became an intellectual exercise and the Old Testament was stripped of its normative character to show that it was merely an allegory. Christianity was in danger of losing its conception of providential history, its intrinsic concreteness. With the Reformation, that changed and the Old Testament was also read as a Jewish history and Jewish law. In England John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs compared the biblical nation of Israel to England and brought back the idea of the concrete historical event in interpreting scriptures. By then Jacob Boehme and Nicholas of Cusa’s books on mysticism also began to be published in English translation.20 But most importantly, there was beginning to develop in England a division within the nature of Independency itself. William M. Lamont has shown that the rejection of Foxe by Puritan ministers in 1641 indicates that there was a fundamental difference between the orthodox and the radical Independent thinkers.21 T. Wilson Hayes in Winstanley the Digger observes that the “Orthodox Independents such as Thomas Goodwin, John Goodwin, and Stephen Marshall, following the prophecies of Brightman, Mede, and Archer, look for an apocalyptic millennium when Christ will literally appear again to lead the saints into the New Jerusalem. Radical Independents such as John Everard, Giles Randall, John Saltmarsh, following Foxe, foresee a political, social and economic revolution, demanding great sacrifice, that will gradually progress toward a more ideal state” (12). Hayes sees the difference in terms of typology (in case of radicals) and allegory (in the Orthodoxy) but there is more to radical Independency than merely the nature of their interpreting the sacred texts. The radical liberals like Winstanley were not to be satisfied with a merely hermeneutical exercise of interpreting sacred texts, but would rather use those readings for challenging local deferential structures.


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Both Hill and Sabine, who are among the few who try to place Winstanley within a wider context of religious radicals, agree that in matters of scriptural interpretation and innovation it is futile to look for absolute originality in Winstanley. It is difficult to decide which writers during the revolutionary epoch were producing original ideas and which were merely recombining commonplaces. Winstanley’s originality lay elsewhere—in fusing the radical interpretations with everyday applications. He came to be dominated by his desire to create a social and economic utopia out of the Revolution. Radical Independent doctrines extended through the Hermeticists, Lollards, Familists, Muggletonians, Ranters, Quakers, Seekers and through independents like Nicholas Storch of Zwickau, Thomas Munzer and Agricola, Dell and Carpenter, Mrs. Attaway and William Jenny and of course John Milton. Thomas Edward’s 1646 tirade Gangraena charts an impressive list of a variety of such sectarians. In order to understand the nature of Winstanley’s religious radicalism and how it affected his social vision, it is less important to stress the differences between him and the group he belonged to than to emphasize that the ideas of the group differed fundamentally with what was officially referred to as Puritanism. Often the radicals were motivated by mysticism and materialism at the same time and were different from the Presbyterians and most English Baptists. Calvinism was in its method ultimately rationalistic in the analytic sense. The enthusiasts, on the other hand, were rationalistic in the experimental sense of the term and placed experience and self-authentication beyond analysis and strict exegesis. The effects of this denial were profound and far more destructive for clericalism, ecclesiasticalism, dogmatism and supernaturalism in both the Catholic and the Reformed religion. As Sabine has pointed out “ . . . When they asserted the sufficiency of ‘experimental’ religion, Winstanley, Fox, Saltmarsh, and Dell knew exactly what they meant to reject” (35). Gerrard Winstanley, according to his own confession, joined a Baptist Church before 1648 and before that was “ . . . a blind Professour and strict goer to church, as they call it, and a hearer of Sermons.” He then “believed as the learned clergy . . . believed” (Sabine 243). After his financial ruin and flight to the country he took to writing. He tells us in The Saints Paradise that God speaks sometimes inwardly to the believers through a voice, dream or revelation. And then famously, in The New Law of Righteousness, dated January 26, 1649, he revealed the messages in a trance to “work together, Eat bread together” and “Let Israel go free; Israel shall neither give nor take hire” (Sabine 190, 199). In August 1649 he referred to this experience in “A Watchword to the City Of London” and described the writings of the New


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Law as the fulfillment of instructions from God (Sabine 315). A self-proclaimed trance cannot be verified but it is clear that he believed he had literally heard and seen God, and that God to him was external as well as internal. In that sense, Winstanley did believe in a personal God (as has been testified by the pamphlet Fire In The Bush, a testimony to the personal nature of Divinity and as such a thorny issue to those who define his religion via his economic concerns). But Divinity to Winstanley was also a matter of extreme public concern. It is certainly not enough to say, as Hill has emphasized, “ that Winstanley had a mystical experience, as though that ended the matter” (The Religion 22). He might have had a flash of inspiration but that inspiration fitted well with the political crisis that engulfed England during the winter of 1648–9. Radical ideas were flying around and the major undertaking of digging at St. George’s Hill had to be supported by the authority of a revelatory voice.22 The nature of Winstanley’s radicalism can be illuminated through certain positive appraisals of religion as well as through his critiques of certain tenets of any institutionalized religion. Winstanley believed that both God and the Devil resided within Man. Since the Fall good and evil struggle within him and God is not to be found external to Man: “He that looks for a God without himself, and worships God at a distance, he worships he knows not what but is . . . deceived by the imagination of his own heart” (“The Saints Paradise”: 54–55). The Spirit and power of God dwell in every Man and Woman. The Devil as well as the Son were not real persons but were internalized within Man. The individual always preserves a dialectic relationship with the external world. The Spirit within Man relates through Reason to the Spirit of the world and other men. God is at the same time an immanent as well as transcendent concept. The concept of transcendence did not contradict his materialist beliefs. In fact it fortified his social and economic beliefs. The fallout of this radical assertion was a complex cluster of ideas. First, a belief in Mortalism, the idea that the soul sleeps from death until the general resurrection (or dies with the body). An extreme version of Mortalism was annihilationism—denial of any ultimate resurrection. The second is the passionate belief in the liberty of conscience. He had been attacking antinomian immoralism since 1648—those who say “that which was sin formerly . . . is now no sin while thou art under the law of love” (The Saints Paradise 7). But this attack on the Ranter variety of extreme liberalism was supplemented by an ardent conviction in the freedom of human spirit that will be achieved through religious righteousness. Third, and most subversively, a heretical belief in the doctrine of universal salvation, that at the end even the


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damned shall be rescued from Hell by the mercy of God. This feature is more pronounced in his earlier writings and is connected to two other characteristics of his belief system. First, that the world is governed by the universal power of love (so no part of the universe could be irretrievably damned). And second, that the unfolding of this cosmic power of love runs through a series of stages and ends in universal salvation. Thus, in the “Mysterie of God,” we find a final stage even beyond the last judgment, in which the damned will be released out of hell. The word Reason is also one of the most radical categories in Winstanley and one of the most tortuously defined. It cannot be directly equated with rationalism. But it is also not irrationalism. As Sabine put it in the last line of his Introduction, the Winstanleyan sense of brotherhood “lifts the non-rational above the brutalities of irrationalism” (Sabine 70). By “non-rational” Sabine probably meant a benign consideration for the material as well as the collective, the bedrock values in Winstanley. Nicola Baxter defines Winstanleyan reason not “as a definitive name or an abstract term, but as a condition or state of reasonableness . . .” (Baxter 187). Reason can be defined positively as well as negatively. Positively, it springs forth from all things natural as from the godhead. Universal love, God, Righteousness—all are manifestations of Reason. In Light Shining in Buckinghamshire: Reason in all men teaches them to do as they would be done by and in More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire: Reason equals cooperation. (Sabine 611, 627). Above all, the faculty of reason helps man govern according to peace and wisdom: “ now this word reason is not the alone name of this spirituall power: but every one may give him a name, according to the spirituall Power that they feel and see rules in them, carrying them forth in actions to preserve their fellow creatures as well as themselves.” (Sabine 105) Negatively defined, reason is the opposite of selfishness, the Serpent. As John Sanderson puts it while discussing Winstanley’s early writings: “Plainly, the tension between the moral imperatives of Reason and man’s self-interest was for Winstanley the product of a flesh-infested world, and as this world is superceded, men will increasingly recognize that their individual interests demand the preservation of all mankind.” (459) Reason is directly opposed to the lusting after the objects of creation that divides individual from his fellow creatures. In other words, Reason helps thwart reification and alienation. In Truth Lifting up its Head, Winstanley explains why he uses the word Reason instead of God. Partly it was because he had “been held under darkness” by the word God. Reason is “spiritual power that guides all men’s reasoning in right order and to a right end . . . It hath regard to the whole creation, and knits every creature together into a oneness, a making every creature to be an upholder of his fellow” (Sabine 109, 11, 124–5).


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Winstanley was most severely critical of traditions (sacerdotal and institutional) and hearsay though he greatly valued the concept of a community of human beings. He was simultaneously critical of the hireling clergy (as a distinct class of professionally trained persons) who preach from books and other men’s words. He considered hireling preaching as a trade that has no connection to religion. Thus, he writes: “The Clergie and professors of England, in their public worships doe practice their own inventions, which neither Reason, nor Scripture, doth warrant; and yet they call them Gods Ordinances” (Sabine 140). He completely rejected ordinances, that is, the total baggage—prayer, preaching, Holy Communion, baptism, and Sabbath observance. Consequently he insisted that laymen (and sometimes women) may preach, since experience is a copy written by the Spirit of God upon the hearts of believers. He hoped that people would “burn their books, forsake their private chambers and Colleges, and deny their Ecclesiastical trade, which their fathers and friends for worldly living sake have bred them to . . .” (Sabine 130). Every man must attend revelation through his own efforts and therefore needs no worldly skill or learning. He repeatedly insists that the founder of Christianity and his apostles were simple, uneducated men—fishermen, tentmakers and publicans, skills far removed from what the university teaches. If there is any fundamental doctrine in Winstanley, it is his insistence on simplicity and love. He was a peace-loving person who insisted on action when it was necessary. Messianism in politics has most often than not tended to assume an illiberal and meddlesome role. But as Sabine has perceptively observed “He was saved . . . by the completeness with which he had broken away from any doctrinal or theological standard of religion” (39). DIGGING AND MILLENARIANISM: ACTION OR CONTEMPLATION? One central question that has vexed Digger scholarship has been the primacy of religious or economic considerations in Winstanley’s thought. Was he a mystic or a rationalist? Winthrop S. Hudson was one of the earliest Winstanley critics to identify what he preferred to call a “mystifying paradox”: “if the new order was dependent on God’s decision, why should Winstanley embark upon a programme of practical action” (7). Winstanley’s digging project consequently becomes an “eschatological sign” to restore Creation to a community of Mankind “in which men should be of one heart and mind” (Hudson 5). This is a neat scheme but makes a romantic reactionary out of Winstanley. On the other hand, George Juretic and David Petegorsky stress the


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modernity of Winstanley’s ideas, relating them forward to the nineteenth and twentieth-century socialism. The whole debate actually hinges upon a wrong premise, a false binary, namely that social and religious issues are mutually exclusive. They are not— not today and certainly not in the early modern world. Religious experiences and social concerns might at times be configurationally segregated spheres but it was certainly not the case with the Diggers. In fact, a central driving force in Winstanley is to break free of such conceptual oppositions. These divisions, “ . . . between spirit and matter, clergy and laity, heaven and earth, labor and prayer, Eden and England and the New Jerusalem,” as James Holstun observes, was alien to Winstanley’s radical liberal philosophy. Neither is there any opposition between secular life and millennium. As Sabine so insightfully put it long ago: “Religion was for him a way of life, not a ceremonial, a profession, or a metaphysic” (48). It is an open-ended dialectic scheme through which Winstanley wanted to draw a connection between religion and society. The connection was not foolproof or overarching. Often, it was subject to the most democratic of revisions but there is an overall pattern in those revisions. At one end of the dialectic is the religious hope with a yearning for the second coming of Christ. The important thing to note is that the Son of Righteousness is each man himself. Every man is himself responsible for regenerating himself. Anointing makes Christ and the Saint one, single mystical body. The Anointing is “the power, life and peace of the Father . . . this is Christ in you, which is the hope of glory, or the earnest of the future inheritance.” (Sabine 120, 166, 169) As Christopher Hill points out: “More specific than an expectation of the reign of Christ on earth in the near future, which was widespread in the exiting 1640s, was the millenarian belief which often accompanied the heresies of the radical underground—that Christ would reign and judge in and through his saints.” (The Religion 10) This was Winstanley’s millenarian hope, a completely unorthodox one at that time period. But it was not an interim Holy Commonwealth that Winstanley was looking for in his eschatology. It was a permanent commonwealth in the world itself that he was interested in. It is true that in his early writings Winstanley is more of a reformer who is suspicious of hastening action even in millenarian terms: “Even as wee see any tree, corn or cattell, grows up in the eye of man by degrees; for as these creaturs doe not attaine to perfection on a sudden; neither doth the spirit of Righteouesness rise up on a sudden perfection, but by degrees” (Sabine 166). Indeed his pacifism is legendary: “ . . . every one is to wait, till the Lord Christ do spread himself in multiplicities of bodies . . . It must be one power in all, making all to give their consent to confirm this


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law of righteousness and reason” (Sabine 182–3). But in his later writings, especially in The Law of Freedom, as we have seen, the eschatology is replaced by a more programmatic social vision. On the other end of this open-ended dialectic lies the project of digging. It is true that the idea of digging has an ecclesiastical context, especially in the “Church Reformation” debate. Thinkers like William Goodwin encourage men to “dig” into their “heart” hoping to find the wisdom that is hid in Christ. Goodwin’s usage in his sermons of terms like “spade,” “mountains,” “herbs,” “watering pots,” “herbs,” “grasse,” “dung,” “Hay and Stubble” and “fertile soil” also are drawn from scriptures, especially from the Book of Job. And Winstanley’s debt to the reading of scriptures cannot be overlooked. But the act of digging to the Diggers was not merely metaphorical, as some commentators of Winstanley have suggested. To begin with, digging had an immediate worldly concern for the Diggers: a simple need to feed themselves. At the individual level this action also would give peace to the personal self which has obeyed the Spirit and the dictums of Reason. But his action was also a declaration to the Gentry and the freeholders that the poor people of England would not take their domination for granted, in religious as well as in social practice. It was a direct and not merely a symbolic challenge to the powers that be. The cultivation of the Commons, Winstanley was convinced, would lead to vast economic benefits to the nation. It would also lead to the elimination of poverty and unemployment, since every single individual could use the abundant wastelands of England and feed himself or herself. Thus he writes in An Appeale to all Englishmen to judge between bondage and Freedome: “By this means, within a short time, there will be no beggar or idle person in England”(Sabine 669). An increase in production would reduce the prices which had oppressed the people since the war: “The waste and common land being improved will bring in plenty of all commodities, and prevent famine, and pull down the price of corn to 12d. a bushel or less” (Sabine 669). Robert Coster, in A Mite Cast into the Common Treasury, dated December 18, 1649, says that cultivation of the waste land will increase the area under cultivation, which will help reduce the price of land and thereby the price of the agricultural commodities: “if the poor men which want Imployment and others which work for little wages, would go to dresse and improve the common and waste Lands, whether it would not bring down the prizes of Land, which doth principally cause all manner of things to be deare ?” (Sabine 657) Digging and cultivating the Commons would also lead to perceptible social benefits. Crime, often the product of economic distress, would actually be reduced: “ This freedom in planting the common land will prevent


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robbing, and stealing and murdering and prisons will not so mightily be filled with prisoners” (Sabine 669). Finally such activities would lead to national unity and England would be the first country to establish an enlightened social order based on the true spirit of Christianity. THAT ELUSIVE SYNTHESIS In Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642, Conrad Russell observes that both the Liberal and the Marxist revel in working within a Hegelian framework, by affirming that progressive change occurs only when there is a clash of opposites. This was, as it were, the ancillary part of liberal orthodoxy. What he misses is that the best of the liberal and marxist historians (certainly Gardiner and Lawrence Stone on the liberal side and Hill, Manning and E. P. Thompson on the marxist), of the English Revolution would love to reject the Hegelian synthesis because of two plain reasons. For one, there are always more than a pair of opposites or variables (but not absolute contingent ones) and more than one cycle of causes (not infinite contingency again). Second, a teleological journey towards an Absolute Spirit or the State in the Hegelian mode has never been a very progressive idea. But guarding ourselves from employing any kind of master narrative—class, deference, neutralism or localism—does not mean that the alternative ought to be non-explanations based on pure serendipity and contingencies that help “trigger” issues. Gerrard Winstanley was a myriad-minded man. What he possessed was an immense breadth of outlook and a sense of active realism to go with that. Thanks to his encounters with the speculators in the London marketplace and later in Surrey, with the landholding gentry, he understood that the honest tradesman and the extreme poor copyholder are the ones who would perish if the revolutionary promises were not fulfilled and only Parliamentarians enjoyed the benefits. The same was the case with the Reformed Religion: Winstanley easily realized that the evolving English Anglican Church system was bound to marry the institutionalized ethos of the Catholic world with that of High Puritanism. This to him would be a halfway approach, a betrayal of the promise of the very idea of reformation. Progress and justice are not notions of crystal-clear content and unmistakable indices, which may be easily measured. Nor is Revolution the name of a transition from one social structure to another. From a Digger point of view it is the name of a heightened political consciousness and popular participation. Winstanley was not out there writing pamphlets and digging earth to make a metaphorical point nor to foment disorder, carrying to the logical extreme the puritan rejection of divine, political and ecclesiastical


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authority. At least till 1652 he was acting since he understood that the middling sort, in both the city and the town, was splitting into two social groups: the freeholding yeomen joining the lords in their manors and the copyholders, who were forced into joining the landless wage laborers. His model of constructing a society on the bedrock of common economic and cultural assumptions, as illustrated in The Law Of Freedom, may seem at times to be simplistic, but his great importance lies in his realization that the economic level is inseparable from the questions of nationalism and religion, law and politics. Winstanley’s life is a living proof that the causal explanation of the English Revolution (at least for the revolts within that revolution) cannot come from divorcing the “hard” social factors of economic change and class struggle from the “soft” ones of culture and discourse. It is not that he looked for a grand synthesis of all these diverse fields, nor did he attempt to provide a double-decker model of base and superstructure. He identified the malady in a case specific manner and tried to fight it pragmatically—sometimes with an inward pacifism, often through communication and at times with anger and direct action.


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Chapter Four

Turning the World Upside Down and the Limits of Liberalism: The Delayed Radicalism of the Ranters

The story of the English Civil War takes a curious turn in the wake of the suppression of the Levellers by Cromwellian troops in 1649.1 It was not sufficient for the powers-that-be to merely suppress the activist ways of the radical sects. Both sides understood that at a more fundamental level, the struggle between the Parliament and the sectarians was also a war of ideas. The Cromwellians realized the need for the simultaneous deployment of ideological state apparatuses through statutes and acts, along with more repressive and brutish forces, in order to crush the radical forces. One such maneuver was the Parliament’s act of August 9, 1650 against blasphemy. This act was really a modification of the Blasphemy Ordinance of May 1648, which did not include the sectarian activities in its ambit. The act of August 1650 was aimed specifically against the writings and practices of a sectarian group known as the Ranters. In the immediate context there could really be only one way out for the radical forces by the early 1650s: to hope for an egalitarian and communal society with genuine individual rights; and these altered values of yearning and hope gradually transformed the Ranters into a purely millennial force. The radicals were making a crucial changeover from active radicalism to contemplation. By 1650 those who began to surrender to the metaphor of hope could choose one of two modes—that of inwardness and quietism, as exemplified by the Quakers, or that of excess and violence, as manifested in the various activities and tracts that overtook the milieu to which the Ranters belonged. In this chapter I will consider the philosophical and the literary implications of this crucial turn—from active dissent to contemplation—in Civil 155


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War radicalism, principally by elaborating the various dimensions of the writings of one of the central players of the Ranter movement: Laurence Clarkson. The fundamental question is whether the activities of the Ranters can be considered liberal or politically radical. I argue that the Ranters underpoliticize the concerns of the mid-century sectarians, and that their social and literary activities ultimately underscore a politics of conformism. It is true that the Ranters were remarkably feisty in the face of continuous persecution—both physical and polemical—that originated not only from the “dominant subculture” of the Parliamentarians and the Presbyterians but also from the competing “subordinate subcultures” like the Quakers and later from the Muggletonians. But the Ranters could not or did not wish to transform their anger arising from such persecution into any meaningful reformist or revolutionary program. In the context of the Civil War, we have noticed how the sectarians had deployed the metaphor of enthusiasm in order to imagine radical political societies. The antinomian idea of the liberty of the free spirit was at the core of Miltonic and Winstanleyian thought. The earlier radicals shunned ecclesiastical authoritarianism, all sorts of religious dogmatism, and formal religious paraphernalia by creatively reading the scriptures, writing radical tracts based on their readings, and, in the process, ended up inspiring their readers. Most of all, they were engaged in political action and were directly involved in shaping the discourse of the mid-century public sphere. In short, the enthusiastic sensibility defined the liberalism of the earlier sectaries. In Ranters we see very little of such enthusiasm. There is not much talk about political action or social reform in their writings. Instead, the Ranters engage in skilful reading of the scriptures primarily to encourage personal millennial salvation. Their vision of history and the world either gets manifested within the personal or becomes dissolved in eternity. The Ranter “I” is the cosmic personality. The “I” does not engage itself sufficiently with the immediate radical concerns of the Diggers and the Levellers. Unlike the Diggers and the Levellers, the Ranters are also not too keen about projecting any vision of political equality and individual freedom. Rather than challenging or trying to reform the existing power structures, the Ranters reconcile with their socially alienated status. They do not provide us with any idea of the nature or extent of participation of the general population in the political decision-making process. This participatory aspect is at the core of radical liberals like Winstanley and classical Republicans like Milton. Instead, we have a very different notion of community among the Ranters, which cannot be called liberal. As Joan Webber has pointed out, there is a great divide between Anglican communion and Leveller community, between mystical body politic and collective body politic.2 I contend


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that Clarkson, as a typical Ranter, is paradoxically closer to the Anglican political-theological model, as if he were re-theologizing religion, forcing it back into a purely Christological form, cleansed of its seventeenth-century political accretions. As a consequence, the earlier sectarian interests of transforming the existing power structures by proposing a fresh economic, legal and political blueprint does not impress the Ranters. There is also another crucial difference between the Ranters and the sectarians who operated mainly around 1649–50. From a broad political point of view, the Ranters ultimately fail as a movement, not just because they were unable to cohere as a group or because they did not have any unified program, but because at a more basic level there is an inherent retrogressive strand in the Ranter philosophy and linguistic innovations, which develop paradoxically from their questioning spirit. In the writings and actions of Republicans and the Diggers we have witnessed the practice of idea of tolerance and diversity in political and religious spheres. But we have also marked that among the earlier sectarians, toleration as a very basic liberal quality has always been conditional and judgmental, that is to say, even the tolerationists among the sectarians have actively countered the oppressive nature of religious and political authoritarianism. Toleration and political neutrality are not one and the same thing, nor is toleration and endurance. In fact, an active pursuing of freedom, rationality and self-determination are three positive characteristics that mark a tolerant social movement or community. In the Ranters, we notice a shift in this liberal definition of toleration. Though the Ranters question social hierarchies and conservatism, they never form any judgment against the oppressors. In fact, Clarkson is very critical about the very idea of judgment, or what he calls “estimation,” is his writings. The radical questioning on their part leads finally to an acute form of skepticism, which in turn leads at worst to political quiescence and at best to a state of radical undecidibility.3 There has been a fascinating polemic as to the true nature of the Ranters.4 Norman Cohn tries to draw a pattern in religious psychological deviancy by comparing the Ranters with other victims of such deluded revolutionary eschatology like the Joachites, the flagellants of Thuringia and the medieval Brethren of the Free Spirit or Spiritual Liberty. J.C. Davis’s defining polemical intervention, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians, altogether denies the Ranters any sectarian, theological or ideological coherency, arguing rather that they are fictitious products of the Puritan heresiographers. J. F. McGregor describes the Ranters as mystical antinomians and not the “ . . . spokesmen for a sect or movement but prophets of certain universal truths which they had come to comprehend through personal revelation”(McGregor and Reay 129).


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On the other hand A.L.Morton and Christopher Hill notice a coherent polemical and rhetorical similarity in the writings of Abiezer Coppe, Laurence Clarkson, Joseph Salmon and Jacob Bauthumley in the sense that they all reject contemporary religious and political hierarchies. G. E. Aylmer supports the position taken by Hill and asserts that though the Ranters “ . . . were never an organized sect in the denominational sense, with a recognizable membership . . . they were enough of a movement for the threat to seem a credible one”(Aylmer 219). James Holstun, while acknowledging the Ranters as an authentic force of popular resistance emphasizes that as a group, the Ranters failed because they could not relate their libidinal existence and their critique of the existing social hierarchies to any meaningful and sustainable utopian praxis.5 At a slight angle to this debate stands another band of Ranter scholars who stress the importance of the manic excess of the Ranter language and lifestyle. In Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660, Nigel Smith conducts a hermeneutic study of the various Ranter texts and often connects their language with the exegetical in Christian theology. Clement Hawes declares, “The Ranters so named by their enemies, constituted a radical milieu especially given to the enthusiastic rhetorical mode” (Hawes 34). Both Hawes and Jonathan Sawday underscore the rhetoric of inspired madness and the manic mode in the Ranter texts by placing the Ranters within historical and revolutionary milieux, carefully avoiding a pathological and symptomatic explanation like the one espoused by Cohn. From another angle, the Ranter philosophy seems to have many conceptual similarities with what Jurgen Habermas has designated as the philosophy of the far-left in modern and post-modern times, “ . . . who could only imagine the revolution as a leap out of the concurring barbarism of prehistory, as an exploding of the continuity of all history” (The Philosophical Discourse 58). There are two basic elements in which the Ranters show tantalizingly close affinity with the far-left and neo-conservative philosophers and social thinkers of modern times, elements that take them away from the philosophy of liberal praxis that we see among the Diggers, the Levellers and the Republicans. One, the Ranters hypostatize the process of mutual understanding and praxis and inflate that to the level of the subject writ large. And two, their adoption of an absolute monist philosophy precludes them from acknowledging all dualist or even finitely hegemonic structures. By monism I mean a philosophy that claims that all things, no matter how many or of what variety, can be reduced to one unified thing in time, space, or quality.6 The conscious and the unconscious, expressive self-realization and domesticated excesses, structures that ensure freedom and those that suppress it, all flow into each other.


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These two traits—nurturing contemplative subjectivity and discounting hegemonic structures—joined together, lead to a situation where the crises that fired the Diggers and the Levellers to act decisively against the top-down national political governance, the deferential local structures, the cooption of antinomian tendencies by magisterial Protestantism and so on, no longer evoke a similar reformist or revolutionary reaction from the Ranters. Habermas has succinctly summarized such a non-conformist but hardly radical situation when the “ . . . subject (that) knows itself, determines itself, and realizes itself ” by breaking down all normative contents into an ethic of internal responsibility (The Philosophical Discourse 357). By an ethics of responsibility I mean a non-judgmental acknowledgement of the Other’s alterity, to which one cannot lay hold of and which always exceeds one’s grasp or political action.7 An ethics based on responsibility for the Other is absolutely unconditional in its scope for tolerance. Such an ethics, which has close ties to pantheistic monism, always attempts to assimilate all forms of alterity and plurality to sameness and in thus refrains from taking any political action. An ethics based on praxis, on the other hand, sets limits to its tolerance for the political Other and upon transgression of such limits, acts through empirical means like reforms and revolutions in order to achieve its goals.8 The paradox is that the ethic of responsibility that the far left espouses, rather than an ethic of praxis, stretches radical liberalism to its limit. There is an ominous side to it that makes any claim by a Ranter like Clarkson to be thinking and acting ethically simply vacuous. If there are really no differences, then there can be no respect for or any acknowledgment of the qualities and differences of the Other. This internal contradiction among the Ranters is compounded by the fact that they are constantly persecuted by the Cromwellians, effectively guiding the Ranters to a classic neo-conservative reaction, that, if the political and social system functions on reification and on hounding out political dissenters, the only way to counter it would be in taking shelter within a realm of subjective freedom. The result is that instead of engaging with their persecutors politically, the Ranters consciously allow themselves a contemplative and purely linguistic zone of freedom. Eventually, such a standpoint only permits them to degenerate into the authoritarian system that the Rump propounded. THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAWRENCE CLARKSON Laurence Clarkson or Claxton (1615–67) spent his childhood in Preston, where he was brought up in the Church of England.9 He soon turned into a Presbyterian and then to an Independent. As an Independent, he became a


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parish priest in Norfolk. Thereafter, he lived an itinerant life. In 1644 he joined the Anabaptists and was frequently imprisoned for indulging in unconventional Baptist practices, notably for practicing rebaptism or “dipping.” For the next four years, Clarkson was a wandering preacher in Kent, Hertfordshire and Lincolnshire, and followed the life of a Seeker. During this time, he began writing religious pamphlets. He spent the next phase of his life as a preacher in an Army regiment and in looking for a suitable parish in London. In early 1649, he became a Ranter. For the next two years he was imprisoned intermittently and his books were burned publicly. Subsequently, he resumed his wandering life as an astrologer, and in 1658 became a disciple of John Reeve, the Muggletonian, had a rather stormy relationship with Ludowig Muggleton himself, and again wrote several tracts, including his spiritual autobiography The Lost Sheep Found. In 1667 Clarkson died as a debtor in Ludgate jail. At the most obvious level, and in consonance with the Leveller and the Digger ideas, one does detect among the Ranters an attack on the privileges of power and money and a bitter distaste for the formal and outward in religious activities. The unknown writer of A Justification of the Mad Crew affirms, “The Poor and the rich are both made by God . . . He pulleth down the mighty from their Throne, and sets up men of low degree” (“A Justification” 203). Here we notice that the radical dichotomies of low and high, rich and poor, are still intact. Joseph Salmon notes in A Rout, A Rout that in the altered political scenario after 1650, the Parliament has taken the monarch’s position of power and “That the present condition of the Army, or the present appearance of the supreme Power amongst them, renders them in darkness, and far below the pure Light and Life of God” (A Collection 194). Clearly, the idea of the powerful is sharply contrasted with that of the powerless, and the standard dualistic structure of God as the source of Light fighting the dark forces of evil is invoked, fully in keeping with earlier radical ideas. On the religious front, the Ranters severely critique the formal, the external and the textual. The writer of A Justification of the Mad Crew is vitriolic on idolaters and “worshippers of many Gods” (199). In fact, the whole tract is a justification for a living, breathing God detected in every object in the created cosmos. The author subtitles the pamphlet as “The Madnesse and Weaknesse of God in Man Proves Wisdom and Strength” (198). In Laurence Clarkson’s writings too, one discovers a similar and an acute Protestant distaste for the externalities of religion. In A Single Eye, All Light, No Darkness; Light and Darkness One, a singularly clear manifesto of extreme Protestant monism, Clarkson begins by pointing out that his “God is not limited


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to pen, inke, and paper” (A Collection 164). God’s significance lies rather in the fact that he is capable of making the “ . . . darkness of the Jew light, as well as the Gentile . . . for never was there more superstition, more darkness in the Churches than now” (A Collection 164). There is also a simultaneous attack on rituals and the Scripture, by putting these against the “natural” acts of swearing, adultery and theft. Clarkson makes it clear that people who place a premium on the Scripture are not at all persuaded by the logic or argument within the Scripture; rather they are affected by the “titles in the Scripture,” which is based on a false and an outward estimation of the Scripture. In fact, there is a constant attempt in A Single Eye to differentiate among various kinds of estimation and judgment. Clarkson specifically decides to assail two illiberal and conservative attributes: preconceived imagination and faulty estimation. He puts forth the thesis that Drunkenness, Adultery, Theft, Swearing and such other traits are pure and valueless concepts rather than vices. The idea of vice is man-made and arbitrary: there cannot be anything sinful. The idea of Sin is a human construct, the product of imagination and a needless judgmental tendency in humans, which finds some sort of perverted pleasure in evaluating the conduct of their fellow beings on an imaginary moral scale. Such tendencies are hypocritical and false: “Sin, it is only a name without substance, hath no being in God” (A Collection 167). Estimation or passing moral judgment on the activities of other human beings, to Clarkson, is a formal attribute and hence nondivine. Opposed to that is body and life, the two concrete substantial things. Imagination is also a derogatory characteristic in Winstanley, but unlike Clarkson, he pits Reason (a norm and not merely matter) as a countervailing force against Imagination. The idea of estimation is a conundrum simply because it is ultimately based not on a universal yardstick, but rather, on subjective and preconceived opinions of humans disguised in the garb of universalism. Clarkson cites from Romans 14.5: “One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike,” and goes on to conclude that “ . . . what to one is pure, to another is impure; herein it appreareth but a bare estimation” (Clarkson 170). Clarkson’s idea of “estimation” is of central importance if one is to understand the ethics that characterize the Ranter writings. It is based on an idea of responsibility rather than on an idea of taking any radical stance or action. The ethical, in the Ranters, lies in being responsible to others, exterior beings.10 At its pantheistic core, the Ranters continuously seek radical alterity in the various and the variegated facets of existence. To be judgmental of the


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“other” from such an angle is a central defect. The Ranter ethics, from which springs their politics, is a continuous attempt of refraining from domesticating the “other,” acknowledging the importance of the “other” in the scheme of things and including it within a single, unified cosmic structure. The binary oppositions of dialectical schemes—between those who are governed and those who govern, the free and the unfree, the deprived and the opulent—based on which the Diggers and the Levellers worked, make very little sense to the Ranters. To the Ranters, such binary oppositions are hypocritical and have rather opportunistic potentialities hidden within them. The Ranter anger at Winstanley for betraying his own ideas and converting into a respectable freeholder later on in life perhaps derives its strength from a realization that Winstanley’s guild-based Digger politics had its origin in a liberal dialectical philosophy. Winstanley’s turning back on his own precepts might seem like a result of relying on such a more liberal position. In any case, it proved to Clarkson that moderate liberal politics of the Digger variety is ultimately self-defeating. Besides, to the Ranters, such binary frameworks would not only be philosophically limiting, they would also be politically suicidal after 1650. In the face of constant persecution, the Ranters realized that it would be much more judicious to include the existing power structures within their radical millennial vision, rather than to actively challenge them through any concerted action. Consequently, the Ranters seek a political form by their way of living and linguistic excesses that will have no metaphysical foundation. At a practical level, such an approach leads to political impasse. Politics is legitimized purely through hesitation and a radical undecidibility. Ranters will not make a passage from ethics to politics, from responsibility to questioning. Since there is an active repression of antagonism, contestation and struggle inherent in their ethics, the Ranters typically refrain from taking political decisions at the ontic, empirical level. Simon Critchley’s words about the deconstructionists are applicable here: “Any attempt to bring closure to the social is continually denied by the non-totalizable relation to the other. Social space is an infinite splintering, or fragmentation, of space into spaces”(238). Moreover, the ethical relationship with the “other” is not specified, that is, it is not indicated whether the Ranters stand in any relationship of unequal power with the Cromwellians or with God. This makes it impossible to conceive of any symmetrical community of equals or any fraternity of free individuals. Instead, we have a monist community of the equal and the unequal, the symmetrical and the asymmetrical, continuing happily in a changeless society. Clarkson is actually motivated by an ethics that entirely nullifies any notion of right or wrong, good or bad, light or darkness. In fact, such an


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ethics is the very basis of his monocular conceptual framework: a single eye. Since, to the pure all things are pure, it would imply that the various objects and issues in the world can be finally reconciled if we conceive of everything as being part of a divine plan. This ethical core is the driving force in most Ranter prose. Clarkson is taking radical Calvinism to its logical conclusion by proffering the idea that Sin and Damnation, Virtue and Holiness, are all ultimately figments of human imagination, constructed citadels of a conventional and antiseptic liberal morality. Thus, in Clarkson’s pure world, there is no scope, indeed no need, to judge the Parliamentarians or the Royalists in the political world; nor is it possible to estimate the Anglicans, the Presbyterians or even the Papists as far as religion goes. All antagonism either gets magically sucked within one’s mind or is projected toward an infinite mystical being called God. This change in the ethical stance actually leads to an altered political vision—one that is more internalized and wary of taking political action. MARKERS OF TRANSITION There are very significant markers of this transition in radical content among the Ranters. One of them is a self-conscious shift from the foundations of experiential reason to a faith-based approach, a definite change from the rhetoric that had characterized the initial phases of the Civil War. For instance, there is a marked distrust in the claims of Reason in Clarkson, which, as we have witnessed, was one of the cornerstones of Winstanley’s radical vision. Clarkson views Reason as an ambiguous and amorphous category that can neither be fully trusted nor abandoned at will. Abandoning Reason, instrumental or experimental, takes Civil War sectarian radicalism a huge step away from its liberal activist core. A Single Eye begins by invoking Reason. But it is not the Reason that fights Imagination; rather Imagination works in collusion with Reason. Clarkson argues at this stage that God is invoked in the most interior villages and towns of England as a divine Form, rather than as an infinite Being. He posits that those who worship God as a formal creature, differentiate falsely between types of abstractions like light and darkness, good and evil. It is in this context that Clarkson uses the word Reason: in order to ironically characterize the Scriptural readings that create one more such absurd binary, that between a passionate (angry) and an affectionate God, “ . . . so passionate with the one, and affectionate with the other, so that in conclusion they imagine him as themselves, not infinite, but finite”(Clarkson 163). Here, Reason is incidental and instrumental, admitted solely for the interpreting of


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the scriptures. One might argue that Clarkson is, in fact, writing in consonance with the best radical traditions that encourage a hermeneutical interpretation of the scriptures, rather than a literal one. But if such is the case, it is deliberately left unclear. Moreover, Reason is never pitted against Form and Imagination, which was a standard practice in radical writings from Winstanley to Warr. In The Lost Sheep Found, a work written when Clarkson was in his post-Ranter phase, Reason is used as a double-edged metaphor, now supplicating before Imagination, now seeking a higher pedestal. In fact, Reason gets connected with Insincerity and Vainglory in this spiritual biography. Halfway through his journey and at that point among the Seekers, Clarkson writes, “ . . . for notwithstanding I had great knowledge in the things of God, yet I found my heart was not right to what I pretended, but full of lust and vain-glory of this world, finding no truth in sincerity that I had gone through, but meerely the vain pride and conceit of Reasons imagination” (Clarkson 20). In another context, referring to Everard and Winstanley, Clarkson not only indicts them for vainglory and self-love, but also argues against the Digger project because “ . . . Reason lord thereof, and that Reason was naturally enclined to love itself above any other, and to gather to itself what riches and honor it could, that so it might bear away over its fellow creatures”(Clarkson 27). In other words, Clarkson’s charge is that the Diggers became followers of instrumental reason. One notices a definite disappointment among the Ranters like Clarkson with the more politically effective radical movements of the previous years, because the Ranters felt that the leaders of those earlier movements pretended to a universality but were ultimately self-serving. But there is a logical leap involved here, since the Ranters attack not just Winstanley or Lilburne, but Reason itself for being conceptually an ineffective radical tool. This debunking of reason as a conceptual tool is only backed up by a simultaneous shift in liberal radicalism itself among the Ranters: from religious enthusiasm to religious mysticism. In the later part of his autobiography, Clarkson produces spurts of passionate mystical appeal. There is a persistent mystical urge to surrender oneself to the Divine being, away from all worldly cares: “I knew not what I was before I came in being, so for ever after I should know nothing after this my being was dissolved; but even as a stream from the Ocean was distinct in it self while it was a stream, but when returned to the Ocean, was therein swallowed and become one with the Ocean; so the Spirit of man while in the body, was distinct from God, but when death came it returned to God, and so became one with God, yea God it self ” (Clarkson 28). One cannot miss in such statements a movement


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away from radical materialist concerns. In fact, almost unknowingly, Clarkson is ushering in, through the back door, the body/spirit duality by making God a spiritual and higher category. The dialectic between the human and the divine, that kept each dependent on the other in the thinking of the enthusiasts, gets lost in the process. Astrology, magic and witchcraft also attract Clarkson at a later stage in his career, but he does not explain how far he used such practices for any radical purposes. He seems to be quite aware of the trickery involved in such arts but was still not loath to use them himself. A remarkable thing happens when Clarkson actually ceases to be a Ranter and joins the Muggletonians instead during the 1660s. His belief in fideism is absolutely categorical now. At this stage, his journey’s end, he does not believe in reason at all: “I came to see the vast difference of Faith and Reason . . . that from Faith’s royal Prerogative all its seed in Adam was saved, and all Reason in the fallen Angel was damned” (Clarkson 34). It is quite interesting to notice that Faith is invoked along with Prerogative, something that the Levellers and the Diggers fought vehemently against. In fact, Clarkson’s whole argument for adopting the Muggletonian Commission at the end of his career pivots around the crucial difference between Revelation and Reason. He chooses the former. A moment later his Ranter ways of nullifying binary categories get the better of him and he rejects both Faith and Reason: “you read of two ways, a true and a false, the narrow way, and the broad way, that is, the way of Faith, and the way of Reason” (A Collection 45). But he immediately goes on to undermine reason again: “unless you deny Scripture, you cannot but confess, that as truth is onely in a Commission, so then of necessity it must follow, that the true Commissioners are the narrow way, and the way of Faith to eternal truth” (A Collection 45). This statement clearly records a mystical stasis with no wider vision about how such a Commission can be helpful in creating a human community. In fact, there is hardly any notion of community in Clarkson. Clarkson is actually preaching an inward movement not unlike the Quakers, a movement that celebrates quietist individual salvation rather than any comprehensive social well-being. This inward movement is also expressed in Clarkson’s style and linguistic practice. One sure indicator of the anti-rationalism of the Ranters is the domain of language. They are quite self-conscious about the nature and proper use of language. Like most other schismatics of the time, the Ranters essentially celebrate the Spirit, something anterior to language and beyond the text. But at the same time, they are forced to communicate their ideas through language. Among all other sectarians of this period, it is in the Ranters that the classic antinomian dilemma, writing against writing,


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becomes most pronounced. In such circumstances, the use of shocking language to drive their point home is a conscious strategy, which, I would argue, finally has limited usefulness from the point of view of practical radicalism. Nigel Smith has shown that the Ranters were not atypical Puritans in the sense that they accepted the logocentric nature of God, creation and the divine intervention.11 From John 1:1–2 they too picked up the notion that the Word and God have an archetypal connection. Besides, the act of creation was itself simultaneously an act of making and naming, since it could be deduced that God had indeed “spoken” the world into creation. However, while orthodox Puritans perceived the Word to be fixed and static within the scriptural bounds, to the sectarians the transmission of the “word” and “letter” through dreams, visions and radical revelations was of much greater authority than a purely literal and textual interpretation of the Bible. Jacob Bauthumley reflects in The Light and Dark sides of God, “ . . . that there is nothing in the Treatise then the very Language, and correspondency of Scripture in the Letter of it” (A Collection 230). The free interpretive value of the spirit of the Scripture rather than any one-to-one correspondence was always more important to the radicals because the freedom involved in freely interpreting sacred texts thwarts any final control over public discourse by the ecclesiastical and political authorities. This does not mean that the sectarians rejected the Scriptures as a gloss and as a text of hand. And though there was a constant tension among the sectarians themselves on how to deal with the spirit/letter dyad, they never accepted a complete disjunction between the two. In fact, many of them were so anxious about linguistic corruption of the translated versions of the original Biblical texts that they attempted to return to the roots of reformation, so to say, and tried to grasp the spirit of the Hebrew or the Greek Bibles. The Ranter pamphlets are also heavily grounded in the Bible. However, in order to avoid the obvious literalism of the verbal form, which they detest and consider unenlightened, the Ranters take refuge in an overtly expressive and violent language. The Ranters use Biblical imagery in order to make antinomian points that get personalized through the allegorical context of the imagery. Joseph Salmon ruminates that the Scriptural allegories are important because “they bear Testimony to the great Oracle of Life and Salvation (Christ Jesus). They are the letter & sound of truth” (A Collection 221). In a brilliant double-handed acknowledgement of the Letter in Scriptural readings, Abiezer Coppe admits in his recantation tract, Coppes’s Return, that the Scripture does hold forth truth “ . . . in Types, Allegories, Metaphors, Prophecies, promises in plain terms,” but he immediately goes


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on to undermine that claim by asserting that such allegorizations can only be felt through the spirit and “ . . . confirmed by joyful experience” (A Collection 154). The uses of allegory, and the collapse of the literal in those allegories in the Ranter texts, successfully de-historicize their concerns. For example, the Ranters place more significance on the mystery of the allegorical re-enactment of the Fall inside every individual rather than considering it as a historical event. This allegory encourages the regeneration of the individual by hinting at the rebirth of Christ, the second Adam in each individual. The writer of A Justification of the Mad Crew creates a timeless image of the first two human beings as a symbol of pure life-force. Adam and Eve have transcended all shame, hell and heaven, and even death. They are the “new creatures” who are “past dying, perishing or rotting, all things in them rotted damned and plagued already” (13). Adam and Eve get resurrected in successive generations of freedom-loving individuals as “ . . . nothing else but a blessing, a sweet flavour, a sweet smell to all, in all upon all: they are life of all” (13). Such dehistoricizing might be useful at times, especially if it gets individualized. But more often than not, it leads to pure transcendence. It is instructive to notice in the previous example that the anonymous writer allegorizes the idea of life-force in terms of a saccharine sweetness and not in terms of freedom or action. Such figurative condoning of timelessness in Biblical allegories leads extreme radical sects like the Ranters towards espousing a prophetic voice that claims to antedate all language. The Quakers and the Ranters were gradually doing away with the word/Word dichotomy altogether and shifting towards the monism of the Word. The only inspirational light was to come from the transcendent Spirit that had pantheistic manifestations. So, Coppe, in Some Sweet Sips gradually moves from being an enthusiast in the initial stages towards mysticism.12 A mystic advances gradually in his religious sensibility through successive stages of regenerative awareness, each stage being of a higher spiritual order than the previous one. Eventually, a mystic attains a stage of transcendental awakening, passing through his earlier stages of imperfection and corruption. The mystic, through this gradual regenerative process, attains a sense of individual piety. The enthusiast, on the other hand, conceives the knowledge of God in a spontaneous and immediate manner. There are no stages in his awakening. His sense of religion is inspirational. An enthusiast also seeks to narrow the gulf between heaven and earth, and his God is neither esoteric nor aristocratic in remoteness. The communicative content in the mystic’s experience of God is wrapped in a lyrical ecstasy, whereas for an


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enthusiast, the Holy Spirit and scriptures often speak through them explicitly and without any equivocation. An enthusiast deals in Types, a mystic, in Truth. The spiritual journey of Clarkson testifies to this very transition—from a life that seemed to be filled with skepticism at every turn, he ultimately settles down with faith and mysticism. Indeed, the mystical turn at the end of The Lost Sheep Found is remarkable because Clarkson had covered almost all the major schismatic religious groups (he names seven of them) traveling extensively throughout England, and in his encounter with each group, he was dissatisfied mostly because the groups were not liberal enough. Soon after he had spent some time with the Quakers, Clarkson chanced upon the writings of John Reeve and was immediately persuaded by the latter’s theory of Three Commissions and Two Seeds. In a tone of abject surrender to Reeve’s precepts, Clarkson declares that he has finally discovered the “true God and right devil” and that such a discovery is a result of the revelation of the third and the last Commission. It is here that he finally comes out against Reason and places all his energy in glorifying blind Faith. There is a detailed question-answer session about the relative merits of this Commission as opposed to Reason but never for once is the true nature of the Commission explained. This might be a defensive gesture. After years of searching in vain for a milieu that might be more accepting of his radical thoughts and actions, Clarkson might have been frustrated and opted for the other extreme: Faith. As suits a mystic who wants to hold on to a precept rather than any political action, he declares that the “ . . . Commission doth change the power of corruption, that though he is not free from motions to sin, yet he is freed from the act of sin” (Clarkson 37). It is almost a return to the language of Grace. The lost sheep is found and the prodigal son returns to his father. Sectarian radicalism comes full circle indeed. That the linguistic innovations of the Ranters complete a full circle in the context of the English Revolution is best exemplified by the constant internalization and the private nature of their discourse. Joan Webber in The Eloquent “I” made a distinction between two distinct literary styles about selfhood, analytical as well as rhetorical, which she called the “conservative Anglican” and the “radical Puritan.” Since she was making a general point about literary style, the word Puritan was used very broadly, though she was acutely aware of the sectarians. “The conservative I,” Webber writes, “is meditative, anti-historical, obscure and ambiguous, symbolic . . . Time for him is an aspect of eternity, there is nothing new under the sun; every man is like Adam, who contained all” (7). She goes on to point out that the self in the conservative imagination is always general, macrocosmic, something that


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overcomes space and time so that it can symbolize the shared and the unified experience of the race or the community. At the opposite end of the spectrum lies the active, time-bound and literal Puritan. As a person he is interested in the specifics of history and about himself—not about man as a species being. Most of all, the Puritan’s prose is less volatile and less resonant than that of his Anglican counterpart. In the Levellers and the Diggers, in spite of the frequent allegorizations, we have precisely witnessed this Puritan spirit at work. They were all men of history, action and progress. They still had faith in the logical conclusion of the Revolution: a democratic leveling of law and politics, land and capital. Their worldview was always, in the last instance, grounded in the everyday and the mundane. Even in their literary style one notices transcendental motifs and figurations repeatedly and periodically being offset through pleas of actual, lived improvement. And that was done through a spare prose. We see a sharp and urgent shift in literary style among the sectarians after 1650 when it becomes increasingly clear that the Rump is not going to compromise its top-down agendas in favor of further political reforms. The result is that we now witness the gradual moving of certain sects towards a literal form of millenarianism, its importance appreciated purely for eschatological (and not for social) reasons. In linguistic terms, this rhetoric of inwardness initially takes two forms: the language of silence and the language of eloquent violence. The first is exemplified by the Quakers and the second by the Ranters. We see numerous traits and usages of the conservative Anglican “I” in the Ranter literary style. Though the Ranter allegories are more akin to prophecies than autobiographies, the world is expressed through the experiences of the self. The Ranter prophets were convinced that they either spoke the words of God or that God pronounced through them. Consequently, the Ranter “I” is the cosmic personality. This personality is not only general, but also extremely elusive. Such a personality does not directly communicate with the reader/listener; rather he continuously teases the reader about his identity. His personality consequently becomes different from that of the narrator—fragmented and made deliberately ambiguous (A Collection 63). Clarkson’s spiritual autobiography, The Lost Sheep Found, is a typical case of a world that gets reflected to us through such an internalized “I.” In this case, the chosen genre is autobiography. The discourses of the various sects that Clarkson describes are not important in their own right or for their contribution to society, but have significance only to the extent that they help or hinder the spiritual quest of the author. Clarkson begins his autobiography by making it amply clear that the writing would deal with


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his personal sojourn: “the various leadings forth of my spirit through such Dispensation, from the year 1630, to this year 1660” (Clarkson 3). Immediately after that, he moves on to explain his encounters with the local parish minister and describes how he could not participate in customs and rituals that his family demanded of him. But he simultaneously craves personal salvation: “I have many times privately prayed with rough Sinders under my bare knees, that to God might hear from me; and when I could not end my Prayers with tears running down my cheeks, I was afraid some sin shut the attention of God from me”(Clarkson 6). This certainly is a private and mystical quest. Subsequently among the Presbyterians, his next stop, Clarkson affirms once again that he is interested in being personally saved, and that he looked for “ . . . those signs and marks in my own soul, and to that end neglected all things that might hinder it” (Clarkson 8). Here is an intensely meditative and personal way of looking at what salvation might entail, quite contrary to the time-bound and historical spirit of the radical Protestant. There is also a complementary attempt to turn this personalized “I” into an elusive, general and timeless one. Once he received the Muggletonian Commission his whole “being was dissolved” into the Ocean of Oneness (Clarkson 28). Clarkson speaks eloquently against all forms of God and history and categorically points out that: “a Commission changeth not the nature of man,” which is timeless (Clarkson 37). All that the Commission does is to change the power of corruption. In other words, Clarkson comes to believe that there cannot possibly be any permanent change in the way things are, since human nature is fixed and immutable. As he moves into his mystical provenance, he builds a case against history, precisely because history is conditional and not immutable. History alters, transforms, revolutionizes—and that is not acceptable to Clarkson: “all our Philosophical Histories are dubious to the Writter, and indeed the Reader thereof approves of no other language, but what is written with a proviso, under correction of better judgments, and more learned Fathers” (Clarkson 38). Many conservative critics of the Ranters have argued that their literary style is abnormal, since they indulge in an excessive use of language and are preoccupied with the self.13 Clement Hawes has described the rhetorical mode that the Ranters use as manic and goes on to portray this particular mode as “a well developed, thoroughly collective, and politically oppositional rhetoric of madness” (14). Hawes is right in so far as he identifies the manic mode of the Ranters as being a conscious strategy stemming from both (1) class resentment and (2) continuous persecution by authority. He also correctly salvages the manic mode from the merely pathological. However, Hawes extends the same logic to brand the Ranters as oppositional and subversive but fails to convince.


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If indeed there was a subcultural ethos of the manic subjectivity during that period, it could not have been dissident because, as we have discussed, it became too fragmented and too self-conscious at the same time. Both traits made it impossible to carry on any meaningful radical politics in the practical sense of the term. In Mania and Literary Style, The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from The Ranters to Christopher Smart, Hawes rightly points out that it would be simplistic merely to dismiss the self-conscious manic rhetoric of the Ranters as straightforward monologue. Abiezer Coppe, for instance, was speaking within himself and against the “greater ranks” when he dramatized the relationship of the “inaudible with the higher ups,” the common population and the political authorities. Coppe employed a similar rhetorical technique in participating in a kind of typographical parody as a reaction to the logical art of preaching. His position is particularly interesting because he was an insider who underwent classical training at Warwick school and at All Souls, Oxford. He deliberately composes his arguments with an emphasis on divine light and subject-centered inspiration. Such illogical language threatens the godly Puritan society which stresses strict discipline and rational argumentative structure in religion. It is only in his recantation that Coppe returns to the catechetical form and syllogism, but that too appears to be left-handed rantings, sounding more like exculpations. Hawes argues for an enthusiastic subject position that “ . . . would not apply primarily to the vicissitudes of an ‘individual’ ego, but to the subject-positions constructed within a deliberately oppositional discourse” (Hawes 37). Hawes particularly highlights Coppe’s appropriation and selective reapplication of the different biblical topoi for making enthusiastic claims. Hawes’ arguments are particularly effective in salvaging the Ranters from a discourse of pathological manic mode. But it is one thing to say that the Ranters’ subject positions were overdetermined and quite another to deduct that such subject positions were effectively oppositional. Millennial subjectivity does not necessarily lead to any vision of antagonistic movement against the forces of privilege and prerogative. Indeed, Coppe does rework the Scripture but the subject positions he attains are often inward-looking rather than oppositional. In A Second Fiery Flying Roule Coppe clearly states, “The mystery is mine (mostly) that which I most delight in, that’s the Jewel. The historie’s mine also, that’s the Cabinet.” (A Collection 112). There is a humanistic core in Coppe, but that does not get translated into any anarchic, utopian, reformist or revolutionary framework: “My spirit dwells with God, the Judge of all, dwells in him, sups with him, in him, feeds on him, with him, in him. My humanity shall dwell with, sup with, eat with humanity” (A Collection 112). Here is a usage of a hallmark Anglican


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rhetorical strategy: dramatization of the world within himself. The concern for humanity and God is judged on the basis of their relationships with an inward-looking spirit. More often than not, Coppe undertakes a purely ontological and mystical exercise, rather than an enthusiastic one. Religious enthusiasm, as opposed to mysticism, seeks to engage the component of religion in order to forge an active social vision, as we saw in Winstanley or Milton. That kind of community-based holistic vision is clearly absent in Coppe. He is ultimately fighting a millenarian battle with the specter of his Oxbridge friends, rather than participating in any grassroot oppositional discourse. The use of pronouns among the radicals also depicts their social and political priorities. Gillian Alexander has shown that conservative authors in the seventeenth-century shifted interchangeably from “I” to the use of “we” since Anglicans and mainstream Puritans would tend to generalize the world or mankind rather than deal with specific collectivities or human beings.14 In contrast, in the radical texts “we” is used to signal or awaken “some kind of group consciousness and collective political activity “ and not the whole of humanity (Alexander 224). In the manic rhetoric of the Ranters there is a preponderance and self-conscious use of “I” and “we” is mostly absent. In The Lost Sheep Found, Clarkson iterates once too often that as an itinerant preacher with radical ideas it was his duty to preach and it was the people who came in droves to hear him speak and who were immediately affected by his doctrines. The other parish priests were envious of his success and tried to sabotage Clarkson’s sermonizing ventures. One does not dispute the truth-value of his contentions. But what is striking is the way Clarkson shifts the whole discourse of a radical community by giving priority to the “I” instead of the more humble and communicative “we.” There is no sense of any collective religious activity here, nor in the least the development of any political consciousness. Hawes has rightly identified this particular form of enunciation as being sublime. One cannot, however, take such an easy step from sublimity to subversiveness, as he does. Instead, this transfigured use of subjectivity shows once again the turmoil within a fragmented self trying to come to terms with a hostile political situation and getting cocooned within its own visions and aspirations. The first person/third person relationships in the Ranter texts are even more interesting. The we/he distinction is never in syntactic opposition. In this the Ranters do follow the usual radical pronominalizing pattern, since they do not see God and themselves as radically distinct and hierarchically opposed beings. The third person “they” is often used to describe the enemies of the millennium, namely the lords and the merchants. Besides, the


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Ranters also frequently “thee” and “thou” their social superiors, not unlike the Diggers and the Quakers. But these pronominal usages never become revolutionary tools for leveling or toward democratic ends because all these pronouns are sometimes also used interchangeably by the Ranters, and hence, the vital distinction that the innovative pronoun system is supposed to make loses its sheen and the desired effect. The fundamental point is that in different ways the Ranters repeatedly get themselves enmeshed in rhetorical solipsism. This is not because they are by nature defensive or that they try to preserve a unified sense of selfhood in order to protect themselves in the face of political persecution of the 1650s. In fact, their getting more vociferous and the whole idea of ranting, which was supposed to challenge hierarchies, involuntarily divides each one of them from within. The result is that the world, the text, the audience— indeed the whole cosmos itself—gets a microcosmic manifestation within the “I.” The potentially dissident ends up being a contemplative non-conformist. SHIFTING EQUATION WITH POWER Another important alteration in radical philosophy in and after the 1650s appears in the changing equation that such radicals have with the idea of Power. Since a gradient in the existing power structure ultimately is the basis for all radical utopian politics, any failure to understand such a structure is fatal for active liberal ventures. It is cause for concern to notice that Power, like Reason, is an extremely ambiguous word in Clarkson’s oeuvre. To thus use crucial terms like Power might be a strategic move to placate his wouldbe tormentors, or it might be a product of the realization that Power needs to imagined, and if need be, exercised, against the tormentors even though its nature might be violent. When Clarkson talks about Power gone is the placating, productive and pluralist language of Winstanley or the legislative approach of the Levellers. Instead, in A Single Eye he is relativizing the idea of Power itself to an all encompassing and unchangeable force. According to Clarkson, Power is at least two-fold: that which is directly derived from God and that which emanates from God’s creations like the sun and the stars: “From hence you may observe the connexion hereof run in plural, not Power, but Powers; a Power of darknesse, a Power of light, a Power in the wicked, a Power in the Godly; yet you have held forth in the same Scripture but one God” (A Collection 167). Such an assertion puts Clarkson in a very counterintuitive position. His aim here is to prove that the charges against imagined malpractices like Adultery and Equivocation are baseless, since


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these attributes are ordained by God himself, and hence are part of the Divine plan. But, he takes that claim to its logical extreme and tries to show that such categories as Sin and Power are also ultimately imagined. The power of Sin and the power of Darkness are celebrated as willful acts of God. After such knowledge, there is scarcely any space left to challenge any topdown hierarchical structure. Clarkson’s claim is ultimately based on a norm of responsibility that does not consider moderate liberal yardsticks like limited tolerance, rule of law (even natural law), or property rights as sacrosanct. In the process, such an ethic makes any norm-based politics impossible. Unless we can identify the nature of Power and track down its deployment, all kinds of political vision become irrelevant. Such an approach goes against the very nature of radical politics that the Diggers and the Levellers were envisaging. Power can cut in many different ways, unless identified and contextualized. Clarkson’s vision reaches a crescendo as he celebrates absolute purity: “thou art risen from title to act, from act to power, from power to his name, and that only one name, pure and undefiled; so that now thou art of purer eys than to behold any iniquity, so that Devil is God, Hell is Heaven, Sin Holiness, Damnation Salvation, this and only this in the First Resurrection” (A Collection 173). His pure eyes refuse to behold any inequity. It is a most liberating ethics that he proposes, but an absolute pure being cannot simply bring forth radical political changes, because he is by definition, blind to all sorts of hierarchies and oppressive forces. To the “pure,” as Clarkson makes it amply clear, “ . . . all is sweet and lovely” (A Collection 173). This ambiguous relationship with existing structures of power is best exemplified by the playful nature of the Ranters’ linguistic usages. The Ranter often consciously decides to engage in language games with his reader. One consistent attribute of the Civil War radicals is their rejection of the formal—in literature, in religion and generally in all social transactions. Enthusiastic and antinomian rhetoric is impatient with all kinds of mediation, which it calls formalism. But once the urgency of representing the “presence” of the various manifestations of God takes an extreme position, as it does in case of the Ranters, the rhetoric cannot escape the fragmentary implications of form. A classic instance is Coppe seeking to mediate between difference and non-difference in Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spiritual Wine: ”O dear hearts! Let us look for, and hasten to the comming of the Day of God, wherein the Heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the Elements, (Rudiments, first principles). (Imagine formall Prayer, formall Baptism, formal Supper—&c.) shall melt away, with fervent heate, into God;


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and all Forms, appearances, Types, Signs, Shadows, Flesh, do, and shall melt away (with fervent heate) into power, reallity, Truth, the thing signified, Substance, Spirit” (A Collection 71).

It is an extraordinary litany of verbiage that Coppe deploys so that the forms “melt away.” Types, shadows and indeed, most presciently, “signs” must now be put on paper before the transition into “the thing signified.” Clement Hawes concedes: “The manic rhetoric of fusional identification, then, is not just a matter of a levelling “content,” of radical politics and millennial dreams. It involves a complex constellation of formal shifts as well: from serially iterate metonymies to arresting metaphors, for instance, and from paratactic catalogues to chiasmic crossings” (Hawes 79–80). It is not that the manic mode does not protest. In Clarkson one notices a kind of verbal excess where slippages are deliberate, apparently logical, attempts to break free from the distinction between conceptual abstractions and the world of natural phenomena. He makes them slide each into the other in order to establish a monotheistic world order. In A Single Eye, Clarkson produces such a calculated series of reversals: “whereas thou sayest a sinful act is not produced by the Power of God, its Truth: for that which is not in the Power, cannot be acted by the Power: but an act that is sinful is not in God, nor the Power of God, therefore hath not its being in God, nor acted by the Power of God, for God is light, and in him no darknesse: but sin is darknesse, therefore sin is not in God” (A Collection 168). God is Truth is Power is Light. But Clarkson is selectively choosing his table of equivalents. God does not produce a sinful act since Sin is a part of the dark forces and Darkness is not a part of God. This is a clear violation of his monocular vision of the world, where logically all creation, including Sin and Darkness, is supposed to be a component of the single eye. The litany of linguistic excesses is thus consciously ordered in order to fit his scheme where despite an overall equity in his single world, God retains his seat of Power, towering above his creations: “Love is God, and God is Love; so all pure, all, light, no spot in thee” (A Collection 170). It is rather the Devil who lures the creation with his sinful imaginations. The verbal excesses offer an ingenious and designed scheme of fragmentation actually to maintain the God/Devil, Transgression/Glory, Imagination/Reality dichotomies. But these willful slippages fail to produce a vision of a future where the benevolent order of Light, Power and God will be socially enacted and will also be productive for individual beings. The Ranter rhetoric thus constantly produces slippages that are its chief obstacles to any realization of communitarian hopes. Apocalypse


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becomes an ongoing process, beyond imminent action, indeed even beyond all sorts of gradualist reforms, into a celebration of a fragmentary process of linguistic enunciation. Byron Nelson has correctly suggested that Ranter prose experiments with Wittgenstein’s “tool” conception of language.15Wittgenstein has an ambiguous relationship with post-structuralist indeterminacy of language. In the Blue and Brown Books, he uses the term “language-game” as a synonym for “calculus” and the emphasis is on the use to which language is put. But the later Wittgenstein also suggests that the structure of language determines the way we perceive the world. The deconstructionists have taken the “indeterminacy” factor from him but not the “use” factor. The use factor to them is pure ethics of the “other,” which was not the aim of Wittgenstein. Since the Ranter is convinced of the inability of action, he continuously resorts to joyous verbal excess, to sheer prankishness and parody, so that the prophetic content of that language ceases to be adequate for radical purposes, precisely because of the excess. The extraordinary energy, paradoxically, becomes a sign of political desperation. One reason for such linguistic excesses is to demonstrate that it is unethical and false to deny base and natural instincts. Consequently, there is a deliberate reveling in scatological, visceral and coprophilic details. In Heights in Depths and Depths in Heights, Joseph Salmon writes that he is proud to acknowledge the joys of fleshly ways and could not care less if his “unclean things,” his “tumbling in his own vomit” would become “a derision to all” and “a spectacle of scorn and contempt to every eye” because this very celebration of one’s natural instincts would “become signs and wonders amongst men” (A Collection 213). Salmon attests that such a disgorging from his “foul stomack upon the very face, and appearance of Truth” is necessary because such verbiage evolves from the “cup of pure wrath,” from the “ . . . rankor and venom of this subtil serpent” (A Collection 213). The powers-that-be of this world will be pulled down from their thrones as they witness with amazement such a celebration of our physical world and natural instincts. Linguistic excesses are important to create a sense of awe and wonder among the governing powers. However, it is not explained how such a sense of awe among the rulers would translate itself into a vision of a free and progressive society. One notes instances of this second kind of ranting also in Clarkson. In a frenzied declaration, he asserts the power and wisdom of conventional moral degradations: “What said I, a Swearer, a Drunkard, an Adulterer, a Theef, had these the power and wisdom of God, to Swear, Drink, Whore, and Steal? O dangerous Tenant! O blasphemy of the highest nature! what make God the author of Sin? so a sinful God” (A Collection 169). It becomes apparent that by


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acknowledging and advancing the blasphemous notion of a sinful God, Clarkson immediately undermines his earlier dualistic scheme, when God was a benign power of Goodness, Love and Light. Linguistic excesses undermine his logical attempts to build a structure of social antagonism. In a way, the playful Ranter rhetoric was a reaction to the Puritan logical and rhetorical method, which was influenced greatly by the Ramus-influenced preaching manual, The Arte of Prophesying (1592), by William Perkins. This system of logic assumed that “the understanding of reality is achieved through progressive logical analysis, visualized in a series of bracketed dichotomies revealing the terms of any matter” (McDowell 196). More importantly, any utterance within the Ramist framework had to be subjected to a process of definition and division before enunciation. Obviously, all these had to be cultivated through formal education. Naturally, the free-spirited Ranters, not formally educated, found such a rhetorical method utterly nonsensical and unacceptable. In Winstanley and the Levellers, the reaction to any form of strict logic was spontaneity laced with an urge to communicate with fellow beings in tribulation. Not so with the Ranters. The historic time they found themselves in made them see the world, especially the religious conflicts of the Civil War, as a linguistic anomaly, as a fallout of the confusion of tongues, which would only be resolved with the millennium. Thus, the anonymous author of the Ranter tract A Justification of the Mad Crew (1650) declares that God “ . . . loves as dearly with an infinite unchangeable love the Cavileer as the Roundhead, and the Roundhead as the Cavileer: the Army as abundantly as the Levellers, and the Levellers as the Army: For him there is no distinction” (203). The author is eliding all divisions instead of bracketing dichotomies in order to divide and distinguish the relation of religious identities and terms following the Ramist method. The crucial point to notice, however, is the phrase: “For him there is no distinction.” As a reaction to the strict Ramist logic, the Ranter tract is turning towards the other extreme, that is, towards active skepticism, and hence towards an acceptance of the status quo. The focussed radicalism of the Diggers and the Levellers gets dissipated in the Ranters. NATURE AND THE RANTERS All radical politics in England after 1650 must also confront a related and important issue: the changing notion of nature, from human inclination to participate in a politically deliberative process (among the Levellers and Republicans) to a subjective fulfilling of one’s basic urges (among the


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Ranters). It is this transformed idea of nature that lies at the heart of the Ranters’ celebration of sexuality. The Ranters conceive nature as being quite different from that of the Leveller legal reformers. In the Ranters, nature has little to do with the inclination of human beings to participate in political organizations and governments. The idea of “natural law” connected to human sociability, or constituted by human reason, is abandoned. Rather, nature is a part of the divine plan that engulfs all contraries. Clarkson writes in his autobiography “ . . . I judged that all was a lie, and that there was no devil at all, nor indeed no God but only nature” (Clarkson 32). He further reflects that such a view of nature does neither contradict the Scripture nor History. Nature, to Clarkson, is another term for fulfilling one’s deepest cravings—sexual as well as spiritual. Nature means not denying one’s basic urges, and sensibility or reason does not qualify as basic: “Happy is the man that condemns not himself in those things he alloweth of ” (Clarkson 171). The “allowing of things” points towards a personal gratification, perhaps even hedonism. The shift is definitely towards a subjective fulfillment of one’s natural instincts, rather than towards any socially participatory direction. Not only this, nature is another name for designating what is essential, pure and eternal: “darkness is made light, sin holiness, and all deformity converted into its own pure nature” (Clarkson 172). Clarkson echoes the author of A Justification of the Mad Crew who discovered kindred souls in those who act “ . . . in a holy way as holiness, swearing holily, and drinking holily, whoring holily, all is holy, righteous and good” (A Justification 201). Nature is consequently something to be nurtured and celebrated for personal satisfaction, rather than for any viable radical purpose. This leads us to the Ranters’ rather scandalous notoriety and the oftrepeated charge against their bohemian lifestyle. Conservative, as well as leftliberal, critics have reacted against the Ranter breed of hedonism, mostly because such critics estimate the Ranters precisely on a moral scale against which the Ranters were most vocal.16 There is, however, a more serious allegation that their libertinism led to, or potentially could lead to, a series of unwanted pregnancies and hardships for women. And that does not tally with their radical claims. However, in A Nation of Change and Novelty, Christopher Hill points out that the Ranter libertinism is a direct fallout of church attempts from the fifteenth-century onwards to “ . . . enforce monogamous church marriage on a population which had its own traditional but different marriage customs” (174). Marriage in England during the early modern times was a far more complex and heterogeneous affair was allowed by the conventional and neat definitions of the moralists and legal documents.17 Indeed, marriage was a


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fundamental social institution and both the church and the state enjoyed some legal control over matrimonial affairs. The church insisted upon the active participation in the ceremony of parish clergyman. At the theoretical level, the state backed those writers who tried to base the divine right of kings upon the patriarchal basis embedded in the family structure in their writings. In the 1690s the state got more directly involved when it tried to raise money by putting tax on marriages and then imposed a heavy stamp duty on marriage licenses and certificates. But all these attempts to control the union of two people by enforcing ecclesiastical and legal means were challenged in many creative and ingenious ways. The root cause of such experimentation was of course that there was no consensus within the society at large as to what constituted a legally binding marriage. During the late 1640s and before 1653 (when the Barebone’s Parliament established laws regarding civil marriage), the ecclesiastical courts virtually ceased to function, especially since the old marriage service in church according to the Book of Prayer was denounced as “popish.” Many took to being clandestinely married by clergymen and even by the sectarians. A large number of people were living together in situations of varying uncertainty. A considerable number of English men and women lived in a condition of customary concubinage, illegal according to laws of church or state, but recognized by the neighborhood. One must also remember that the ecclesiastical laws were themselves more latitudinous during the late middle ages and accepted a variety of contractual marriage. In this context, Lawrence Stone informs us “In church law a verbal contract, if duly performed in the present tense before witnesses, was complete in substance, though not in ceremony, and was indissoluble” (Stone 18). But in common or state law, however, and therefore in all matters of property, this contract was considered null and void. Stone goes on to explain the point: “It gave the husband no rights over his wife’s property; it imposed on the wife none of the disabilities of ‘coverture,’ such as being unable to make contracts, or write a will, or run up debts; it gave the wife no right to dower; it gave the children no claim on their parents property as legitimate heirs” (Stone 18). In fact, from the introduction of parish registers in the 1530s to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, as Christopher Hill points out, there had been a long recorded conflict between the church and the radical forces. The church had gradually become interested in registering marriage since periodic bouts of unemployment, enclosure and a rise in the population in the sixteenth-century had led to vagabondage, which in turn, had fostered the production of illegitimate children. Hill concludes that since these children often had to be taken care of by the parish, the parish


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church tried hard not to let the very poor marry. It is clear that the church and the state were responding to the interests of the propertied parents and their kin who would favor the population getting married in the eyes of God and Church rather than in the simply in the eyes of God. The legalistic implications of the legislation of 1653 were again hotly debated in Parliament in 1657 and the result was utter chaos. The Parliament failed to come to consensus on the subject and prolonged the existing legislation for another six months. But it abolished the clause that invalidated all forms of marriage other than the ones prescribed in 1653. This made it appear that almost any form of marriage was now legal. The parliament virtually left it to newly restored ecclesiastical courts to decide the legality of marriages. With this background in mind, Hill is perhaps correct in concluding that the Ranter libertinage was a reaction against “ . . . state and state-church control over personal relations, a rejection of official notions of ‘sin’ [and] also an assertion of male human freedom . . .”(174), but the Ranters were not always consciously reacting against the church control of marriage. A Ranter like Laurence Clarkson was extremely devoted to his wife, and it is not clear whether the distinction that Clarkson makes between her and his other partners owed to Frances Clarkson’s intelligence and endurance, or whether it was a devotion based on the fact that she was his wife. Indeed, there is a serious logical gap between Clarkson’s professing of adultery as being morally equivalent to marital honesty and his claiming special status for his wife. For instance, in The Lost Sheep Found, Clarkson declares “ . . . in the height of this ranting, I was made still careful for moneys for my Wife, onely my body was given to other women” (Clarkson 26). This is a crucial statement, which in a dual sense, undermines the Ranter ideal of sexual radicalism. First, by acknowledging the importance of money, Clarkson is actually admitting that there are indeed certain formal material constructs that require attention. In other words, he is actually erecting a moral foundation based on a material concern—in this case, money—that is incompatible with his skeptical ethical framework. Second, he distinguishes between his wife and other women, which could mean that extramarital relationships are not so sacrosanct as marriage. One must remember that though Clarkson defines marriage as “ . . . no other, but a free consent in love to each to the other before God, and who was sufficient to publish the Contract as my self,” he did, in fact, get married to his bride, with the consent of Frances’s parents (Clarkson 16). The marriage itself took place in the Church. So, it seems that he did have a belief in the institutionalized form of marriage.


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Besides, such a reference to other women is also insulting to those other relationships that he had formed. Third, and most importantly, he is distinguishing between his “body” and something else, presumably his mind or spirit. The body he would share with his many partners, but not his soul or mind. In fact, Clarkson makes the body/life distinction in several other places. In The Lost Sheep Found, he proposes that though he did not believe in resurrection, he realizes “ . . . that which was life in man, went into the infinite Bulk and Bigness, so called God, as drop into the Ocean, and the body rotted in the grave, and for ever to remain” (Clarkson 33). This goes completely against the Ranter philosophy of radical monism that Clarkson so passionately advocates in his tracts. This prioritizing of spirit over body also betrays a mainstream liberal moralist approach, if not something more conservative. The changed idea of nature in the later sectarians like the Ranters also gets manifested at the linguistic level. One way to achieve a radical monism through a linguistic system was to strive to create an Original Language.18 The debate often centered around the nature of Hebrew as the original language. But the radicals who wanted a direct communion with the Spirit discredited that claim. The Paracelsans and the Behemenists, for instance, regarded Hebrew as the corrupt version of the original Adamic “natural language.” To them, only the latter could hold the key to the secrets of nature and spirit. From here the next step is to look for a language of nature, something innate and implanted in various objects of nature. This language of nature was the so-called “signatures,” or characters divinely inscribed upon each object of nature. All the signatures put together constitutes a divine harmony, which is often expressed in musical terms. Once again, it is important to understand that such a notion of nature is utterly different from the idea of Nature as we encounter in the Levellers and the legal reformers. The Levellers based their ideas of language on natural inclination that always got politically or legally projected. There is rarely anything like that in the Ranters. In Clarkson, nature, as we have discussed with respect to his philosophy, is more of an innate personal urge that must be fulfilled. Nor is there any direct political usage of language in the Ranters as we see among the legal reformers and the Diggers. If anything, Warr and Winstanley deployed language in order to break free from the prevailing politics of consensus. Milton used language much more strategically, taking various subject positions depending on the issue at hand. He made his frequent Republican “jumps” so that he could take stands, not relinquish them altogether. The Ranters’ search for an all-encompassing natural language, on the other hand, leads them to take refuge in nominalism: “from act to power, from power to his name, and that only one name, pure and undefiled” (Clarkson 173).


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Actually, the individual Ranter found himself in a characteristic skeptical position that often marks the extreme radical. Since he is uncertain of his social or political success, the skeptical radical begins to believe that by conjuring everything in his mind, he is subverting social hierarchies and political injustices. A nominalist entertains the idea that “ . . . words or signs are commensurate with the notion or thing which they signify” (Perfection Proclaimed 281). James Holstun points out that among the Ranters such a position led to “pure serial generation: vatic tables of contents, series of oracular one-sentence paragraphs, rapid shifts of identity” (Ranting 217). This way of reading according to the logic of analogy finally becomes merely an exercise in tracing the signifieds within the original language of nature. (Perfection Proclaimed 283, 305). In A Single Eye, Clarkson is precisely enacting such an exercise. In his quest to prove that each and every object within creation is nothing but a manifestation of the One or the Infinite, Clarkson conjures up a series of cosmic bodies to show that they can be interchangeably applied to God, since all these bodies emanate light just as God is supposed to do: “The light of the Sun, the light of the Moon, Stars, fire and candle. From hence take notice that though but one God, yet divers Lights, and that all made by God”(Clarkson 165). The bodies emanating light act as pure markers—signifiers—almost divested of their other essential attributes, so that Clarkson gets to make his case. But, this case stands on unsteady ground since he simultaneously tries to prove that the light of God is essentially different and superior from the other lights. In other words, Clarkson is asking his readers to believe that not only God but various heavenly bodies also do emanate light and at the same time he is undermining that very claim by stressing that all these other bodies are mere appearances, since the true enlightening power originates solely from God. Clement Hawes has rightly observed that at such extremes “ . . . the enthusiastic linguistic project simultaneously demystified language, subjecting it to a skeptical critique, and invested it with every sort of supernatural significance” (Hawes 56, Note 22). I would argue that at such a stage one fails to remain a radical enthusiast, but rather moves into the world of the mystic. Nominalism finally demonstrates not only an inward projection of the world, but also exhaustion and inability to place divine meanings within a social useful context, a trait that is the hallmark of the radical liberals like the Diggers and the Levelers. This kind of a skeptical position often leads to a rhetoric of non-communication. Its motive violently divides into two divergent pulls. On the one hand, there is a tendency to internalize the world, especially the immanent and the material world, into one’s own self. On the other hand, there is an


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inclination to continuously defer the revolutionary moment by taking refuge in language games, in the kind of linguistic formalism that it so vehemently criticizes. LIBERALISM, RESPONSIBILITY AND ACTION With the Ranters we come a full circle. We witness in Marchamont Nedham, the official censor, as one of the chief tormentors of the Ranters, a practical reflection of the authoritative tendencies of classical Republicanism during the 1650s. By indulging pure linguistic innovations and strategies of personal salvation, the Ranters on the other hand, peel apart the central tenets of radical liberalism, such as a procedural belief in reason or in the principles of political and economic solidarity. In order to build a more inclusive and liberal community the Ranters abandon notions of universal validity and unconditionality. The essence of radical politics, the Ranters would assert, rests rather on the mobilization of multiplication of personal practices and language games. In reality, the excesses of the Ranter discourse simply moves it beyond the public sphere, a realm where actual radical and democratic decisions could have taken place. It moves into the realm of the mind and the infinite. The Ranters provide us with one of the first modern instances where an extreme form of radicalism leads to political undecidability and inwardness. The extreme radical is never completely satisfied by taking a political decision, since he is certain that a decision in favor of one alternative necessarily deprives other parties. In fact, in spite of their bold resistance to the Parliamentarians, their intense rhetoric and their paradoxical ethical issues, the Ranters take the sectarians away from radical liberal politics. The Ranter tracts and lifestyle ultimately underpoliticize social concerns at the ground level.


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Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. For a comprehensive introduction to the historiography of the English Revolution, see R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited (Manchester, New York: Manchester UP, 1998). See also, Alastair MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: an Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 2. See G. R. Elton, “ A High Road to Civil War.” Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974). 3. For the classic Whig interpretation of the English Revolution, see Laurence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1986). For the best Marxist accounts of the Revolution, see Christopher Hill The Century Of Revolution (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1961), Brian Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (London, East Haven, CT: Pluto Press, 1996), Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1993) and James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London, New York: Verso, 2000). For revisionist accounts, see Conrad Russell, ed. The Origins of the English Civil War (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973) and The Causes of the English Civil War (New York: Oxford UP 1990), John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, New York: Longman, 1993), J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1986) and Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK, New York : Cambridge UP, 1986). 4. See Derek Hirst, “The Place of Principle,” in “Revisionism Revised: Two Perspectives on Early Stuart Parliamentary History,” Past and Present 92 (1981): 55–99, William A. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: the Coming of the

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP, 1983), Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1989) and Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds. Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London, New York: Longman, 1989). For a critique of both the revisionist and the post-revisionist approaches to the Civil War, see Andy Wood, “Beyond Post-Revisionism? The Civil War Allegiances of the Miners of the Derbyshire ‘Peak Country.’” The Historical Journal 40 (1997): 23–40. See Peter Lake, “Retrospective,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993). For various conceptual interpretations of liberalism, see Will Kymlicka Contemporary Political Philosophy, An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and Liberalism and Its Critics, ed. Michael Sandel (New York: New York UP, 1984). For an intellectual and historical overview of liberalism, see Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History Of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996). See John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Other Essays ed. John Gray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991 [1859]), Thomas Hill Green Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Essays, eds. Paul Harris and John Morrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 [1895]) and Bernard Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State in Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays, eds. Gerald F. Gaus and William Sweet (Indianapolis: St. Augustine Press, 2002 [ 1923]). See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1979) and C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). For tracing the continuity between medieval and early modern liberal thought, see Annabel S. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge, Melbourne, New York: Cambridge UP, 1997). See, Introduction by Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith in Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830, From Revolution to Revolution, ed. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 2002). See also, Margaret Jacob and James C. Jacob, The Origins of AngloAmerican Radicalism (London and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984). See C. H. Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England (New York: Putnam, 1900) and The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656–1658 (London, New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1909), S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649 (London, New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1898) and History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660 (London, New York, Bombay, Longmans: Green and Co., 1894–1903), Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution


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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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(London, New York: Routledge, 2002) and The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). See Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge, Melbourne, New York: Cambridge UP, 1997) and Alan Bullock and Maurice Schock, The Liberal Tradition from Fox to Keynes (New York: New York UP, 1957). For pro and con, see the essays in Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C. B. Macpherson, ed. Joseph H. Carens (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). See also, Jules Townshend, C. B. Macpherson and the Problem of Liberal Democracy (Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2000), Peter Lindsey, Creative Individualism: The Democratic Vision of C. B. Macpherson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) and William Leiss, C. B. Macpherson: Dilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988). See Allen Patten, “The Republican Critique of Liberalism,” British Journal of Political Science 26 (1996): 25–44. Patten calls the kind of republicanism practiced by J.G.A.Pocock and Quentin Skinner “instrumental.” See also, Christopher Nadon, “Aristotle and the Republican Paradigm: A Reconsideration of Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment” Review of Politics 58.4 (1996): 677–99. Pocock’s whole project has been, Nadon has charged, a venture to “politicize virtue.” According to Nadon, this consists of a transformation in the traditional understanding of virtue so that it is no longer thought to be the heroic manhood of a ruling individual, but a partnership of citizens in a polis. The effect of this shift is that the different citizens participating in various ways became alike, or “universal beings,” all willing the common or universal good before their own. Nadon concludes that such a Spartan inclination towards a premature stable harmonization within the polis goes against the very idea of negative liberty. See J. G. A. Pocock, “ Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought,” collected in Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1985). See John M. Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics” (75–104) and Mikael Hornqvist, “The Two Myths of Civic Humanism” (105–42) in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See Blair Worden, “Marchamont Nedham and English Republicanism” in Republicanism, Liberty, And Commercial Society, 1649–1776. ed. David Wootton (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1994) and “Milton’s Republicanism and The Tyranny Of Heaven,” Machiavelli And Republicanism. ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). See Samuel Dennis Glover, “ The Putney Debates: Popular Versus Elitist Republicanism,” Past and Present 164 (1999): 47–80.


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18. See Nigel Smith, “Popular Republicanism in the 1650s: John Streater’s ‘heroic mechanicks,’” Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy Quentin Skinner (Cambridge UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1995). 19. See Quentin Skinner, “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, VII, ed. S.M. McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), “The Republican ideal of Political Liberty,” Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) and Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1998). See also Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 20. For a discussion on the connections between autonomy, toleration and liberalism, see John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2003) and Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton as The Moral Law (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967). For a philosophical overview on the same issue, see Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997). 21. See Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997) and Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., Civic Liberalism (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999). See also, Peter Berkovitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1999), Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), Lance Banning, “Some Second Thoughts on Virtue and the Course of Revolutionary Thinking,” in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, eds. Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988): 194–212. 22. For continuities and transmission of radical intellectual history in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, see J.G.A. Pocock, “Post-Puritan England and the Problem of Enlightenment,” in Perez Zagorin, ed. Culture and Politics: From Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980): 91–112 and J.A.I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies 1660–1730 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1992). See also Christopher Hill, “Freethinking and Libertinism: The Legacy of the English Revolution,” in Roger D. Lund, ed. The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response 1660–1750: 54–70 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1995) and Nigel Smith, “Radicalism and Replication” in Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830, From Revolution to Revolution: 54–70 ed. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2002). 23. See Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966). See also Max


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24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

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Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958) and R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: The New American Library, 1954). For a historical overview of late medieval and early modern enthusiastic literature, see Christopher Hill, “From Marprelate to the Levellers,” and “From Lollards to Levellers” in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill: Religion and Politics in 17th Century England (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). For an excellent conceptual discussion on the idea of enthusiasm, see Joe Lee Davis, “Mystical Versus Enthusiastic Sensibility,” Journal of History of Ideas 4.3 (1943): 301–19. For an evaluation of the mutual compatibility between Marxism and Liberalism, see A. Landy, Marxism and the Democratic Tradition (New York: International Publishers, 1946), Marxism and Liberalism, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul et al (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), and Norman Geras, Literature of Revolution, Essays on Marxism (London: Verso, 1986). On issues concerning liberalism and identity politics, see Michael Walzer Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Society (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005) and Kwame Anthony Appiah The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, Princeton UP, 2004) For discussions on the conceptual affinities and dissimilarities between skepticism and liberalism, see Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989) and Joseph Raz, “Liberalism, Autonomy and the Politics of Neutral Concerns,” Mid-West Studies in Philosophy 7: 89–120. See also, Ronald Dworkin, “What Liberalism Isn’t,” New York Review of Books, January 1983. For a classic discussion on the connections between toleration and humanism, see John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis: Hackett Publications Co., 1983). See also, Differences and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laurensen (Lanham, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996) and Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996). See Sally L. Jenkinson, “Two Concepts of Tolerance: or why Bayle is not Locke” Journal Of Political Philosophy 4 (1996): 302–32. See also, Peter Byrne, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (London, New York: Routledge, 1989) and Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, New York: Manchester UP, 2003). See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: a Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) and Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (London: S.P.C.K., 1976).


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30. See Jay Newman, Foundations of Religious Toleration (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press: 1982) and Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989). See also William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002). 31. For a distinction between judgmental and non-judgmental forms of liberalism, see, Michael J. Sandel, “Judgmental Toleration,” in Natural Law, Liberalism and Morality, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 32. For a discussion on the links between seventeenth-century skepticism, toleration and liberalism, see Richard Tuck, “Scepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century,” in S. Mendus ed. Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge UP, 1988). 33. See Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990), ed. George S. Rousseau and Roy Porter and Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987). See also, P. Hulme and L. Jordanova, The Enlightenment and its Shadows (London: Routledge, 1990) and M.C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991).

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. See Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). 2. For contemporary appraisals on radical centrism, see Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) and Giddens’ follow-up book The Third Way and its Critics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). See also, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, The Radical Center. (New York : Doubleday, 2001). For a left critique of political centrism, see Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001). 3. There are obvious caveats about using the term “Whig” uncritically. Annabel Patterson, in the “Introduction,” Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) pp 3–4 writes: “ ‘Whig,’ on the other hand, often used as a synonym for either ‘liberal’ or ‘republican,’ has the disadvantage, in addition to archaism, of requiring constant qualification. As the party system developed in England at the end of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth, shifting alignments produced the same ambiguities as today inhere in the names of political parties all over the world . . . In certain argumentative contexts, therefore, to make ‘Whig’ a useful term calls for the addition of ‘Real,’ ‘Old,’ ‘Calves Head,’ “Roman,’ ‘Court,’ ‘Commonwealth,’ ‘Rockingham,’ or some such modifier. This expedient tends to subdivide people into ever smaller and sadder clubs and cells; while


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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

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the weird etymology of the word ‘Whig’ (from the Scottish ‘whiggamore’) appropriately inhibits its transfer to any modern political vocabulary.” For a classic discussion of the internecine struggles within modern history with the term see, Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Scribner, 1951). For a history of Whig ideology of early modern times, see J. G. A. Pocock, “The Varieties Of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse” in Virtue, Commerce, and History, Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985). See Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1981) and Christopher Kendrick, Milton: A Study in Teleology and Form (New York and London: Methuen, 1986). For appraisals of Milton’s radical liberal religious viewpoints, see James Egan, The Inward Teacher: Milton’s Rhetoric of Christian Liberty (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1980), Michael Fixler, Milton And The Kingdoms Of God (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964) and Harry F. Robbins, If This Be Heresy: A Study of Milton and Origen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963). See also, the collection of essays in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Melbourne, New York, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998). See George F. Sensabaugh, That Grand Whig, Milton (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1952). Although a third variety of scholarship (other than Whig and Marxist) argues that Milton was a confused elitist, divided against himself and inconsistent in his political allegiances, it has not evolved into a scholarly tradition. For Milton’s supposed self-division and elitism, see David Aers and Gunther Kress, “Historical Process, Individual and Communities in Milton’s Early Prose,” in Francis Barker, et al., eds. 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1981). See Nicholas von Maltzahn, “The Whig Milton, 1667–1700” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, Quentin Skinner. (Cambridge UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1995). See Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment Nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of English Commonweal Society” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 705–36. See Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994) and Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). See John M. Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics” Renaissance Civic Humanism Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000: 105–42). Najemy argues that


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Trecento and especially Cinquecento Florence came to regard itself, through a strong and intensely felt identification with the ancient Roman republic, as destined for imperial greatness and hegemonic rule, at least over adjoining principalities. As early as the mid-Trecento, Florence assumed the role of the defender of Tuscan and Italian liberty, when the city entered a series of aggressive wars designed to subjugate surrounding cities and establish Florentine hegemony in Tuscany. The expansive definition of liberty that Bruni, Salutati, Rinuccini and Georgio Dati give is not the positive, participatory form of freedom that Baron, Rubenstein, Pocock and others have come to identify with Florentine republicanism. In Georgio Dati’s Istoria, for instance, Florentine hegemony in Tuscany and its attack on Pisa is seen as a natural consequence of the city’s moral superiority. Moreover, while libertas was equivalent to all accounts to citizenship, the Romans found no difficulty in acknowledging that people in distant colonies (and sometime in not so distant neighborhood states) could be citizens without being able to vote: cives sine suffragio. In such circumstances the term libertas is often used in the sense of “republican self-rule” rather than as something akin to “political independence.” As a consequence Florentine libertas appears as a simplistic but powerful vision to constitute a supreme form of freedom, morally superior, more authentic and more refined than all surrounding liberties. Certainly such a republican standpoint is less likely to produce any radical political possibilities. 12. See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, U.K., New York: Cambridge UP, 1999). 13. See Hobbes’ Book II, Chapter 21, “Of the Liberty of Subjects” in Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Harmondsworth, 1968), where he assures us that “liberty or freedom signifieth (properly) the absence of opposition” and signifies nothing more. Locke makes the same point when he says “Liberty, ’tis plain, consists in a power to do or not to do; to do or forbear doing as we will. This cannot be denied” An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975): 21,56. Also see John Lind’s pronouncement that “Liberty is nothing more or less then the absence of coercion,” Three Letters To Dr. Price. (London: T. Payne, 1776: 16). 14. See Quentin Skinner “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophy In History. Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, eds. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), “A Reply to my Critics,” Meaning and Context, Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press 1988),”The Republican Ideal Of Political Liberty,” Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990 and Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1998). See also Philip Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).


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15. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1976), The Crisis Of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985) and Political Romanticism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986). 16. See especially Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and the Protectorate in 1658,” collected in Milton and Republicanism, eds. David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (New York, Melbourne, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995). 17. See S. B Liljegren, Studies in Milton. (New York: Haskell House, 1967) and Arthur E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma 1641–1660 (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1942). 18. See Chapter 5 in James Holstun’s A Rational Millennium, Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) and Knoppers’ essay “Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad” in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, eds. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge, UK, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1990). 19. See Isaac Kramnik, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87 (1989): 629–64 and Don Herzog, “Some Questions for Republicans,” Political Theory 14.3 (1986): 473–93. Many contemporary “instrumental Republicans” owe their conceptual vigor to Hannah Arendt. See Arendt’s essay “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future. (New York: The Viking Press, 1961) and The Human Condition. (Chicago and London: The University Of Chicago Press, 1958). 20. See Ernest Sirluck’s editor’s Introduction, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1959) 21. Though in the “Historical Introduction” to The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), especially in the section “The Growth of Cannon: The Polemic Against Clericalism,” (77–99), Pocock revised his earlier thesis of radical secularism by including the notions of regnum Christi and by discussing the role of the Judaic Sanhedrin within the scope of the Republican tradition. 22. There is a raging debate about the authorship of De Doctrina Christiana. In summer 1991, William B. Hunter raised the astounding possibility that Milton did not write this theologically heterodox text traditionally attributed to him. See William B. Hunter, “The Provenance of the Christian Doctrine,” Studies in English Literature 32 (1992): 129–42. Barbara K. Lewalski and John T. Shawcross then responded to that article, while Hunter rebutted in the same issue under the title, “ Forum: Milton’s Christian Doctrine,” 143–66. Hunter further explored his case in “The Provenance of the Christian Doctrine: Addenda from the Bishop of Salisbury,” Studies in English Literature 33 (1993): 191–207. Maurice Kelley and Christopher Hill responded to Hunter in, respectively, “The Provenance of


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John Milton’s Christian Doctrine: A Reply to William B. Hunter,” and “Professor William B. Hunter, Bishop Burgess, and John Milton,” Studies in English Literature 34 (1994): 153–63. Hunter’s reaction, “Animadversions upon the Remonstrants’ Defenses against Burgess and Hunter,” appears in the same issue, 195–203. 23. See John Calvin, Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dillenbeger (Ann Arbor: Scholars Press, 1971) especially Book 3 and 4 from “Institutes” (pp 267–506) where Calvin discusses the issues of Faith, Discipline of Church and Sacraments. 24. This point has been most clearly explored by H.R. MacCallum in “Milton and the Figurative Interpretation of the Bible,” University of Toronto Quarterly 31(1961–62): 397–415.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. For a comprehensive account of the legal reformers in the seventeenth-century see Stuart E. Prall, The Agitation for Law Reform during the Puritan Revolution 1640–1660 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966 and Donald Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970). The excellent study that makes a case for “natural law” as the fundamental driving force among the Levellers is Richard A. Gleissner, “The Levellers and Natural Law: The Putney Debates of 1647” JBS 20.1, 1980: 74–89. 2. The most rigorous contemporary theoretical account of “natural law” is John Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). But Ernst Bloch’s meditative symphony Natural Law and Human Dignity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1961), outshines Finnis in its breadth of vision. 3. The idea of nature (physis) and “natural law” can be traced back to both Plato and Aristotle. In the Platonic dialogues like Gorgias or Protagoras, even in the Republic, nature seems to be more a psychological observation than an ethical justification. One basic argument of the Republic amounts to an assertion that there is an order in nature, which is universal, objective, and harmonious, in which the soul is the most fundamental principle. This is a formal definition of nature and does not appeal to “natural law.” In Aristotle, the sociological and political dimensions of the word physis are much more evident, though he does not abandon the ontological aspect of the word. Human beings are naturally inclined to be political and “natural law” is the guiding principle for the perfecting the polis. I follow the Aristotelian line of thought. 4. Blair Worden has charted the routes of the divergent scholarship between the Whiggish and the Socialist appraisals of the Leveller ideas in the essay “The Levellers in History and Memory, c1660–1960,” collected in The Putney


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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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Debates of 1647, The Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). In Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1972) Norman T. Burns has strongly argued in favor of viewing Overton as a proto-deist. He sees no anticipation of rationalism in Overton. Instead Burns insists that Overton relied heavily on the scriptural and literal interpretation of the Bible even as he argued for man’s mortality. On the other hand for suggestions that Overton belongs to a skeptical and secular tradition, see W.K Jordon, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1932): 190–196, Joseph Frank, Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1955): 40–44, Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954): 19–25, A.S. P. Woodhouse ed. Puritanism and Liberty (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951), David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (London: V. Gollancz, 1940); 72–73, and Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930). For a balanced viewpoint on this issue, one arguing that Overton represents a current of positive and radical theological opinion among early modern Protestant sects, see W. Schenk, The Concern for Social Justice in the Puritan Revolution (London, New York: Longmans and Green, 1948), and H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1961). David Zaret has traced the links between radical public spheres and religion in seventeenth century England from a liberal point of view in ‘Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England’ collected in Habermas and the Public Sphere ed. Craig Calhoun, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1999). See also his “Religion and the Rise of Liberal-Democratic Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 163–79. Charles H MacIlwain draws this distinction in his book Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1958). The original book consisted of six lectures which the author delivered at Cornell University in the academic year, 1938–39, namely, the Messenger lectures on the evolution of civilization. See C.B Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1962) and Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1979). For a more trenchant evaluation of Locke as an ideologue of early capitalism and as a bourgeois philosopher, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). One formidable contender to Hobbes as the first modern systematic thinker of natural law is Hugo Grotius. But of late, Grotius’ links with the pre-modern


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traditions, especially with that of late scholasticism, has made his formulations look less innovative then was previously assumed. In his Prolegomena (section eight) Grotius, unlike Hobbes, did not aim at formulating an eternal code, but was merely delineating a broad spectrum inventory of common rules such as abstaining from things that belong to others, returning what belongs to others, keeping promises, repairing damages done, and subjecting one’s self to the punishment for transgression of laws. 10. Instrumental in characterizing John Locke as an antiseptic constitutionalist is John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969). James Tully A Discourse on Property, John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge UP, 1980) connects Locke with the “natural law” tradition (what he calls ‘religious praxis’), but makes that connection on the level of history of ideas. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1986) places Locke in the context of the Exclusion Crisis and Neal Wood delineates Locke as an early modern agrarian capitalist on Hartlibian lines in John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). I try to argue that agrarian capitalism and “natural law” may sometime be compatible and radical bedfellows, not just as a means but also as a substance, as it was in Locke’s case. 11. C. B Macpherson, more than anyone else, has been instrumental in drawing the Leveller-Locke connection on a far too stretched argument that both the parties were the original adherents to a philosophy of possessive individualism. The thesis reads the property connection correctly but drew a classical Marxist stadial conclusion from that connection.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. See Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (Leicester, 1966) and Change in the Provinces: the Seventeenth Century (Department of English Local History, Occasional Papers, I, Leicester 1972). Other notable works in this genre include T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640: A County’s Government under the ‘Personal Rule’ (Oxford, 1961), R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War: A Portrait of a Society in Conflict (London, 1969), Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (London, 1975), John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976), K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700 (New York, 1979), William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983), Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire (Cambridge, 1987) and the oeuvre of David Underdown.


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2. See, Brian Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (London, East Haven, CT: Pluto Press, 1996). 3. See Paul Elmen, “The Theological Basis of Digger Communism,” Church History, 23 (March 1954): 207–18, Winthrop Hudson, “Economic and Social Thought of Gerrard Winstanley, Was He a Seventeenth-century Marxist?” The Journal of Modern History, 18 (March 1946): 1–21, Lotte Mulligan, John K. Graham and Judith Richards, “Winstanley: A Case for the Man as He Said He Was,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 28 No.1, (January 1977): 57–75 and Nicola Baxter, “Gerrard Winstanley’s Experimental Knowledge of God,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39.2 (April 1988): 184–201. 4. See Edward Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism (New York 1963), L.H. Berens, The Digger Movement in the Days of Commonwealth (1901, rpt London 1961), Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London 1954), David Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (London 1940), Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution 1640–1660 (London 1966), and George Juretic, “Digger No Millenarian: The Revolutionizing of Gerrard Winstanley,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975): 263–80. 5. See Ann Hughes, “Local History and the Origins of the Civil War Church History,” 224–53 in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds. Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London 1989) and Leah Marcus, Politics of Mirth (Chicago 1986). 6. See Warren Chernaik, “Civil Liberty in Milton, the Levellers and Winstanley,” in Winstanley and the Diggers 1649–1999 ed. Andrew Bradstock (London, Portland, 2000). 7. For a cultural synthesis of the guild system, see James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). For a debate on the various perspectives on the French guild system, see the three article proceedings of a symposium in French Historical Studies, 4 (1988): 688–717. See also various works by Albert Soboul on “sans-culotte’’ artisan ideology coming out of the milieu of the guilds and Liana Vardi, Land and the Loom (Durham, Duke UP, 1993). For an early modern background on the British guild system, see Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 8. For an emphasis on the guild ethos of fraternity in medieval and early modern Europe, see Anthony Black. Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1984) and Norah Carlin. “Liberty and Fraternities in the English Revolution: The Politics of London Artisans’ Protests, 1635–1659,” International Review of Social History 39.2 (1994): 223–54. 9. G.L. MS 4409/1 Churchwardens accounts of St Olave Jewry 1581–1643, fo.269v. This is reported in Dalton’s essay, 973. For detailed discussions of


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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

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Notes to Chapter Three Winstanley’s life in London, see J.D. Alsop, “Gerrard Winstanley: Religion and Respectability,” The Historical Journal, 28.3 (1985): 705–9 and R.J Dalton, “Gerrard Winstanley: The Experience of Fraud 1641,” The Historical Journal, 34.4 (1991): 973–84. Almost all perceptive critics of Winstanley have advised against such a dichotomous appraisal of the man. See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books 1964) and “Patrician Society, Plebian Culture.” Journal of Social History, 7(1974): 382–405 and “Eighteenth-Century English society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History, 3 (1978): 133–165. For Thompson’s response to his critics on the concept of “moral economy,” see Customs in Common (London: The Merlin Press, 1991). See especially the various works of Joan Thirsk, R.H. Tawney, Buchanan Sharp, Ann Hughes, J. A. Yelling, J. M. Neeson and Mark Overton. The notable exception is of course Alan Macfarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism (New York: Cambridge UP, 1979) which claims that the majority of the ordinary people in England since the thirteenth century were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically rational, market-oriented and acquisitive, ego-centered in kinship and social life. The basic configuration of fields and severalties of the Cobham area was surveyed by Ralph Agas in 1598, followed by the Ordinance Survey, 2nd ed., 1896, surveyed 1867, revised 1894 (provided by the British Library), Surrey Sheets XVIII, 1, 2, 4–6, 8–10, 12. For a configuration of Walton, see G. B. Greenwood and A. G. Martin, Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge, A Dictionary of Local History (Walton: Martin and Greenwood, n.d.). For a succinct summarization, see David Mulder, The Alchemy Of Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) especially Chapters VII and IX (New York, 1990). For the local history of Cobham area see also, John Gurney, “ Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement in Walton and Cobham,” The Historical Journal, 37.4 (1994): 775–802. See Davis’s essay “Gerrard Winstanley and the Restoration of True Magistracy,” Past & Present (February 1976): 76–93 and his chapter on Winstanley in Utopia and the Ideal Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981). For an equally unsympathetic evaluation of The Law of Freedom, see Austin Woolrych, “Revising Stuart Britain: Towards a New Synthesis,” Historical Journal 31(1988): 450 and Robert Zaller, “The Debate on Capital Punishment during the English Revolution” American Journal of Legal History 31 (1987): 141–42. Sabine points out that the title page of The Law of Freedom is dated 1652 and the Dedicatory Epistle to Oliver Cromwell, November 5, 1651. Thomason dated his copy February 20, 1652. On the issue of improvement, Hartlib, and Winstanley, see Joan Thirsk, “Agrarian Problems in the English Revolution,” R. C. Richardson, ed. Town


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17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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and Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992): 169–97; Andrew Macrae, God Speed the Plow (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996): 129–31; David Mulder, The Alchemy of Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 1990): 191–212; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985): 142–200; Leonard Cantor, The Changing English Countryside 1400–1700 (London and New York: Routledge & Kegal Paul, 1987): 44–64 and Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, ed. Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). See Charles Webster, Utopian Planning and the Puritan Revolution: Gabriel Plattes, Samuel Hartlib, and Macaria (Oxford [England]: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 1979). I am heavily indebted for this point to the works of E. P Thompson and James C. Scott, especially to the latter’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Hidden Transcripts (New Heaven and London: Yale UP, 1990). Erich Auerbach deals extensively with this distinction in “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959): 42–52. On the distinctions between typological and allegorical interpretations see Thomas M. Davis, “The Traditions Of Puritan Typology,” in Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972): 11–45; and Karlfried Froehlich, “ ‘Always To Keep the Literal Sense in Holy Scripture Means To Kill One’s Soul,’ the State of Biblical Hermeneutics at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century,” in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP 1977): 20–48. George Sabine, in his masterful introduction to Winstanley’s works, points out that by 1645, the better-known books of Boehme was being published in England and Cusa’s The Vision of God was published in English in 1646 and his Theologica Germanica in 1648, both under the auspices of Giles Randall. Nigel Smith discusses the publishing history of English radical tracts in Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, New York: Oxford UP: 1989). William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660 (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969). See also the debate between Lamont and Bernard Capp in Past & Present reprinted in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (London; Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974): 386–434 and Christopher Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988). On the issue of Winstanley’s trance and the nature of his God, see the debate between Hill, The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley and Lotte Mulligan,


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Notes to Chapter Four John K. Graham and Judith Richards, “Winstanley: A Case for the Man as he Said He Was,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Volume 28, No 1, (January 1977): 57–75.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Radical religious dissent of the era does not cease with the Levellers and the Diggers. Barry Reay argues for a “continual ebb and flow” of radical hopes in the wake of changing circumstances of the early 1650s in Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984). Nigel Smith describes the Leveller culture as an evolving process in Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994) and has more recently looked for a recurring historical pattern in dissenting ways. Clement Hawes talks about the emergence of fellow travelers and a new enthusiastic constellation, sensing an imminent and apocalyptic overturning of the social order, in Mania and Literary Style, The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). 2. See Joan Webber The Eloquent “I,” Style and Self in Seventeenth Century Prose (Madison, Milwaukee, London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). 3. By skepticism I largely mean Pyrrhonism and not academic skepticism. For a distinction between the two see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) and The History of Scepticism: from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of Skepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), G. E. Moore, “Four Forms of Scepticism,” Philosophical Papers (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959). For a survey of the seventeenth-century European variations on skepticism, see Craig B. Brush, Montaigne and Bayle, Variations on the Theme of Skepticism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). 4. See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford UP, 1957), J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), J.F. McGregor and Barry Reay, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984). For opposing viewpoints see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972), A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in SeventeenthCentury England (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), A. L. Morton, The World of Ranters, Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), G.E. Aylmer, “Did the Ranters Exist,” Past and Present, 117(1987): 208–219 and James Holstun, “Ranting at the New


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5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

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Historicism,” English Literary Renaissance 19.2 (1989):189–225. See also, Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Jerome Friedman, Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy: The Ranters and the English Revolution (Athens: Ohio UP, 1987), Jonathan Sawday, “Mysteriously Divided: Civil War, Madness and the Divided Self,” in Literature and the English Civil War eds. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style, The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1996) and Kathryn Gucer “Not heretofore extant in print: Where the Mad Ranters Are,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000): 75–95. See James Holstun, “Ranting at the New Historicism,” English Literary Renaissance 19.2 (1989): 189–225. Monistic philosophers include the likes of Parmenides, Democritus, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Hegel, Ernst Haeckel and the proponents of contemporary atomic theory. The denial of monism forces commitment to either dualism or pluralism. See F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: a Metaphysical Essay (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1946), David Loy, Nonduality: a Study in Comparative Philosophy (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988) and Michael P. Levine, Pantheism: a Non-Theistic Concept of Deity (London, New York: Routledge, 1994). For a literary take on monism, see David Kirby, The Sun Rises in the Evening: Monism and Quietism in Western Culture (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982). In the theological context, if the term monism is employed in place of monotheism, it may mean theism, which is a monotheistic doctrine, or it may mean pantheism, which is opposed to theism. In this sense of the term, as a synonym for pantheism, monism maintains that there is no real distinction between God and the universe. Either God is indwelling in the universe as a part of it, not distinct from it (pantheistic immanentism), or the universe does not exist at all as a reality (acosmism), but only as a manifestation or phenomenon of God. I argue that the Ranters are monists in the pantheistic sense. For a fundamental exposition of an ethics based on responsibility for the “Other,” see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity; an Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969) and Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). For a succinct exposition of the philosophy of praxis, see Jean Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Knopf, 1963). For biographical markers on Laurence Clarkson’s life, see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957), A. L. Morton’s essay “Laurence Clarkson and the Everlasting Gospel” in The World Of the Ranters (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970) and Nigel Smith’s “Introduction” to A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century (London:


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11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

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Notes to Chapter Four Junction Books, 1983). There are as many eight entries listed in ‘Early English Books Online’ on Clarkson but I find Smith’s collection to be sufficiently representative. For an ethical appraisal of post-structuralist thinkers and especially that of the deconstructionists, see Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999). I use Critchley’s discussion of ethics and politics in the context of the Ranters. See especially Chapter 7. “Theories of Divine Signification,” in Smith’s Perfection Proclaimed, Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). See Joe Lee Davis, “Mystical Versus Enthusiastic Sensibility,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4.3 (1943): 301–19. See Norman Cohn “The Ranters,” Encounter 34.4(1970): 15–25, J. F. MacGregor, “Seekers and Ranters,” in Macgregor and Barry Reay, eds. Radical Religion in the English Revolution (New York, U.K., Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984): 121–39 and J. C Davis, Fear, Myth and History (Cambridge, U.K., New York: Cambridge UP, 1986). See Gillian Alexander, “Politics of the Pronoun in the Literature of the English Revolution,” Language and Literature, An Introductory Reader in Stylistics ed. Ronald Carter (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982): 217–235. See Byron Nelson, “The Ranters and the Limits of Language,” Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution, ed. James Holstun (London: Frank Cass, 1992): 60–75. For the connection between Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and skeptical thought, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979). For a general assessment (though not typically conservative) that the rhetoric and practice of enthusiasm is displaced eroticism, see James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977) and Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660–1753 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992). See also, C. Durston, The Family and the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989) and Keith Wrightson, English Society: 1580–1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1982). For a discussion on the issue of Original Language, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).


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Index

A Agitators 87–92 Alexander, Gillian 172 Alienation 16 Alsop, J.D. 114–117 Anabaptist 70, 160 Anarchy 32, 33, 48, 75, condition 5, 42, 50, 55, 59, 97, 127, 128, 132, 171 individual 59, 87, 102, 132, 134 Ancient Constitution 59, 78–83 Anglican 58, 70, 112, 152, 156–157, 163–172 Antinomian 14, 19, 65, 69, 147, 156–159, 165–174 phenomenon 25, 27, 53 Aquinas, Thomas 67–69, 73, 99 Arianism 25 Aristotle 9, 44–45, 60–79, 93–102 Arminianism 14, 25, 54, 109 Armitage, David 30 Ataraxia 20 Autonomy 3, 7, 12–20 Aylmer, G.E. 114, 116, 158

B Baptist 70, 146, 160 Barker, A.E. 42 Baron, Hans 8 Baxter, Nicola 110 Berens, L.H. 110 Berlin, Isaiah 21, 35 Bernstein, Edward 110

Bloch, Ernst 59–60, 92, 105 Bosanquet, Bernard 3 Brenner, Robert 120 Burgess, Glen 81 Burns, Norman, T. 70–71

C Calvinism 14, 51, 68–74, 146, 163 Carlin, Norah 126 Centrism 21, 24, 52 nature and theory 29–34 Chayanov, A.V. 122 Chernaik, Warren 113 Citizenship 9–12, 24, 26, 35, 36 Clark, Jonathan 109 Cohn, Norman 144, 157–58 Commonwealth as establishment 29, 84, 86 as a political community 16, 23–26, 32, 38–39, 72, 115–18 religious 14, 49–55, 132–160 Corruption 11–13, 68–70, 166–70 Communitarian 3, 35, 39, 138, 175 Contractarian 7, 33–35, 74 Copyhold 90–91, 111–112, 124–30, 152–53 Corns, Thomas N 43 Covenant 14, 40–41, 53, 72–74, 91, 95, 96 Critchley, Simon 162

D Davis, J.C. 69–70, 109, 131–34, 157 Deism 70

209


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210 Discordia Concors 8, 11, 32, 51, 55 Donatist 110 Dworkin, Ronald 35

E Elmen, John 109 Elton, G. R. 1 Enclosure 6, 99–100, 113, 124–131,143,179 Enlightenment 14, 20–22, 49, 63 Enthusiasm 9, 13–14, 25, 156, 164, 171–72 Episcopalianism 50 Eschatology 14, 19, 150–51, 157 Everitt, Alan 107–08 Exclusion Crisis 96

F Faith 19, 27, 51–87, 90, 138, 163–69 Fallon, Robert 42, 47 Ferguson, Arthur B. 9 Fifth Monarchy 54 Firth, C.H. 5 Fixler, Michael 49, 51

G Gardiner, S.R. 5, 152 Gleissner, Richard 89, 91 Gooch, C.P. 65 Gradualism 14, 65, 130–31 Graham, John 109 Green, T.H. 3 Greengrass, Mark 137 Guild 8, 45, 90, 115–19, 142, 162 Gurney, John 111, 126

Index Hobbes, Thomas 3–4, 35, 58, 62, 92–96, 104 Hoggart, Richard 139 Holstun, James 43, 108, 121, 127, 144, 150, 158, 182 Hudson, Winthrop 109, 149 Hughes, Ann 108, 111 Humanism civic 8–11, 45 as a tradition 15, 18, 53, 64, 92

I Imagination as self-interest 119, 138, 147, 161–64 thought 6, 9, 22, 141, 142, 163, 165, 178 Independents 2, 27–28, 62, 84, 145–46, 159

J James, Margaret 110 Jeremiad 43, 55 Juretic, George 110, 149 Justice administrative 47, 84, normative 12, 13, 38, 63, 73, 76, 79, 91, 152 popular 11, 41

K Kahn, Victoria 53 Kendrick, Christopher 22, 28–29, 34 Knoppers, Laura Lunger 43 Kramnik, Isaac 45

L H Habermas, Jurgen 24, 39, 158–59 Hanson, Donald 8 Hartlib Circle 17, 99, 136–41 Hawes, Clement 158, 170, 175, 182 Hayes, T. Wilson 145 Hermeticism 27 Herzog, Don 45 Hidden Transcript 140–143 Hill, Christopher 27, 63,109–10, 130, 141, 150, 158, 178–79 Hilton, R.H. 120

Lake, Peter 2 Lamont, William M. 145 Law civil 57, 79, 90–95 common 11, 18, 44, 58–66, 78–87, 100,102, 123, 125, 141 deliberative 41 divine 15, 52, 61, 66, 69, 79–80, 89, 97 ecclesiastical 75, 179 fundamental 48, 63, 80–93, known 80 natural 57–105, 132, 139, 178


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Index positive 7, 13, 16, 24, 33, 58, 67, 81–82, 92–95 Lewalski, Barbara 42, 47 Leslie, Michael 137 Libertarian 27–39, 53 Liberty 7–18, 24–72, 83–116, 136–57 Liljegren, S.B. 42 Lind, John 35 Locke, John 3, 23, 57–63, 88, 98 Lutheranism 50

211 state of 16, 33, Nelson, Byron 176 Neoplatonism 53 Nestorian 110 Neutrality 18–20, 108, 157 Nominalism 181–182 Norbrook, David 34, 48 Norman Conquest 13, 84, 127, 141–144

O Overton, Mark 120

M Machiavelli, Niccolo 10, 22–49, 80 MacLachlan, Alastair 141 Macpherson, C.B. 5–6, 27–28, 72, 88, 101, 104 Maltzahn, Nicholas von 25 Manning, Brian 108, 111, 128, 131, 152 Marcus, Leah 111 McIlwain, C.H. 79 McGregor, J.F. 157 McNeill, John T. 69 Marx, Karl 16–17, 120, 128, Marxist 1, 25–28, 65, 109, 121, 122, 139, 152 Messianism 149 Mill, John Stuart 3 Millenarian 14, 19–20, 77, 110, 150, 172 phenomenon 27, 49–50, 54, 131, 144, 149, 169 Milner, Andrew 22, 26–29 Monism 158, 167, 181 Mortalism 29, 49, 70, 147 Morton, A.L. 158 Mulder, David 111, 126 Mulligan, Lotte 109 Mystic 119–20, 145–72, 182

N Najemy, John M. 45 Nature human 15, 18, 33, 89, 119, 170 law 18, 23, 40, 59–63, 66, 90–115, 133–38 propensity 41, 59–63, 66, 114–17, 177–83 and religion 66–78

P Pease, T.C. 65 Petegorsky, David 65, 110, 149 Pincus, Steve 26, 30 Pitkin, Hanna 46 Pocock, J.G.A. 8–9, 49, 78–85 Post-Revisionism 1 Power as a concept 46–59, 173–77 political 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 15, 72–74, 81–104, 111, 124, 130, 144, 148, 160, 181 Prall, Stuart 81, 84 Praxis 16, 60, 104, 113, 158–159 Presbyterian 3, 15, 28, 43, 50–59, 75, 146, 159, 163, 170 Property 4, 6, 16, 17, 19, 58–59, 66–68, 82–101, 115, 120–30, 141, 144, 174, 179 Puritan 1, 25, 51–52, 69, 73, 109, 137, 152, 166–77 as a concept 70, 109, 156

R Radicalism 4–5 Rawls, John 35 Raylor, Timothy 137 Reason as a concept 23, 35, 61, 63–79, 94–98, 147–52, 163–68 deliberative 25, 41, 105 instrumental 13, 41 pragmatic 22 Republicanism classical 8, 22, 51, 183


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212 democratic 7–13, 25, 32–44 guild 8, 45–46 and religion 49–56 Revisionism 1–2 Revolution 1–2, 23, 27–28, 45, 48, 51, 57–60, 96, 107, 120, 152–69 Richards, Judith 109 Rogers, Michael 133 Rude, George 122 Russell, Conrad 109, 152

Index Thompson, E.P. 122, 152 Thomson, George 141 Toleration as a concept 18–20 scope and limit 13, 157 Trade, 17, 101, 114–19, 129–37, 149 Tuck, Richard 88, 104

V Vardi, Liana 115–16

S

W

Sabine, George 146, 149, 150 Sanderson, John 72, 148 Sawday, Jonathan 158 Scott, James 122, 139–140 Schmitt Carl 38 Sensabaugh, George F. 25 Sirluck, Ernest 48 Skepticism 18, 20, 39, 157, 168, 177 Skinner, Quentin 8 Smith, Nigel 10, 33, 110, 158, 166 Socialism 15–16, 92, 141, 150 Stone, Lawrence 5, 152, 179

Walzer, Michael 9, 14 Webber, Joan 156, 168 Whig 1, 5, 18, 22, 25–27, 76, 96–97, 102, 109, 141 Williams, Raymond 121 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 176 Wolf, Eric 122 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 85, 99 Wood, Neal 99 Woolrych, Austin 42–48 Wootton, David 58–59 Worden, Blair 9

T

Z

Tawney, R.H. 58, 125

Zagorin, Perez 110

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