Seventeenth Century Ireland and the Making of Sectarianism: Joan Redmond’s Religion, Rebellion and Violence in Ireland, c.1603–1649

Sectarianism in Ireland did not descend from the heavens, nor did it arise from some primordial antagonism between Catholics and Protestants. People created it deliberately, violently, and in the interests of a rising colonial bourgeoisie. Joan Redmond’s new study, published by Cambridge University Press, enters a field long shaped by myth, propaganda, and apologetics. Her work is serious, empirically grounded, and attentive to the symbolic dimensions of religious conflict. Yet the evidence she assembles points beyond the interpretive framework she adopts. What is needed is not another account of “religious violence,” but a materialist analysis of how colonial property relations forged the sectarian order that continues to scar Ireland today.

The central weakness of the conventional narrative and the strength of Redmond’s departure from it rests on the assumption that religious division was somehow natural to Ireland. In reality, the decades after 1603 witnessed a profound social revolution. Following its famine-driven victory in the Nine Years’ War, the English state began systematically transforming Irish society through plantation. Ulster, confiscated after the Flight of the Earls, became the laboratory where land, labour, and political authority shifted from Gaelic and Old English proprietors to a new class of English and Scottish undertakers, servitors, and London financiers. Protestantism identified this class as loyal to the Crown, while Catholicism identified those dispossessed by it. Sectarian identity was not the cause of conflict but the ideological form through which a deeper struggle over property and power was expressed.

Redmond’s attention to symbolic violence the burning of Bibles, the stripping of ministers, and the desecration of churches is valuable. But symbols do not exist apart from material relations. The Protestant bible burned in Tyrone belonged to a settler occupying land taken from Irish families within living memory. The desecrated church was often a former Catholic church whose revenues the established Church of Ireland had seized. The humiliated minister was a tithe-collector and local agent of the colonial state. These acts were not simply religious gestures; they were political attacks on the apparatus of expropriation. Treating them primarily as expressions of religious hatred risks mistaking form for content.

The 1641 Rebellion, the focus of Redmond’s study, demonstrates this dynamic with particular clarity. The Depositions, eight thousand witness statements collected by a colonial administration preparing for reconquest, are filled with accounts of atrocity. They document genuine horrors, including the drowning of Protestants at Portadown, but they also served a political purpose: justifying the largest land confiscation in Irish history. The Adventurers’ Act of 1642 turned the reconquest into a speculative investment scheme, pledging millions of acres of Irish land as security. Here, the connection between colonial violence and capitalist accumulation appears in its starkest form.

Redmond rightly places Ireland within a broader Atlantic and European framework, but this positioning calls for a more radical conclusion. Ireland was not peripheral to the emergence of the capitalist world system; it was central. Plantation, expropriation, and sectarianisation were mechanisms of primitive accumulation, just as much as the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Virginia or the enslavement of Africans in Barbados. The sectarian order forged in the seventeenth century was not an aberration but a structural product of colonial capitalism.

The legacy of this process endures. Partition, Stormont’s sectarian architecture, the Troubles, and even the consociational logic of the Good Friday Agreement all bear the imprint of the seventeenth-century colonial order. Ruling elites created sectarian identities and reproduced them because they served property. Understanding their origins means recognising that they can be overcome not through appeals to reconciliation or shared identity, but by dismantling the social relations that produced them. Redmond’s book contributes to this understanding, but its own evidence demands a more explicitly materialist reading. Sectarianism was made. And what has been made can be unmade.

The Plantation as Social Revolution

Redmond’s most valuable contribution is her rejection of the lazy media cliché that Catholics and Protestants have hated each other “since time immemorial.” She rightly places the emergence of sectarian division in the decades following 1603, when the English state, having just secured a famine-driven victory in the Nine Years’ War, undertook the most radical social transformation in Irish history: the Ulster plantation. The Ulster plantation was not a religious mission that merely happened to involve land.

It was a massive act of expropriation. Plantation was neither a cultural encounter nor a theological dispute nor a clash of identities. It was the violent transfer of the means of production- land, livestock, rents, and tithes- from Gaelic and Old English proprietors to a new class of English and Scottish undertakers, servitors, and London financiers. Protestantism served as the ideological badge of this rising colonial bourgeoisie, while Catholicism marked the dispossessed. Sectarian identity was not the cause of the conflict; it was the form through which a deeper antagonism over property and power was expressed.

This is the decisive point Redmond approaches but never fully grasps. Her emphasis on symbols  Bibles, churches, clerical vestments risks treating religion as an autonomous force rather than as the ideological expression of a colonial social order. Symbols matter, but they do not float free of material relations. The burning of a Protestant bible in Tyrone was not simply an attack on scripture; it was an attack on the settler who held land taken within living memory from Irish families. The desecration of a Protestant church was an assault on an institution whose revenues had been seized from Catholic parishes and redirected to the established Church of Ireland. Stripping a minister was humiliating a tithe‑collector and local agent of the colonial state, often himself a beneficiary of confiscated land. These acts were not random eruptions of religious hatred. They were political attacks on the apparatus of expropriation.

To treat them chiefly as expressions of sectarian animus is to mistake form for content. Religion was not the engine of the conflict; it was the language through which struggles over land, labour, and survival were waged. In an age when the Church dominated intellectual life, every social struggle necessarily assumed a theological form.

The insurgents of 1641 believed their actions had sacred meaning, but their material aim was to reverse dispossession and reclaim the foundations of life. Redmond’s symbolic interpretation captures the surface of these events, but not their underlying logic. The plantation system had created a society in which religious identity corresponded directly to property relations: Protestant meant proprietor, while Catholic meant dispossessed. Violence against Protestant symbols was therefore violence against the colonial order itself.

This is why sectarianism cannot be understood as a timeless cultural division. It was forged in the crucible of plantation, sharpened by famine, and intensified by the tri‑kingdom crisis that culminated in the English Revolution. The symbolic dimension of violence matters, but only when situated within the political economy that gave those symbols their explosive charge. Without that materialist grounding, the history of seventeenth‑century Ireland risks being reduced to a drama of competing identities rather than recognised as a struggle over land, power, and the violent birth of a colonial capitalist order.

1641: Class War in Theological Form

Redmond’s focus on the 1641 Rebellion is justified. The Depositions' eight thousand witness statements, overwhelmingly Protestant, form one of the most revealing archives of early modern colonialism. They are saturated with fear, atrocity narrative, and the desperate insistence on Protestant innocence and Catholic barbarism. But they also served as a political instrument. Compiled by a state preparing for reconquest, they documented settler losses, substantiated compensation claims, and justified future confiscation. Their very structure reveals their purpose: to create a moral and evidentiary foundation for the wholesale transfer of Irish land into Protestant hands. In this sense, the Depositions are not simply a record of violence; they are part of the machinery of colonial expropriation.

This is why the central interpretive question cannot be avoided: were the insurgents of 1641 fighting about religion, or was religion the form through which they expressed a struggle over land, power, and survival? In an age when the Church dominated intellectual life, every social movement necessarily took theological form. The Irish insurgents believed in the sacral meaning of their acts. Still, the objective content of their struggle was the attempt to reverse expropriation and reclaim the material basis of life. The theological language of rebellion, the ritualised attacks on Protestant symbols, the invocation of divine justice: all expressed a deeper conflict rooted in the violent restructuring of property relations that plantation had imposed.

The drowning of Protestants at Portadown, endlessly reproduced in Protestant martyrology, was horrific. But its political function was equally clear: it became the ideological justification for the largest land confiscation in Irish history. The atrocity stories of 1641 were not merely accounts of suffering; they were instruments of policy. They provided the moral vocabulary through which the English Parliament passed the Adventurers’ Act of 1642, turning the reconquest of Ireland into a speculative investment scheme. Investors subscribed funds to suppress the rebellion in exchange for future title to Irish land. In this way, the atrocity narrative became the bridge between violence and capital accumulation. The stories gathered by the commissioners, amplified by pamphleteers such as Sir John Temple, were the fuel for Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, and for the Cromwellian settlement that transferred most Irish land to Protestant ownership.

Redmond acknowledges the symbolic dimension of violence but underplays its economic logic. The rebellion was not a sectarian spasm. It erupted from a class struggle shaped by plantation, intensified by famine, and sharpened by the tri‑kingdom crisis. The insurgents were not driven by timeless religious hatred but by the memory of dispossession, the experience of exclusion, and the immediate threat of further confiscation. The symbols they attacked  Bibles, churches, clerical vestments were not abstract emblems of Protestant identity but concrete expressions of colonial power. To burn a bible was to strike at the ideological justification for expropriation. To desecrate a church was to assault an institution whose revenues had been seized from Catholic parishes. To strip a minister was to humiliate a tithe‑collector and local agent of the colonial state.

The rebellion must therefore be understood as a political and economic uprising expressed in religious form. Its violence was shaped by the material conditions created by plantation: the loss of land, the imposition of rents and tithes, the exclusion from office, and the constant threat of further confiscation. Redmond’s symbolic reading captures the surface of these events but not their underlying logic. Without a materialist grounding, the history of 1641 risks being reduced to a drama of competing identities rather than recognised as a struggle over land, power, and the violent birth of a colonial capitalist order.

Ireland and the English Revolution

No account of 1641 can be adequate without situating Ireland within the English Revolution. Redmond gestures toward this but does not integrate it into her analysis, and the omission is decisive. The rebellion did not unfold on a static Irish stage; it erupted at the precise moment when the English state was being torn apart by a revolutionary crisis that redefined the relationship between property, sovereignty, and political power across all three Stuart kingdoms. To treat 1641 as an insular religious convulsion is to miss the structural forces that shaped it and the colonial logic that determined its outcome.

The English bourgeoisie, mobilised through Parliament, was the most implacable enemy of Irish Catholics. This was not because of theology, but because Irish Catholic landownership blocked the consolidation of a new social order grounded in private property, commercial expansion, and parliamentary sovereignty. The Adventurers’ Act of 1642, a speculative investment scheme that pledged 2.5 million acres of Irish land as security, is one of the clearest examples in world history of colonial conquest as primitive accumulation. Investors financed the reconquest in advance, expecting land as repayment. The Irish Catholic population became collateral in a financial instrument. Here the relationship between violence and capital is laid bare: atrocity narrative provided the moral justification, parliamentary legislation provided the legal mechanism, and military conquest provided the enforcement. Ireland became the terrain on which the English Revolution exported its contradictions.

The Confederation of Kilkenny, often romanticised in nationalist historiography, must be understood within this framework. It was not a proto‑national movement but a coalition of Catholic landowners seeking to preserve property and religion through negotiation with the Crown. Its internal divisions  Old English grandees versus Gaelic leaders and clergy were class divisions, not cultural ones. The Old English elite, long integrated into the structures of English rule, sought accommodation with Charles I to secure their estates. The Gaelic leadership, shaped by more recent and more brutal experiences of dispossession, pushed for a harder line. These tensions reflected differing relationships to land, power, and the English state, not differing “identities.” The Confederation’s failure was not the failure of Irish unity; it was the failure of a landed class trying to defend its interests amid a revolutionary transformation that rendered its position untenable.

Redmond’s narrative stops at 1649, but her evidence points directly to Cromwell. His invasion was not a religious crusade; it was the military enforcement of a capitalist revolution whose domestic progress was inseparable from colonial brutality abroad. The same Parliament that abolished monarchy and executed a king also authorised the reconquest of Ireland as a financial venture. Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford were justified explicitly as vengeance for 1641. Still, their real function was to break resistance to a land settlement designed to secure the interests of the Adventurers, the New Model Army, and the emergent Protestant Ascendancy. The Cromwellian settlement that followed transferred most Irish land to Protestant ownership, completing the expropriation process that plantation had begun.

Situating 1641 within the English Revolution is therefore not an optional historiographical flourish; it is key to understanding the rebellion’s causes, course, and consequences. Ireland was not a peripheral theatre but a central arena in which the English bourgeois revolution realised its colonial dimension. Redmond’s evidence demonstrates this repeatedly, even if her interpretive framework does not. A materialist analysis reveals what a symbolic or identity‑centred approach cannot: that the violence of 1641 and the violence of Cromwell were two moments in a single process, the violent birth of a capitalist order whose foundations were laid in expropriated Irish soil.

Ireland Between Two Worlds

One of Redmond’s strengths is her insistence on Ireland’s Atlantic and European context. But this can be pushed much further, because Ireland in the seventeenth century was not an isolated theatre of religious conflict but a nodal point in a rapidly expanding imperial world. Ulster and Virginia were twin laboratories of English colonialism. The same ideological justifications barbarism, idleness, the civilising mission were deployed in both. In Virginia, Indigenous peoples were described as wandering, unproductive, and in need of English discipline; in Ulster, Gaelic society was condemned as disorderly, backwards, and incapable of proper husbandry. In both cases, the ideological vocabulary served the same purpose: to legitimise the violent transfer of land to English proprietors and to naturalise the emerging colonial order.

The parallels were not accidental. Many of the same individuals, companies, and intellectual currents shaped both projects. The City of London’s livery companies, which took over the plantation of Londonderry, were simultaneously investing in transatlantic ventures. English promoters of colonisation wrote treatises that moved seamlessly between Ireland and America, treating both as spaces where English civility could be imposed upon supposedly degenerate populations. The plantation of Ulster and the settlement of Virginia were two fronts of a single imperial expansion, driven by the same economic imperatives and justified by the same ideological repertoire.

At the same time, Irish Catholic elites were deeply embedded in the Counter‑Reformation world. They served in Spanish tercios, in the armies of France, and in Imperial forces during the Thirty Years’ War. Irish colleges in Salamanca, Louvain, and Rome produced clergy who moved between Ireland and continental Europe, carrying with them the intellectual and political currents of the wider Catholic world. Ireland was therefore not simply a colony but a crossroads: a site where English imperialism collided with continental Catholic power, where global confessional conflict intersected with local struggles over land and authority.

This global positioning reveals a deeper truth: Ireland was not peripheral. It was central to the violent birth of the capitalist world system. Plantation, expropriation, and sectarianisation were not anomalies; they were characteristic mechanisms of primitive accumulation. Marx’s description of primitive accumulation the forcible separation of producers from the means of production, the creation of a landless labouring class, and the use of state violence to restructure property relations fits Ireland with almost uncanny precision. The Ulster plantation was one of the earliest large‑scale experiments in this process. It created a new class of Protestant proprietors, dispossessed a Catholic majority, and established a colonial state apparatus capable of enforcing the new order.

Sectarianisation was part of this machinery. It provided the ideological framework through which expropriation could be justified, and resistance delegitimised. By fusing religious identity with property relations- Protestant as proprietor, Catholic as dispossessed- the colonial state created a durable social division it could mobilise to stabilise its rule. Sectarianism was not an unfortunate by‑product of plantation; it was a structural outcome. It helped produce a population divided against itself, unable to unite against the colonial order, and perpetually vulnerable to manipulation by ruling elites.

Seen in this light, the seventeenth century becomes not merely a period of Irish turmoil but a foundational moment in the formation of global capitalism. The techniques of expropriation, the ideological languages of civilisation and barbarism, and the fusion of religious identity with property relations were all exported from Ireland to other colonial theatres. Ireland was both a proving ground and a model. To understand its history is to understand the origins of a world system built on dispossession, coercion, and the violent remaking of social relations.

The Long Shadow of 1603–49

Redmond argues that the period forged long‑lasting legacies. She is right. The Protestant Ascendancy, the Penal Laws, the Act of Union, the partition of 1921, the sectarian architecture of Stormont, the Troubles, and even the consociational logic of the Good Friday Agreement all bear the imprint of the seventeenth‑century colonial order. The structures created in the aftermath of plantation a landed Protestant elite, a dispossessed Catholic majority, and a state apparatus designed to maintain that hierarchy did not simply vanish with time. Successive political regimes reproduced, adapted, and modernised them. The Ascendancy became the governing class of the eighteenth century; the Penal Laws codified the exclusion of Catholics from property and power; the Union entrenched Protestant dominance within a wider imperial framework. Partition in 1921 then froze these relations into a new constitutional form, creating a Northern statelet whose institutions were designed to ensure permanent Protestant control. Stormont’s architecture was not an accident of political negotiation but the direct descendant of the colonial order established in the seventeenth century.

The Troubles, too, cannot be understood without this genealogy. The conflict was not the eruption of ancient hatreds but the violent expression of unresolved colonial contradictions. The spatial segregation of communities, differential access to housing and employment, policing structures, and political institutions all reflected the long shadow of plantation. Even the Good Friday Agreement, often celebrated as a triumph of peacebuilding, bears the imprint of this history. Its consociational logic, dividing political representation into “unionist” and “nationalist” blocs, institutionalises the very sectarian categories forged in the seventeenth century. It stabilises peace by managing division rather than overcoming it, a solution that reflects the depth of the historical structures it seeks to contain.

But the lesson is not fatalistic. Ruling elites created sectarian identities and reproduced them because they served property. They were never spontaneous expressions of popular feeling; they were political technologies. From the seventeenth century onward, elites used sectarian division to fragment the labouring population, prevent unified resistance, and secure the social order. Whenever workers in Ireland have united the Belfast dock strike of 1907, when James Larkin led Protestant and Catholic workers together; the Outdoor Relief riots of 1932, when unemployed workers marched across sectarian lines the state responded by stoking division. Employers, politicians, and clerical authorities alike intervened to reassert the boundaries between communities. Sectarianism has always been a strategy of rule, not an inevitable feature of Irish society.

This is why the history Redmond describes, despite its limitations, contains a profoundly emancipatory lesson. Sectarianism is not eternal. It is historical. It was forged in specific circumstances: plantation, expropriation, colonial administration, and the needs of an emerging capitalist order. What was made can be unmade. The same forces that created sectarian division the restructuring of property relations, the consolidation of state power, the ideological mobilisation of religion can be confronted and dismantled. The moments when workers united across sectarian lines show that the divisions are neither natural nor insurmountable. They are maintained because they serve the interests of those who benefit from a divided population.

To understand sectarianism historically is to recognise its contingency. Recognising its contingency is recognising the possibility of its abolition. The seventeenth century forged the structures that still shape Irish society, but it also reveals the means by which those structures can be overcome: through the collective action of those whose lives have been shaped  and constrained  by the

Beyond Identity, Toward Social Relations

Redmond’s book is a serious scholarly intervention. But its interpretive frame, privileging identity, symbol, and religious meaning, reflects the dominant academic retreat from class analysis. This retreat is not unique to her work; it is characteristic of much contemporary historiography, which has become increasingly wary of structural explanations and increasingly enamoured of cultural ones. Yet the evidence she assembles cries out for a materialist reading. Sectarianism was forged in the crucible of plantation, expropriation, and capitalist expansion. It emerged not from competing identities but from the violent restructuring of property relations that transformed Ireland in the seventeenth century. To treat sectarianism primarily as symbolic conflict is to mistake the surface for the depth, the ideological form for the social content.

A genuinely scientific history must strip away the mythologies of all sides and reveal the social relations underneath. This means recognising that the plantation was not simply a cultural encounter but a massive act of class reorganisation: the transfer of land, rents, tithes, and political authority from one social group to another. It means understanding that the 1641 Rebellion was not a spontaneous eruption of religious hatred but a political uprising expressed in theological language. It means acknowledging that the Cromwellian conquest was not divine vengeance but the military enforcement of a capitalist revolution whose domestic achievements were inseparable from colonial brutality abroad. Redmond’s work, despite its limitations, provides ample material for such a project. Her detailed engagement with the Depositions, her attention to symbolic violence, and her insistence on Ireland’s Atlantic and European context offer rich evidence for deeper analysis, even if she does not pursue it herself.

The challenge, then, is not to dismiss Redmond’s approach but to push beyond the categories in which it is framed. Identity, symbol, and religious meaning are important, but they are not primary. They are the ideological expressions of underlying social relations. A bible burned in Tyrone was not merely a religious affront; it was an attack on the settler who held confiscated land. A church desecrated was not simply a violation of sacred space; it was a blow against an institution whose revenues had been seized from Catholic parishes. A minister stripped was not merely a humiliation of a religious figure; it was the punishment of a tithe‑collector and local agent of the colonial state. These acts cannot be understood without reference to the material conditions that gave them meaning.

To recover those conditions is the task of historical materialism. It requires situating Ireland within the global processes of primitive accumulation, recognising the role of colonial violence in the birth of capitalism, and tracing how sectarian identities were constructed to stabilise a new social order. It requires seeing the seventeenth century not as a drama of competing religious communities but as a moment in the formation of a world system built on dispossession, coercion, and the remaking of social relations.

Redmond’s book, for all its interpretive limitations, offers the raw material for such a reconstruction. It documents the violence, fear, symbolic acts, and political manoeuvres that accompanied the transformation of Irish society. What it does not do, and what must be done, is to place these phenomena within the broader logic of colonial capitalism. That task falls to readers willing to push beyond the cultural frame and recover the structural forces that shaped the period. A scientific history must reveal not only what happened but why it happened and, in doing so, illuminate the social relations that continue to shape Ireland today.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• 1641 Depositions, Trinity College Dublin, MS 833–MS 849.
• Temple, Sir John. The Irish Rebellion: Or, An History of the Beginnings and First Progress of the General Rebellion Raised within the Kingdom of Ireland, 1641. London, 1646.
• Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. Ed. C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait. London: HMSO, 1911.
• The Adventurers’ Act, 1642 (16 Car. I c. 33).
• Cromwell, Oliver. Letters and Speeches. Ed. Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman & Hall, 1845.

Secondary Sources: Ireland, Plantation, and 1641

• Canny, Nicholas. Making Ireland British, 1580–1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Lennon, Colm. Sixteenth Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994.
• Ó Siochrú, Micheál. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. London: Faber & Faber, 2008.
• Perceval-Maxwell, Michael. The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1994.
• Gibney, John. The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.
• Clarke, Aidan. “The 1641 Depositions.” In Sources for the History of Irish Civilisation, ed. R. Dudley Edwards. Dublin: Cork University Press, 1970.
• Ohlmeyer, Jane. Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Cunningham, Bernadette. The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.

Atlantic, Colonial, and Comparative Context

• Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Elliott, J.H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
• Horn, James. A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
• Andrews, Kenneth. Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

English Revolution and Class Conflict

• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
• Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940.
• Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution. London: Verso, 2016.
• Morrill, John. Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648. London: Longman, 1976.

Marxist Theory and Primitive Accumulation

• Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics, 1976.
• Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
• Engels, Friedrich. The Peasant War in Germany.
• Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge, 2003.
• Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, enslaved people, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso, 2002.

Modern Ireland, Sectarianism, and Legacy

• Bew, Paul. Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Farrell, Michael. Northern Ireland: The Orange State. London: Pluto Press, 1976.
• Patterson, Henry. Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict. Dublin: Penguin, 2013.
• Bardon, Jonathan. A History of Ulster. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992.
• Hennessey, Thomas. The Evolution of the Troubles, 1970–72. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007.

 

The AI Doc: How I Became an Apocalyptic Optimist

 

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocalyptic Optimist presents itself as a reckoning with artificial intelligence at a moment when AI is transforming labour processes, reshaping global competition, and accelerating technology's militarisation. Its theatrical release in March 2026, followed by its arrival on Netflix in September, secured a mass audience of workers, parents, and students urgently asking what AI means for their future. Daniel Roher’s documentary claims to answer that question. In reality, it avoids it. Rather than analysing the social forces driving AI’s development, the film offers a therapeutic narrative aimed at an anxious professional class.

The film’s central conceit, Roher’s impending fatherhood, immediately reframes a social crisis as a private psychological dilemma. Instead of examining how AI is reshaping the global economy, intensifying exploitation, or deepening geopolitical conflict, the documentary invites viewers to calibrate their feelings about the future through Roher’s personal journey. This displacement of analysis by affect marks contemporary liberal documentary filmmaking, which increasingly treats political questions as matters of personal anxiety rather than collective struggle. The result is a film that is slick, emotionally resonant, and ideologically hollow.

Roher assembles a collage of opinions from Silicon Valley executives, futurists, ethicists, and celebrities. The documentary’s promotional materials describe these voices as “eye-opening,” but the film’s reliance on tech oligarchs' self-presentation is one of its least enlightening moves. Asking billionaires whether the future is safe is not an investigation; it is an abdication of analysis. The people driving AI development- those who stand to profit from its deployment- are treated as neutral experts rather than as actors with material interests. Their anxieties, hesitations, and self-justifications become the substance of the debate, while the structural forces shaping AI- capital accumulation, military competition, and the search for new avenues of profit- remain unexamined.

The film’s aesthetic choices reinforce this ideological sleight of hand. Roher’s signature style- rapid montage, intimate confessionals, and a swelling score- creates an atmosphere of emotional urgency. But emotion substitutes for explanation. The viewer is encouraged to feel overwhelmed, hopeful, frightened, or inspired, without ever being asked to understand the economic and political dynamics driving AI's explosive growth. The film’s narrative arc mirrors the therapeutic culture of contemporary liberalism: anxiety is acknowledged, processed, and soothed, but never politicised.

The documentary’s failure is not simply one of omission. It actively reproduces the ideological framework through which the ruling class seeks to manage public concern about AI. By focusing on individual feelings rather than collective interests, it obscures the fact that corporations and states deploy AI to intensify exploitation, discipline labour, and expand military capabilities. The question millions of people are asking- what does AI mean for my job, my rights, my future- is displaced by Roher’s question: what does AI mean for my child’s emotional wellbeing?

The film’s title, with its self-conscious blend of apocalypse and optimism, encapsulates this ideological manoeuvre. The viewer is invited to oscillate between fear and hope, between dread and reassurance, without ever confronting the material conditions that produce those emotions. The documentary becomes a mood, not an argument.

In the end, The AI Doc is less a reckoning with artificial intelligence than a symptom of the cultural moment that produced it. It reflects a political culture that has lost the capacity to think structurally, that treats social crises as personal dramas, and that looks to the very architects of technological upheaval for guidance. It is a film for a class that feels anxious about the future but cannot imagine challenging the forces that shape it.

The Personalisation of a Social Question

Roher’s impending fatherhood becomes the catalyst for his inquiry. He wants to know what kind of world his child will inherit. This is a legitimate concern, shared by millions of workers who face an unprecedented technological transformation. But the film immediately converts this collective anxiety into an individual psychological journey. The question is no longer: What does AI mean for society? But how should one feel about AI? The answer Roher offers—“apocaloptimism”—is a hybrid of dread and hope, a mood rather than a theory, and a telling ideological manoeuvre.

The first ideological move displaces social analysis with emotional calibration. By framing AI as an emotional dilemma, the film avoids confronting the social relations within which the technology is being developed. It avoids asking who owns AI, who profits from it, and who it harms. Instead, it asks how one should respond emotionally to a rapidly changing world. The viewer is encouraged to oscillate between fear and hope, rather than to analyse the material forces shaping AI’s trajectory. This oscillation is not neutral; it is a political act that substitutes affect for critique.

“Apocaloptimism” functions as a class-specific coping mechanism. It acknowledges danger, permits unease, and then resolves to be hopeful—because hope is more comfortable than struggle. It is a psychological balm for a professional class that senses crisis but cannot imagine challenging the structures that produce it. The film’s emotional arc mirrors this class's ideological habits: anxiety is recognised, processed, and soothed, but never politicised. The viewer is asked to manage their feelings, not to interrogate the system.

This ideological framing has concrete consequences. By centring Roher’s personal fears, the film erases the collective dimension of AI’s development. The international working class—the only social force capable of altering the course of technological change—does not appear in the film’s frame of reference. Workers are present only as abstract figures who might lose jobs or face disruption, never as agents capable of shaping the future. The documentary thus reproduces a familiar liberal narrative: history is made by individuals with feelings, not by classes with interests.

The film’s choice of interviewees compounds the absence of class analysis. Roher turns to Silicon Valley executives, futurists, and ethicists—figures whose perspectives are shaped by their proximity to capital, not by the experience of exploitation. Their anxieties and hopes become the film’s emotional palette. But these are not neutral observers. They represent corporations that stand to profit enormously from AI’s expansion. Their reassurances, hesitations, and moral reflections serve to naturalise a technological trajectory driven by competition, profit, and geopolitical rivalry.

By presenting these voices as part of a balanced debate, the film obscures the structural forces at work. It treats AI as a phenomenon understood through a collage of opinions rather than through an examination of capitalism’s need to intensify productivity, reduce labour costs, and expand surveillance. The documentary’s emotional framing thus becomes a method of depoliticisation. It transforms a social crisis into a personal drama, and a political question into a psychological riddle.

“Apocaloptimism” ultimately reveals the film’s ideological core. It is a mood designed for a class that feels threatened by technological change but cannot imagine collective resistance. It demands nothing of the viewer except emotional calibration. It proposes no alternative social order, no democratic control over technology, no worker mobilisation. It is a politics of feeling in place of a politics of struggle.

In this sense, Roher’s film is not simply inadequate; it is symptomatic. It reflects a culture in which structural analysis has been replaced by therapeutic narratives, and in which the future is imagined not as a terrain of conflict but as an emotional landscape to be navigated. The danger is acknowledged, the hope is affirmed, and the system remains untouched.

Asking the Oligarchs Whether the Future Is Safe

The film’s interview roster reveals its ideological horizon with remarkable clarity. Roher turns not to workers, educators, or those whose lives are already being reshaped by AI, but to the most powerful executives in Silicon Valley: Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic. These figures are not neutral experts. They are the executives of corporations valued in the hundreds of billions, backed by the largest concentrations of finance capital in history. Their companies are at the centre of a global technological arms race, competing for market dominance, military contracts, and geopolitical advantage. Asking them whether AI will be good for humanity is like asking the owners of the oil majors whether the climate is in good hands. Their answers are predictable: AI is dangerous, but manageable; transformative, but controllable; risky, but ultimately beneficial—provided, of course, that they are the ones managing it.

The documentary supplements these corporate voices with researchers and ethicists: Yoshua Bengio, Timnit Gebru, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin. Their perspectives range widely—from labour exploitation and data colonialism to existential catastrophe and runaway superintelligence. Yet the film treats them all as “voices” in a debate to be balanced, rather than evidence to be weighed. The result is a collage of opinions, not an explanation. The viewer is presented with a spectrum of viewpoints, but no framework for understanding why these viewpoints exist, how they relate to one another, or what material interests they express.

This is the hallmark of contemporary liberalism: present disagreement as pluralism, and pluralism as insight. A documentary that sets out to explain a phenomenon and ends by presenting a spread of opinions has explained nothing. It has merely curated a marketplace of ideas, treating every perspective as interchangeable and none as analysed in relation to the underlying social structure. The film’s method is to gather voices whose assessments do not neatly align and to present this dissonance as a virtue. But disagreement is not analysis. A cacophony of perspectives does not constitute understanding.

The ideological function of this approach is clear. By flattening the differences between corporate executives, academic researchers, and critics of the tech industry, the film obscures the power relations that shape AI’s development. The executives who stand to profit from AI’s expansion are placed on the same plane as those who warn of its dangers. The film treats their statements as contributions to a conversation rather than expressions of class interest. The viewer is encouraged to see the debate as a clash of ideas rather than as a struggle between competing social forces.

This pluralistic framing also allows the film to avoid taking a position on the central question: what drives AI development? The answer is not mysterious. Private corporations are developing AI under intense market competition and geopolitical rivalry. Its deployment is shaped by the imperatives of profit, surveillance, and military advantage. But the documentary’s collage structure prevents these forces from coming into view. Instead, the viewer is left with a series of personal reflections, anxieties, and speculations—none of which illuminate the material dynamics at work.

In the end, the film’s interview roster is not simply a list of participants; it maps its ideological limits. By privileging the voices of the tech elite and framing their perspectives as part of a balanced debate, the documentary reproduces the worldview of a class that sees technological change as a matter of ideas rather than interests. It offers pluralism in place of analysis, opinion in place of explanation, and emotional resonance in place of political clarity.

The Absent Subject: The Working Class

The film’s most striking absence is the working class. Roher’s documentary contains no examination of the labour conditions under which AI is developed, the global supply chains of data annotation, the militarisation of machine learning, the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China, or the use of AI to cut labour costs and intensify exploitation. AI is not emerging in a vacuum. It is being developed within capitalist social relations, under conditions of inter‑imperialist competition, and in close collaboration with the military‑intelligence apparatus. Its first large‑scale applications are not in utopian problem‑solving but in automating managerial control, expanding surveillance, reducing labour costs, and enhancing targeting systems in warfare.

This omission is not accidental. It reflects the film's ideological horizon. Roher’s narrative centres on personal anxiety, elite opinion, and emotional calibration, not on the material processes through which AI is reshaping global capitalism. The documentary’s defenders often point out that executives such as Altman, Hassabis, and the Amodeis have publicly called for slowing “frontier” development. But none of them will do so unilaterally, because doing so risks falling behind rivals. This is a candid admission that AI’s trajectory is dictated not by ethics or philosophical reflection, but by profit and national advantage. The film circles this truth and moves on.

The absence of the working class is particularly glaring given the scale of transformation already underway. AI systems are trained through vast, invisible labour forces—data annotators in the Global South working for subsistence wages, content moderators exposed to traumatic material, and engineers labouring under intense pressure in hyper‑competitive corporate environments. These workers do not appear in Roher’s film. Nor does the militarisation of machine learning appear: the integration of AI into drone warfare, battlefield logistics, intelligence analysis, and autonomous weapons development. The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China—one of the primary drivers of AI investment—is likewise absent. The documentary treats AI as a technological debate rather than as a terrain of global conflict.

Instead, the film focuses on two categories of risk. The first is speculative: runaway superintelligence, existential catastrophe, the familiar tropes of AI apocalypse. The second is reformable: bias, misinformation, harms to children, ethical design. Both categories are framed as solvable through regulation, industry self‑restraint, and “humane” design. These are the risks that Silicon Valley is comfortable discussing, because they do not threaten the underlying social order. They let executives present themselves as responsible stewards of a dangerous technology while avoiding confrontation with the economic imperatives driving AI’s expansion.

Absent from the film is the most immediate and certain danger: that a technology capable of vastly increasing human productivity will, under capitalism, be used to throw millions out of work and concentrate wealth even further in the hands of a tiny elite. This is not hypothetical. It is already happening. AI is being deployed to automate managerial oversight, intensify workplace surveillance, and restructure labour processes in ways that reduce staffing levels and weaken workers’ bargaining power. Productivity gains accrue to shareholders, not to the people whose jobs are being transformed or eliminated.

The problem, in other words, is not the machine. It is who owns it and to what end. Roher’s documentary cannot confront this question because it is structurally incapable of doing so. Its emotional framing, its reliance on elite voices, and its refusal to analyse the social relations of AI development all serve to depoliticise a profoundly political phenomenon. The result is a film that gestures toward danger, acknowledges anxiety, and then retreats into therapeutic reassurance—leaving the real dynamics of AI power untouched.

“Apocaloptimism” as Ideology

The term “apocaloptimism” deserves scrutiny because it crystallises the ideological core of Roher’s documentary. It is presented as a mature emotional stance—acknowledge danger, feel the requisite unease, and then resolve to be hopeful. But this posture is not politically neutral. It is a quintessentially upper‑middle‑class response to crisis, shaped by a social stratum that senses instability yet cannot imagine collective struggle or systemic transformation. “Apocaloptimism” demands nothing of the viewer except emotional calibration. It proposes no social force capable of altering the course of events, because the only force that could—the international working class—does not appear anywhere in the film’s frame of reference.

The documentary’s emotional arc thus substitutes for political analysis. Roher’s impending fatherhood becomes the structuring device through which the film interprets the future. His personal anxiety is treated as a universal experience, and the viewer is invited to identify with his oscillation between dread and hope. This emotional oscillation is the film’s method: it acknowledges crisis, gestures toward catastrophe, and then retreats into reassurance. The danger is real, but the response is affective rather than analytical. The viewer is asked to feel their way through the problem, not to understand it.

This emotional framing is not incidental. It reflects the ideological habits of a class that experiences precarity but lacks a political vocabulary for confronting it. The professional‑managerial class, whose members dominate the documentary’s imagined audience, is caught between capital's power and the insecurity of technological change. They fear downward mobility, job displacement, and the erosion of their social status. Yet they cannot conceive of collective struggle, because their worldview is shaped by individualism, meritocracy, and the belief that social problems are best addressed through personal reflection or ethical consumption. “Apocaloptimism” is the emotional ideology of this class: a way of managing anxiety without confronting its structural causes.

The film’s reliance on elite voices reinforces this dynamic. By centring Silicon Valley executives, futurists, and ethicists, Roher constructs a narrative in which the future is shaped by individuals' insights and decisions rather than by conflict between social classes. The international working class—the only force capable of democratically shaping technological development—remains invisible. Workers appear only as potential victims of automation or as abstract figures in discussions of “labour disruption.” The film never depicts them as agents with interests, capacities, or political power. This erasure is essential to the film’s emotional logic. If the working class were present, the viewer would confront the possibility of struggle rather than the necessity of hope.

“Apocaloptimism” also functions as a mechanism of depoliticisation. By framing AI as an emotional dilemma, the film avoids asking who owns the technology, who profits from it, and who it harms. It avoids examining the capitalist imperatives—competition, profit maximisation, and geopolitical rivalry—that drive AI’s development. Instead, it encourages viewers to adopt a mood that is neither fully pessimistic nor fully optimistic. This mood mirrors the ideological confusion of a class that senses crisis but cannot imagine alternatives.

Historiographical Context: Technology, Capital, and Class Power

Marx’s Grundrisse and Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital provide the essential theoretical foundation that Roher’s documentary lacks. In the Marxist tradition, technology is never treated as an autonomous force or a morally ambiguous phenomenon floating above society. It is analysed as a moment within the social relations of production. Machines do not liberate or enslave on their own; they are instruments of class power. Their effects depend entirely on the social system into which they are introduced. Under capitalism, technological innovation is inseparable from the drive to reduce socially necessary labour time, extract surplus value, intensify managerial control, and compete globally between capitals. These dynamics shape not only the development of AI but its deployment, its risks, and its social meaning.

Roher’s documentary belongs to a long lineage of liberal technological discourse that treats technology as autonomous, neutral, or morally ambiguous. In this tradition, machines appear as independent actors, capable of reshaping society according to their own internal logic. The social relations of production—the ownership of technology, the imperatives of profit, the organisation of labour, the pressures of competition—are displaced by narratives of innovation, creativity, and ethical responsibility. The result is a historiographical distortion: technology is framed as a psychological dilemma rather than as a weapon in capital’s hands.

This distortion is central to the film’s ideological function. By presenting AI as a force that might be dangerous or beneficial depending on how individuals feel about it, Roher obscures the class character of technological development. The documentary’s emotional framing—its oscillation between dread and hope, its emphasis on personal anxiety, its therapeutic narrative arc—serves to depoliticise a profoundly political phenomenon. AI becomes a matter of mood rather than of power.

The Marxist tradition insists on the opposite. Under capitalism, technology is developed to increase productivity, reduce labour costs, and intensify control over workers. Market competition and geopolitical rivalry between states shape it. AI is no exception. Its most immediate applications are not in solving global problems or enhancing human flourishing but in automating managerial oversight, expanding surveillance, restructuring labour processes, and enhancing military capabilities. These uses are not accidental; they follow directly from the imperatives of capital accumulation and state power.

Roher’s documentary cannot confront these dynamics because it rests on liberal assumptions. It treats AI as a neutral tool whose dangers arise from misuse or insufficient regulation. It frames risk in terms of speculative catastrophe or reformable harm—runaway superintelligence, bias, misinformation, ethical design—while ignoring the most certain and immediate danger: that AI will be used to throw millions out of work and concentrate wealth even further in the hands of a tiny elite. This is not a hypothetical. It is already happening. AI systems are being deployed to intensify exploitation, weaken labour bargaining power, and expand managerial control. Productivity gains accrue to shareholders, not workers.

By refusing to analyse these dynamics, the documentary performs a historiographical sleight of hand. It replaces political economy with personal emotion, class struggle with psychological calibration, and structural analysis with a collage of elite opinions. In doing so, it reproduces the ideological worldview of a class that senses crisis but cannot imagine alternatives. The problem, in the end, is not the machine. It is who owns it, who controls it, and what end it is deployed to. Roher’s film cannot say this, because to do so would require abandoning “apocaloptimism” and confronting the reality of class power.

The Real Question: Who Owns the Means of Computation?

Roher and Kwan are undeniably talented filmmakers. The AI Doc is polished, emotionally resonant, and crafted with the narrative intimacy that has become a hallmark of contemporary liberal documentary style. A parent’s fear for a child’s future is real, and Roher’s framing taps into a widespread and legitimate anxiety. But the answer to that fear does not lie in the reassurances of billionaires or the moral exhortations of Silicon Valley’s in‑house critics. The film’s emotional power cannot compensate for its political evasions, and its aesthetic sophistication ultimately obscures the social forces shaping AI rather than illuminating them.

The documentary’s central conceit—Roher’s impending fatherhood—creates a narrative structure that is affectively compelling but politically disabling. It transforms a collective crisis into a private dilemma, a social question into a psychological journey. The viewer is invited to empathise with Roher’s oscillation between dread and hope, but not to interrogate the material conditions producing those emotions. This is the ideological function of the film’s emotional arc: it substitutes personal feeling for political analysis, and therapeutic reassurance for structural critique.

The absence of the working class is decisive. AI is the product of global labour: data annotators in Kenya and the Philippines, warehouse workers monitored by algorithmic systems, engineers labouring under intense corporate pressure, and millions whose jobs are being restructured or eliminated. Yet none of these people appears in the film. Their absence is not merely an oversight; it reflects the film’s class perspective. By centring elite voices—Altman, Hassabis, the Amodeis—the documentary reproduces the worldview of a class that sees technological change as a matter of ideas, ethics, and personal responsibility rather than as a terrain of class struggle.

The film’s defenders often praise its “balanced” roster of interviewees, from corporate executives to ethicists and critics. But this pluralism is itself ideological. It treats perspectives shaped by vast concentrations of capital as equivalent to those shaped by research, activism, or existential speculation. It presents disagreement as insight, and insight as explanation. The result is a collage of opinions that never confronts the underlying social relations driving AI’s development: the imperatives of profit, the pressures of inter‑imperialist rivalry, and the integration of machine learning into military and surveillance infrastructures.

Against this backdrop, the film’s emotional resolution—“apocaloptimism”—functions as a class‑specific coping mechanism. It acknowledges danger, permits unease, and then resolves to be hopeful. But hope, in this formulation, is not a political orientation; it is a psychological balm. It demands nothing of the viewer except emotional calibration. It proposes no collective force capable of altering the course of technological development, because the only force that could—the international working class—has been excluded from the narrative.

A Marxist analysis points elsewhere. From Marx’s Grundrisse to Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital, the tradition has consistently shown that technology is not autonomous. Social relations of production shape it. Under capitalism, technological innovation is inseparable from the drive to reduce socially necessary labour time, extract surplus value, intensify managerial control, and outcompete rivals. AI is not an exception; it is a paradigmatic expression of these dynamics.

The answer to a parent’s fear for a child’s future does not lie in billionaires' reassurances or Silicon Valley critics' moral exhortations. It lies in placing this extraordinary technology—the product of the collective labour and knowledge of generations—under democratic, public control, and directing it toward social need rather than private profit. Only then can AI become a tool for human liberation rather than another instrument of capitalist domination.

 Key Articles (Analytical, Marxist, and Critical Technology Studies)

On AI, Labour, and Capital

• Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilisation” (Journal of Information Technology, 2015) — foundational analysis of data extraction as a new frontier of capital.
• Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System” (2018) — maps the global labour, resource extraction, and logistics behind Amazon’s Alexa; indispensable for showing AI as a material system.
• Aaron Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work” (New Left Review, 2019) — argues that automation is driven by stagnation and competition, not technological inevitability.
• Sarah T. Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Labourers’ Dirty Work” (Media Studies, 2016) — exposes the hidden labour behind AI training and moderation.
• Meredith Whittaker, “The Steep Cost of Capture: How the Tech Industry Co‑opts AI Ethics” (AI Now Institute, 2020) — crucial for understanding why corporate “ethics” discourse depoliticises AI.

On Silicon Valley Ideology

• Evgeny Morozov, “The Taming of Tech Criticism” (The Baffler, 2014) — explains how liberal tech discourse neutralises structural critique.
• Fred Turner, “Machine Politics: The Rise of the Political Entrepreneur” (Harvard Kennedy School Review, 2018) — situates Silicon Valley’s worldview within American managerial liberalism.
• Jathan Sadowski, “When Data is Capital” (Big Data & Society, 2019) — argues that data extraction is a new form of capital accumulation.

On AI, Militarisation, and Geopolitics

• Paul Scharre, “Killer Apps: The Real Dangers of AI in Warfare” (Foreign Affairs, 2023) — mainstream but useful for mapping military integration.
• Lindsay Cohn, “AI and the New Military Revolution” (Parameters, 2022) — outlines how machine learning is transforming command and control.
• Elsa Kania, “AI and China’s Military Strategy” (Center for a New American Security, 2019) — essential for understanding US–China rivalry.

On Marxism, Technology, and Social Relations

• Harry Braverman, “The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century” (Monthly Review, 1974) — classic analysis of managerial control and deskilling.
• David Harvey, “The Technological Fix” (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005) — situates technological innovation within neoliberal restructuring.
• Nick Dyer‑Witheford, “Cyber‑Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex” (Monthly Review Press, 2015) — indispensable for a Marxist analysis of digital capitalism.

📖 Bibliography (Marxist, Critical Theory, Labour Studies, AI Critique)

Marxist Foundations

• Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857–58) — especially the “Fragment on Machines.”
• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867) — chapters on machinery, large‑scale industry, and relative surplus value.
• Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
• Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974).
• Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (1975) — on technological innovation and competition.
• David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010).

Technology, Capitalism, and Labour

• Nick Dyer‑Witheford, Cyber‑Proletariat (2015).
• Ursula Huws, Labour in the Global Digital Economy (2014).
• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).
• Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (2020).
• Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (2019).
• Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (2021).

AI, Ethics, and Ideology

• Meredith Whittaker, The AI Industry and Its Ethics Problem (AI Now, 2020).
• Timnit Gebru et al., “Datasheets for Datasets” (2018).
• Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology (2019).
• Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018).
• Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (2013).

Geopolitics, Militarisation, and Imperialism

• Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (2018).
• Elsa Kania, Battlefield Singularity: China’s Military AI Strategy (2017).
• Michael Klare, The Race for What’s Left (2012) — resource extraction and global competition.
• John Bellamy Foster, The New Imperialism of Global Capital (Monthly Review, various essays).

Documentary, Liberalism, and Political Affect

• Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal (2016) — on the professional‑managerial class.
• Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011) — essential for analysing affect as ideology.
•  

 

The Levellers and the Historians: A Reassessment of Rachel Foxley’s Contribution to Revolutionary Studies

The publication of Rachel Foxley’s The Levellers marks a significant moment in English Revolution historiography. It is the first monograph devoted exclusively to the Leveller movement since H. N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), and this half-century gap is itself historiographically revealing. The absence of sustained scholarly engagement with the Levellers cannot be attributed to a lack of archival material or interpretive difficulty. Rather, it reflects the political and intellectual realignments that have reshaped academic history since the late twentieth century. The Levellers’ marginalisation has accompanied the rise of revisionist approaches that seek to separate political thought from social conflict, limit the scope of revolutionary agency, and displace class analysis from the centre of historical explanation. In this sense, the historiographical silence surrounding the Levellers reflects a broader ideological shift within the discipline.

Foxley’s opening chapter, aptly titled “The Levellers and the Historians,” acknowledges this context with admirable clarity. She observes that revisionist scholars “have questioned almost every aspect of the historical reputation of the Levellers” (p. 3), from the coherence of their political programme to the extent of their influence within the New Model Army. Her study is thus situated within a long-running historiographical dispute- one that has, in effect, constituted a British Historikerstreit over the nature of radicalism, republicanism, and political agency in the 1640s. Although Foxley does not explicitly present her work as a polemical intervention in this debate, her analysis inevitably engages with it, and her conclusions challenge several entrenched assumptions of the revisionist orthodoxy.

Foxley’s intervention becomes clearer when set against the intellectual climate in which revisionism emerged. Beginning with G. R. Elton and consolidated by scholars such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky, revisionism rejected the structural and class-based interpretations advanced by Marxist historians including Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. Rather than emphasising social conflict, revisionists focused on constitutional crisis, administrative breakdown, religious sensibilities, and the contingent decisions of political elites. The Levellers, whose programme articulated demands for popular sovereignty, legal reform, and political accountability, sat uneasily within this framework. Their radicalism was minimised, reinterpreted as derivative, or dismissed as marginal. As a result, historiography often presents the Levellers as episodic actors rather than a coherent political movement.

Foxley’s study challenges this reduction. By emphasising the intellectual originality of Leveller political thought, she shows that their arguments cannot be dismissed as mere extensions of Independent or sectarian discourse. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, the petitioning campaigns of 1646–49, and the ideological exchanges surrounding the Putney Debates reveals a movement capable of sustained organisation and theoretical innovation. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the relationship between political ideas and social forces, the extent of popular mobilisation, and the ideological diversity within the parliamentarian coalition.

At the same time, Foxley’s work reflects the constraints of the historiographical environment in which it was produced. Her emphasis on political theory, rather than the class dynamics shaping Leveller activity, partly aligns her with post-revisionist tendencies. She places the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu and, while cautioning against dissolving them into an undifferentiated political world, does not fully articulate the structural tensions that defined their position within the revolutionary process. This unresolved tension between recognising Leveller distinctiveness and situating them within a wider coalition marks the limits of her intervention.

Nevertheless, The Levellers makes a major contribution to the field. It restores the movement to the centre of debates on political thought during the English Revolution and challenges the revisionist minimisation of radical agency. In doing so, Foxley’s study helps correct a long-standing imbalance in the historiography and reasserts the Levellers’ importance in shaping the political imagination of the 1640s.

Revisionism and Its Discontents

Foxley’s relationship with revisionist scholarship is complex and, in many respects, emblematic of the broader tensions that have shaped English Civil War historiography over the past half-century. On the one hand, she challenges the more reductive claims advanced by scholars such as Gary De Krey, whose critique focuses on the chronology and coherence of Leveller organisation. De Krey argues that the term “Leveller” emerged only in late 1647 and, therefore, that no identifiable movement existed before then.

This insistence on terminological precision leads him to reduce the political developments of 1645–47 to a series of contingent alliances, obscuring the ideological continuity and strategic coherence that Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn were already shaping. As the review notes, “Movements do not wait for their opponents to name them before they exist.” Foxley’s readiness to identify a Leveller movement before it was formally named therefore challenges revisionist scepticism and signals her refusal to regard political identity as purely retrospective.

Yet Foxley’s resistance to revisionism is not absolute. Her methodological focus on political theory, rather than on the social forces that produced and sustained it, places her partly alongside post-revisionist approaches that seek to combine ideological analysis with a more pluralistic understanding of political culture. She locates the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu, emphasising the fluidity of alliances and the permeability of ideological boundaries. This approach enables her to highlight the Levellers’ intellectual originality without artificially separating them from the wider political world in which they operated. At the same time, she warns against “dissolving them into an undifferentiated part of that complex political world” (p. 6), demonstrating her awareness of the dangers of excessive integration. The Levellers were neither mere Independents nor simply one faction among many; they articulated a distinctive political programme that cannot be reduced to the sum of their alliances.

The tension between these positions, however, remains unresolved. Foxley’s analysis does not fully articulate the class character of Leveller politics or the structural limits that shaped its trajectory. Her focus on political argumentation, petitions, pamphlets, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves the social base that enabled it underexplored.

The Levellers drew their support mainly from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and sections of London’s lower middle strata, as well as those of other urban centres. These groups held distinctive economic interests and political expectations that shaped Leveller demands for legal reform, popular sovereignty, and magistrate accountability. Without placing Leveller ideology in this social context, the movement can appear as a free-floating constellation of ideas rather than a political expression of specific class forces.

This omission becomes more apparent when Foxley examines the structural limits of Leveller influence. She acknowledges the hostility of the army grandees and political elite. Still, she does not fully consider why Leveller demands became intolerable to the propertied classes that ultimately shaped the post-revolutionary settlement. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 resulted not simply from ideological disagreement or personal animosity, but from a class struggle within the revolutionary camp, as the interests of small producers collided with those of landowners, merchants, and military commanders. By failing to foreground these dynamics, Foxley’s account risks underestimating the material constraints that defined both the possibilities and the limits of Leveller radicalism.

In this sense, Foxley’s work occupies an intermediate position within the historiographical landscape. She challenges revisionist minimisation of Leveller coherence and influence, but does not fully adopt the class-centred analyses advanced by Marxist historians such as Hill, Manning, or Slaughter. Her study thus serves both as a corrective to revisionist reductionism and as an expression of the post-revisionist reluctance to engage directly with the structural determinants of political action. This duality is not a flaw, but a marker of the historiographical moment in which her work was produced, a moment characterised by methodological pluralism, theoretical caution, and an ongoing effort to reconcile political ideas with social forces.

 

 

 

The Intellectual Originality of Leveller Thought

One of the major strengths of Foxley’s study is its demonstration of the originality and intellectual coherence of Leveller political thought. Against the long-standing revisionist tendency to depict the Levellers as derivative or merely reactive, Foxley convincingly argues that their political language was neither a simple extension of Independent polemic nor an improvised response to the accelerating crises of the late 1640s. Instead, she shows how Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, and their associates forged a distinctive idiom that combined scriptural references, historical analogies, and emergent secular reasoning in unprecedented ways within English political discourse. Their pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals reveal a sustained effort to theorise political authority, liberty, and representation at a moment when inherited frameworks were collapsing. As contemporaries recognised, the Levellers were the revolution’s ideologues, seeking to make sense of unprecedented political developments with the intellectual resources available to them.

Foxley’s analysis is especially effective in showing that Leveller thought cannot be reduced to the religious idioms through which it was often expressed. While recognising scripture’s pervasive influence on seventeenth-century political argument, she demonstrates that the Levellers used biblical language strategically rather than dogmatically. Their appeals to “freeborn rights,” “the laws of nature,” and “the people’s consent” were not simply theological extensions, but elements of a broader shift toward secularised political reasoning. In this respect, Foxley challenges interpretations that trace Leveller radicalism exclusively to congregational practice or covenant theology. Instead, she places their political creativity within a wider intellectual transformation that was beginning to separate political and social questions from scriptural authority.

It is important to place this intellectual creativity within a broader European context. The erosion of scriptural authority after the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1543), followed by the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, destabilised the cosmological foundations on which medieval political thought had rested. As scientific inquiry undermined the Ptolemaic universe and challenged the epistemological supremacy of biblical revelation, new forms of political reasoning became possible. The Levellers were neither scientists nor consciously involved in the scientific revolution, but they operated in an intellectual environment increasingly receptive to secular explanations. Their arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality reflect this shift. They belonged to a generation beginning, however tentatively, to seek answers to political and social problems beyond the confines of theological orthodoxy.

In this sense, Leveller thought anticipates aspects of the Enlightenment. Their insistence that political authority derives from the people rather than divine sanction, emphasis on rational law over arbitrary power, and belief in the universality of certain rights all foreshadow developments in eighteenth-century political philosophy. At the same time, their critique of oligarchic power and defence of small producers and artisans echo themes later adopted by socialist thinkers. It would be anachronistic to describe the Levellers as proto-Marxists, and Foxley avoids such simplifications. Nevertheless, their political language contains early elements of later democratic and egalitarian traditions, showing that the intellectual genealogy of modern radicalism cannot be confined to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

Foxley’s contribution, therefore, is not merely to rehabilitate the Levellers as significant actors in the English Revolution but to restore the intellectual depth of their political project. By situating their ideas within both the immediate revolutionary context and the longer trajectory of European thought, she shows that Leveller radicalism was neither accidental nor derivative. It was a creative and historically consequential attempt to rethink the foundations of political authority at a moment when the old world was collapsing and a new one struggling to be born.

A Movement with a Mass Audience

Foxley’s analysis of Leveller mobilisation is one of the most empirically substantial and historiographically consequential elements of her study. Against the revisionist tendency to minimise the movement’s organisational capacity and popular resonance, she reconstructs a pattern of sustained political activity that demonstrates the Levellers’ ability to reach, mobilise, and coordinate large numbers of supporters across London and beyond. Her discussion of the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (July 1646) is particularly illuminating. She identifies it as “the first Leveller text to claim a mass following” (p. 36), and treats it not as rhetorical exaggeration but as evidence of a developing political constituency. By foregrounding this document, Foxley challenges the assumption common among conservative historians that Leveller radicalism was confined to a narrow circle of pamphleteers and sectaries. Instead, she shows that by mid‑1646 the Levellers were already articulating demands that resonated widely among artisans, apprentices, small producers, and politically conscious segments of the urban population.

Her use of recent scholarship on petitioning and print culture further strengthens this argument. The figures she cites- 30,000 copies of a petition printed in January 1648, 98,000 signatures on a later Remonstrance, 20,000 copies of the Agreement of the People distributed free, and 10,000 signatures on the women’s petition of March 1649- are striking not only for their scale but for what they reveal about the infrastructure of Leveller mobilisation. These numbers indicate a movement capable of coordinating printers, distributors, ward organisers, and networks of sympathisers across multiple parishes and guild structures. They also suggest that Leveller texts circulated far beyond the immediate circles of their authors, reaching readers who may not have identified formally with the movement but who were receptive to its arguments. In this respect, Foxley’s work undermines the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal or ephemeral. Instead, she presents them as a dynamic political force whose organisational practices anticipated later forms of mass politics.

Equally important is Foxley’s challenge to the claim that Leveller political ideas were fundamentally religious in origin. While acknowledging the period's pervasive religious idiom, she argues that “there is simply no need to go hunting in covenant theology or congregational practice for Leveller political ideas of equality or ‘democracy,’ or for a prototype of the Agreement of the People” (p. 9). This intervention matters in a long‑standing historiographical debate. For decades, revisionist scholars have attempted to locate the roots of Leveller radicalism in sectarian ecclesiology, thereby reducing their political programme to an extension of congregationalist church governance. Foxley rejects this reduction. She shows that Leveller arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality cannot be explained solely, or even primarily, through religious categories. Their political language drew on a wider repertoire: classical republicanism, common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the emergent secular reasoning that was beginning to reshape European intellectual life.

By disentangling Leveller political thought from narrowly theological explanations, Foxley restores the movement’s intellectual autonomy. She shows that while the Levellers operated within a religious culture, their political arguments were not derivative of it. This distinction matters because it repositions the Levellers within the broader history of political ideas. Rather than treating them as a sectarian offshoot, Foxley presents them as participants in a wider transformation in political reasoning- one that was beginning to detach questions of authority, liberty, and representation from the interpretive monopoly of scripture.

Taken together, Foxley’s analysis of mobilisation and her critique of religious reductionism significantly revise the historiographical landscape. They reveal a movement that was both organisationally sophisticated and intellectually innovative, capable of articulating political demands that resonated across a broad social base. In doing so, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of Leveller significance and restores the movement to its rightful place within the political imagination of the English Revolution.

Levellers and the New Model Army

The chapter on the Levellers’ relationship with the New Model Army constitutes Foxley’s most substantial and consequential historiographical intervention. For more than four decades, revisionist scholars such as Austin Woolrych, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky have argued that Leveller influence within the army was limited, episodic, or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. In this view, the army’s political actions in 1647–49 can be explained through institutional grievances, professional honour, and war experience, rather than through the penetration of radical political ideas. Foxley challenges this orthodoxy directly. She highlights the petitioning campaigns of spring 1647, the cooperation between civilian and military radicals, and the striking consistency of demands articulated by Leveller leaders and army agitators. Her analysis demonstrates that Leveller influence was neither accidental nor superficial but formed part of a sustained dialogue between civilian activists and politically conscious soldiers.

Central to Foxley’s argument is her treatment of the Putney Debates. Although constrained by the publisher’s space limitations, her discussion is judicious and incisive. She rejects the revisionist tendency to treat Putney as an isolated episode, a momentary eruption of radicalism unconnected to the army’s broader political development. Instead, she situates the debates within ongoing exchanges among agitators, grandees, and civilian Levellers, showing how the issues raised at Putney had already circulated in petitions, pamphlets, and informal discussions throughout the army. This contextualisation is crucial. It shows that the debates were not an aberration but the culmination of a political process in which soldiers actively engaged with questions of sovereignty, representation, and constitutional settlement.

The review reinforces Foxley’s argument by listing the numerous Levellers who served in the army or maintained close ties with it. Figures such as Edward Sexby, William Allen, Thomas Prince, John Harris, and the Rainsborough brothers demonstrate that Leveller sympathies were not confined to civilian circles. Lilburne’s own military record was widely known, and army chaplains such as Jeremiah Ives and Edward Harrison openly supported Leveller positions. These connections undermine the revisionist assertion that the Levellers were “exterior to the army.” They instead reveal a porous boundary between civilian radicalism and military activism, where ideas, personnel, and organisational practices circulated freely.

Foxley’s conclusion that Putney marked “not the end but the beginning of a potentially fertile alliance between civilian Levellers and army radicals” (p. 158) directly challenges the standard revisionist narrative. Rather than viewing the debates as a moment of radical overreach swiftly contained by Cromwell and Ireton, she interprets them as the opening of a political space in which Leveller ideas could shape the army’s constitutional imagination. This interpretation restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary dynamic. It emphasises the agency of rank‑and‑file soldiers, the army's ideological diversity, and the possibility, however constrained, of a democratic transformation emerging from within the military structure itself.

Foxley’s intervention has broader historiographical implications. By demonstrating the depth of Leveller–army interaction, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of radicalism and reasserts the importance of ideological conflict within the parliamentarian coalition. Her analysis suggests that the army was not merely a professional fighting force but a political institution in which debates about authority, liberty, and representation were actively contested. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the extent of popular political consciousness, the relationship between military organisation and political radicalism, and the structural tensions within the revolutionary movement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on the army is a major contribution to the field. It dismantles the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal and restores the New Model Army's political complexity. By reintegrating Putney into the broader revolutionary process, she offers a more dynamic and historically grounded account of radicalism in the 1640s- one that recognises the army not as a passive institution but as a site of ideological struggle and political possibility.

Class Limits and the Cromwellian Settlement

Where Foxley’s analysis is less satisfactory is in her treatment of the class limits of Leveller politics. Although she acknowledges the hostility of the grandees and the structural pressures facing the movement, she does not fully explore the deeper social dynamics that shaped both the possibilities and the constraints of Leveller radicalism. The Levellers drew their support primarily from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and segments of the lower middle strata groups whose economic interests and political expectations diverged sharply from those of the propertied classes who ultimately determined the trajectory of the post‑revolutionary settlement. This divergence was not incidental. It was rooted in the material conditions of seventeenth‑century England, where the emerging capitalist order was reshaping relations of production, property, and political authority.

The Levellers’ programme- universal male suffrage, equality before the law, accountability of magistrates, and the subordination of rulers to the people- reflected the aspirations of those who were being drawn into the early capitalist labour market yet still retained elements of economic independence. Their demands expressed both a desire to preserve older forms of small‑scale production and a need to articulate new forms of political agency in a rapidly changing society. In this sense, Leveller radicalism was simultaneously forward‑looking and rooted in the social position of its supporters. It advanced democratic ideas but was limited by the class base from which it emerged.

Foxley recognises aspects of this dynamic but does not fully develop its implications. Her emphasis on political theory pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves underexplored the structural forces that shaped the movement’s trajectory. The suppression of the Levellers at Burford in May 1649 was not, as the review notes, “an accident of personalities but the outcome of a class struggle within the revolutionary camp.” The grandees, representing the interests of landowners, merchants, and the higher strata of the bourgeoisie, could not tolerate demands that threatened property qualifications, social hierarchy, and the stability of the emerging capitalist order. Cromwell’s actions- arresting Leveller leaders, suppressing mutinies, and consolidating state power- were not simply tactical decisions but class imperatives.

Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility but does not fully explore why Leveller ideas became intolerable to the propertied classes. The Levellers’ insistence on political equality clashed with the economic inequalities that underpinned the revolutionary elite's power. Their critique of arbitrary authority threatened not only monarchical absolutism but also the authority of those who had assumed leadership of the parliamentarian cause. Their demands for legal reform challenged the very structures that maintained property relations. In short, the Levellers’ political programme was incompatible with the class interests of those who emerged victorious from the revolution.

This omission matters because it limits Foxley’s ability to explain the movement’s defeat. Without situating Leveller radicalism within the broader class structure of seventeenth‑century England, the suppression at Burford risks appearing as a contingent event rather than as the predictable outcome of a deeper social conflict. The Levellers were not defeated because their ideas were impractical or because they misjudged the political moment. They were defeated because their demands threatened the foundations of the new order the propertied classes were constructing.

Law, Liberty, and the Freeborn Englishman

The chapter on law and liberty is among the most stimulating in Foxley’s book, offering a nuanced account of Leveller legal thought and its place within the political culture of the 1640s. Yet it contains a notable omission: Foxley does not engage with Soviet legal scholarship, particularly the work of Evgeny Pashukanis, whose analysis of early modern legal forms provides one of the most sophisticated frameworks for understanding the Levellers’ juridical innovations. This absence is striking because Pashukanis’s Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927) remains one of the few attempts to situate Leveller legal arguments within a broader theory of the emergence of bourgeois law. His insights illuminate precisely the terrain Foxley explores, and their omission leaves a gap in an otherwise rich chapter.

Pashukanis argued that John Lilburne’s legal thought anticipated key principles of bourgeois criminal law, including the requirement that punishment correspond to the crime and the prohibition of ex post facto legislation. These principles, which would later become foundational to modern liberal jurisprudence, appear in Lilburne’s writings not as abstract theoretical propositions but as practical demands arising from his own experiences of arbitrary imprisonment, judicial manipulation, and executive overreach. Pashukanis’s observation that Lilburne was “the first man in England to succeed in being served with an indictment” underscores the novelty of Leveller legal arguments. It highlights how Lilburne’s struggles forced the state to articulate and formalise procedures that had previously been applied inconsistently or not at all. In Pashukanis’s reading, Lilburne’s confrontations with authority reveal the embryonic formation of legal norms that would later underpin the bourgeois state.

Foxley’s silence on this tradition is regrettable, given its relevance to her subject. Her analysis rightly emphasises the Levellers’ insistence on due process, legal accountability, and the rights of the accused. She shows how their arguments drew on common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the political language of freeborn English liberties. Yet without engaging with Pashukanis, she misses an opportunity to connect Leveller legal thought to a broader theoretical account of law's historical development. Pashukanis’s framework would have let her situate Leveller demands within the transition from feudal to bourgeois legal forms, illuminating the structural forces that shaped their arguments and why those arguments resonated so powerfully in the 1640s.

Moreover, Pashukanis’s analysis provides a counterpoint to interpretations that treat Leveller legal thought as merely an extension of religious or constitutional traditions. By emphasising the material and class dimensions of legal development, he offers a way of understanding why the Levellers’ juridical innovations emerged when they did and why they took the form they did. His reading suggests that Leveller legal arguments were not simply moral appeals or constitutional clarifications but expressions of deeper social transformations associated with the rise of market relations, the consolidation of property rights, and the emergence of a new political subject: the legally autonomous individual. Foxley gestures toward these themes but does not fully develop them, and her omission of Pashukanis leaves this dimension of Leveller thought underexplored.

This gap is particularly evident in her discussion of the relationship between law and class. Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility to Leveller legal reforms but does not analyse the structural reasons why those reforms were unacceptable to the propertied classes. Pashukanis’s framework would have clarified this point: the Levellers’ insistence on legal equality and procedural fairness challenged elites' discretionary power. It threatened the hierarchical legal order that underpinned emerging capitalist relations. Their defeat, therefore, was not simply political but juridical: a suppression of legal forms that were incompatible with the interests of those shaping the post‑revolutionary settlement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on law and liberty is rich and insightful, but her omission of Pashukanis represents a missed opportunity. Engaging with Soviet legal scholarship would have deepened her analysis, connected Leveller legal thought to broader theoretical traditions, and clarified the structural forces that shaped both the movement’s achievements and its limits.

Conclusion

Foxley’s The Levellers is, without question, a major scholarly achievement. It synthesises a wide range of recent research, challenges entrenched revisionist assumptions, and restores the Levellers to a central place in the political thought of the English Revolution. In doing so, it intervenes decisively in a historiographical landscape long shaped by scepticism toward radical agency and by a tendency to minimise the intellectual coherence of seventeenth‑century popular movements. Foxley’s work demonstrates that the Levellers were not marginal pamphleteers or episodic agitators but serious political thinkers whose ideas resonated across a broad social base and contributed meaningfully to the revolutionary dynamic of the 1640s.

One of the book’s most impressive accomplishments is its ability to integrate intellectual history, political theory, and close textual analysis without losing sight of the broader revolutionary context. Foxley’s readings of Leveller pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals are consistently sharp and historically grounded. She shows how the Levellers developed a distinctive political language that combined scriptural references, common-law traditions, and emerging secular reasoning. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, in particular, highlights the movement’s constitutional imagination and its attempt to articulate a vision of political authority rooted in popular sovereignty rather than inherited privilege. In this respect, Foxley’s work significantly revises the revisionist portrayal of Leveller thought as derivative or improvisational.

Equally important is her challenge to the long‑standing assumption that Leveller influence within the New Model Army was minimal or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. By reconstructing the petitioning campaigns of 1647, the exchanges between agitators and grandees, and the connections between civilian and military radicals, Foxley demonstrates that Leveller ideas circulated widely within the army and shaped debates about representation, authority, and settlement. Her treatment of the Putney Debates is particularly effective, situating them within a broader pattern of political engagement rather than treating them as an isolated eruption of radicalism. In doing so, she restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary process and challenges the revisionist minimisation of rank‑and‑file political consciousness.

Despite these strengths, the book has limitations. Foxley’s reluctance to foreground class dynamics leaves an important dimension of Leveller politics underdeveloped. The movement’s social base- artisans, apprentices, small producers- shaped both the radicalism of its demands and the structural limits of its influence. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 was not merely a political defeat but the outcome of a deeper class conflict within the revolutionary camp. While Foxley acknowledges the grandees' hostility, she does not fully explore the material interests that made Leveller demands intolerable to the propertied classes who ultimately shaped the post‑revolutionary settlement. A more explicit engagement with class analysis would have strengthened her account of both the movement’s achievements and its defeat.

Similarly, Foxley’s silence on Soviet legal scholarship, particularly Evgeny Pashukanis, represents a missed opportunity. Pashukanis’s analysis of Lilburne’s legal thought provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of modern legal norms and the relationship between law and class power. Engaging with this tradition would have deepened Foxley’s discussion of Leveller jurisprudence and connected it to broader debates about the historical development of legal forms.

These limitations, however, do not diminish the book’s overall significance. The Levellers represents a major step toward a more balanced and historically grounded understanding of radical politics in the 1640s. It challenges the revisionist orthodoxy, reopens questions that had been prematurely closed, and restores the Levellers to the centre of debates about political thought in the English Revolution. It deserves a wide readership, and one hopes that a more affordable paperback edition will make it accessible to students and scholars alike.

Primary and Secondary Works

Brailsford, H. N. The Levellers and the English Revolution. London: Cresset Press, 1961.

De Krey, Gary. Review of The Levellers, by Rachel Foxley. History (online). Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-0206.12111_4 (onlinelibrary.wiley.com in Bing)

Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Preface.

Kishlansky, Mark. Various works on the New Model Army and revisionist interpretations (not directly cited with title in the essay but referenced as part of the revisionist school).

Morrill, John. Works on the English Civil War and the New Model Army (referenced in discussion of revisionist historiography).

North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism. Published online, 24 October 1996. Available at: https://www.wsws.org

Pashukanis, Evgeny B. “Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law” (1927). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm (marxists.org in Bing)

Rees, John. – Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519. Available at: https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1519 (reviews.history.ac.uk in Bing) – Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution. PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/ (research.gold.ac.uk in Bing)

Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt.” Labour Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (May–June 1958), pp. 77–82.

Talbot, Ann. “‘These the times … this the man’: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill.” World Socialist Web Site, 25 March 2003. Available at: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html (wsws.org in Bing)

Contextual and Historiographical References

Elton, G. R. Foundational works on Tudor government and the origins of revisionist historiography (referenced indirectly).

Historikerstreit. General background on the German historiographical dispute. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit (en.wikipedia.org in Bing)

Woolrych, Austin. Works on the New Model Army and the English Civil War (referenced in discussion of revisionist interpretations).

Notes Corresponding to the Original Essay

1. Rees, John. Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
2. “Historikerstreit,” Wikipedia.
3. De Krey, Gary. Review in History.
4. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface.
5. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
6. Talbot, Ann. WSWS, 25 March 2003.
7. North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism.
8. Rees, Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution, PhD thesis.
9. Foxley, The Levellers.
10. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
11. Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt,” Labour Review, 1958.
12. Pashukanis, Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927).