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.
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Revolution. London: Cresset Press, 1961.
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Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political
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Notes Corresponding to the Original Essay
- Rees,
John. Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
- “Historikerstreit,”
Wikipedia.
- De
Krey, Gary. Review in History.
- Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface.
- Rees,
Reviews in History, no. 1519.
- Talbot,
Ann. WSWS, 25 March 2003.
- North,
David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism.
- Rees,
Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution,
PhD thesis.
- Foxley,
The Levellers.
- Rees,
Reviews in History, no. 1519.
- Slaughter,
Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt,” Labour Review, 1958.
- Pashukanis,
Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law
(1927).
