Revised Preface
This dissertation is the product of a long engagement with
the English Revolution — the first great bourgeois revolution and the
foundational rupture of the modern world. My aim is not simply to recount
familiar events but to interrogate the class forces that propelled them, the
ideological forms through which those forces became conscious, and the
historical limits that shaped the revolution’s trajectory and ultimate
settlement.
The English Revolution has often been narrated as a
constitutional drama or a struggle for religious liberty. Yet beneath these
forms lay deeper social antagonisms. The Putney Debates of 1647, the
suppression of the Levellers, and the fleeting emergence of the Digger communes
were not marginal episodes but moments in which the revolution revealed its
underlying contradictions. In the arguments exchanged at Putney church — about
sovereignty, property, political rights, and the meaning of equality — we encounter
the earliest explicit articulation of tensions that would come to define
capitalist society.
This dissertation proceeds from the conviction that these
questions remain unresolved because they cannot be resolved within the
framework of bourgeois democracy. The English Revolution inaugurated a new
social order, but it also exposed the limits of that order. The Levellers’
demands for political equality, the Diggers’ insistence on common ownership,
and the broader popular struggle for substantive democracy all collided with
the imperatives of emergent capitalist property relations. The revolution
achieved the political supremacy of the bourgeoisie, but only by suppressing
the very democratic energies it had unleashed.
For this reason, the English Revolution is not merely a past
event but a living contradiction. Its legacy is incomplete; its unresolved
questions continue to shape the present. The debates of the 1640s still echo in
contemporary struggles over representation, economic power, and the meaning of
democracy. To study the English Revolution is therefore not an antiquarian
exercise but an inquiry into the origins of our own world — a world still
marked by the tensions first articulated in that moment of rupture.
This dissertation is offered in the hope that revisiting
those debates with clarity and historical precision can illuminate the
structural limits of bourgeois democracy today and help us understand why the
aspirations voiced by the Levellers and Diggers remain both unfinished and
urgent.
