Table Of ContentDiggers, Levellers and Agrarian Capitalism
Radical Political Thought in 17th Century English
Geoff Kennedy
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For Angela Joya
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1 Radical Political Thought in Early Modern England 1
Whiggism and the creation of the canon 2
Marxism and the bourgeois revolution paradigm 8
Revisionism, republicanism and traditional society 13
2 Historical Materialism and Early Modern Radicalism 29
Rethinking the bourgeois revolution 29
Political Marxism 35
The Social History of Political Thought 41
3 Agrarian Capitalism and Class Formation 60
From Feudalism to Agrarian Capitalism 60
Commons and Enclosures 69
Market dependence and uneven development 81
Coercion, class and state power 86
4 The Political Economy of Improvement 97
The moral economy and peasant resistance 98
Tudor reformer and the foundations of political economy 107
Moral reformers and ‘Baconian’ improvers 112
Levellers and the ‘middling sort of men’ 122
Digger radicalism and agrarian capitalism 124
5 From the State as Property to Property against the State 141
State formation in early modern England 141
The Crown vs. Parliament 147
The Levellers and the Putney Debates 153
The Engagement and the English Commonwealth 164
6 Unearthing the Kingly Power 183
The Diggers, popular sovereignty and the English Revolution 183
The Law of Freedom in a Platform 193
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7 Between Monarchy and Multitude 202
Thomas Hobbes and the ‘masterless multitude’ 203
Hobbes’ Absolutism 208
John Locke and Leveller radicalism 214
Property and consent 222
Locke and the bourgeois paradigm 234
Bibliography 243
Index 261
About the Author 265
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would to thank the members of my supervisory committee
for their comments, their encouragement and their constructive criticisms:
George Comninel for his unsurpassed enthusiasm and knowledge regarding the
issues discussed in this book; David McNally for his characteristic generosity
and his insight; and Nicholas Rogers for his insistence on historical detail. I
would also like to thank Ross Rudolph for helping me maintain my interest in
the history of political thought. Dennis Pilon helped me keep on track with my
dissertation writing by preventing me from getting distracted by the numerous
diversions that exist in a large graduate program like York. I spent countless
hours with Samuel Knafo, Thierry Lapointe, Etienne Cantin, Leandro Vegara-
Camus, Travis Fast and Martijn Konings discussing the finer points of the speci-
ficity of capitalist development from which I learned a great deal. Marcus Green
and I spent much of our time discussing the various approaches to the history of
political thought as well as the differing interpretations of the canon. Hannes
Lacher suggested that I add a chapter on Hobbes and Locke which proved to not
only be a good idea, but also proved to further my education in the history of
political thought and open up new avenues of historical interest. I must also
thank Marlene Quesenberry for her absolutely crucial support regarding all
things related to the graduate program. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the
unconditional moral and intellectual support of my wife Angela Joya, without
whom I would not have had the energy to see this book through to the finish.
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1
Radical Political Thought in Early Modern
England
Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly fashionable to criticize
and reject the Whig interpretation of history and the interpretations of political
thought that are embedded within it.1 This Whig interpretation is often said to be
expressed in most of the predominant interpretations of the English Civil War
and Revolution of the 1640s as well as the interpretations of the history of polit-
ical thought of the Stuart era. Consequently, the canon of political thought is
often said to be embedded within this Whiggish understanding of history and is
therefore believed to share its biases and its problems.2 However, the Whig in-
terpretation of English history is really two histories that lead in two different –
yet not necessarily mutually exclusive – directions. One emerged in the immedi-
ate aftermath of the revolution itself, emphasizing the justice – or lack thereof –
of the parliamentary cause, evolves throughout the eighteenth century, roughly
in accordance with the political division between Whigs and Tories, and finds its
classic expression in the work of Lord Macaulay in the aftermath of the 1832
Reform Bill. The other begins with Harrington, goes up through Hume, Fergu-
son and Smith, up through Guizot and Marx and finds its contemporary formula-
tions in the Marxist and sociological formulations of the bourgeois revolution
paradigm.3 Whereas the former narrative is interested more in the ideals of free-
dom and liberty that the revolution is purported to represent, the latter narrative
is characterized by attempts at explaining the events of the seventeenth century
in terms of long-term processes of socio-economic development.
While practitioners of liberal, Marxist and sociological history insist on
the fundamental differences between these approaches, in the eyes of its revi-
sionist critics, all of these approaches merely represent different variations of the
same underlying Whig interpretation of history. Initially referring to the anach-
ronistic practice that sees history as a vehicle through which to further contem-
porary political struggles, the criticism of the Whig interpretation lay in the fact
that the partisan value judgments of the historian often clouded an “objective”
interpretation of history as it actually happened. Since Herbert Butterfield’s
classic critique of the Whig interpretation of history, however, it has come to
mean more than that.4 It has since come to encompass any approach to history
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2 Chapter 1
that seeks to explain events in relationship to long-term, socio-economic devel-
opments. In other words, the Whig interpretation has now come to include that
classically non-Whig approach to history: Marxism. For revisionists, the Whig
conception of history has become more than a particular interpretation of Eng-
lish history employed in the service of the Whig cause. Revisionists, as we will
later see, have broadened its definition to include certain methodological princi-
ples that lead to its inherent shortcomings. By focusing on methodological prob-
lems of teleology and anachronism, revisionists conflate two similar, yet differ-
ent approaches to historical development and reject them both under the
auspices of the “Whiggism.” This process of historical revisionism has signifi-
cant implications on conventional understandings of the development and char-
acter of radical political thought in early modern England, as revisionist history
has come to inform much of the recent scholarship in the history of political
theory. Any study of radical political thought in 17th century England, therefore,
must look at the historical development of the Whig interpretation, its relation-
ship to the traditional canon of political thought, and the subsequent revisionist
challenge.
Whiggism and the Creation of a Liberal Canon
Initially, the Whig conception of history meant something very specific. From
the Whig perspective, the history of England represented the historical devel-
opment of liberty and freedom over the feudal forces of tyranny and absolutism.
The Civil War and Glorious Revolution were viewed as crucial historical epi-
sodes in this struggle, in which Parliament represented the progressive forces of
individual liberty and parliamentary sovereignty in a battle with the reactionary
forces of an increasingly tyrannical Crown that was embarking on a project of
absolutist state formation. While some argue that the Whig conception of history
can be said to have had its antecedents in the historical commentaries that date
back to the constitutional struggles of the English Revolution itself,5 it was not
until the 19th century that it emerged as a dominant and coherent account of Eng-
lish historical development. Throughout the 18th century, histories of England
were largely divided along Tory/Whig party lines, in which history was enlisted
to serve the cause of contemporary political struggles.6 David Hume was per-
haps the first writer to attempt to transcend this division and present an interpre-
tation of the events of the 17th century from a skeptical and objective stand-
point.7 Hume was not a Tory historian in the usual sense. His Toryism, in some
sense, emerged out of a rejection of contemporary Whig interpretations of the
Civil War. Interestingly enough, Hume’s intention in writing his History was not
to supply ammunition to the Tory cause, but rather to downplay the differences
between Whigs and Tories. In his History, Tory elements coexisted with Whig,
and Hume himself identified with neither political camp. Hume made the point –
against the prevailing Whig wisdom – that there was no clearly defined concep-
Radical Political Thought in Early Modern England 3
tion of the ancient constitution in the 17th century. According to Hume, it was
the ambiguities surrounding the issue of royal prerogative and privilege – not the
issue of its “justness” – that resulted in civil war. Given this ambiguity, the Civil
War was in a sense inevitable, as opposed to being the outcome of the mali-
ciousness of men. But this does not mean that Hume fell in line with the Whigs.
In fact, he condemned the Whigs for their distorted view of the past, despite the
fact that their policies had not been without advantage to the state. Against Whig
doctrine, Hume espoused the doctrine of passive obedience over resistance, and
the classic Tory emphasis on deference to established authority. Hume’s sympa-
thies, therefore, were not unequivocal or unambiguous, and this ambiguity per-
haps speaks to the relative similarity he perceived between Whigs and Tories in
terms of their class identification. This similarity represented a characteristically
English phenomenon that distinguished English class formation from the divi-
sions that persisted between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie common in con-
tinental Europe. However, despite being taken up as a Tory historian by con-
temporary critics, certain elements within his work would later be identified as
comprising the Whig conception of history – namely, the inevitability of the
conflict – and as such, he would be cast in the same vein as his Whig successors.
The problem with this characterization, however, is that in the 18th cen-
tury, what were seen as “Whig” histories, were characterized by something more
than merely a sense of inevitability of the conflict itself; Whiggism was in fact
more typically associated with particular partisan attitudes towards political
events. Where Hume attributed an inevitability to the Civil War resulting from
the ambiguity of the English Constitution, Whig historians were trumpeting the
cause of parliamentary sovereignty. The Civil War was perhaps less an inevita-
bility – because, according to Whigs, it was caused by the wickedness of Royal-
ists – than it was a valiant cause in the pursuit of liberty. Hume, of course, was
much more skeptical in his assessment of the validity of the parliamentary
cause. Whig historiography, therefore, was less teleological than it was explicit-
ly partisan, laced with value judgments that revealed political biases.
By the 1820s, the Whig conception of history was becoming allied to
the cause of political reform in England, notably the reforms of 1832. Between
1824-8, William Godwin published his History of the Commonwealth of Eng-
land, which detailed the republican experiment in English politics. The basis of
Godwin’s work was that the Parliamentary opponents of Charles I were the un-
conditional opponents of tyranny and defenders of liberty. In 1828, J.T. Rutt, a
radical Unitarian, a friend of Joseph Priestley, and a member of both the Society
of Constitutional Information and the Society of the Friends of the People, pub-
lished a diary of Gibbon Wakefield, a member of the Long Parliament, in order
to emphasize the political significance of the Commonwealth period of 1649-50.
But it was not until the publication of Lord Macaulay’s work that the dominance
of Hume was finally superseded.8 In the work of Macaulay, the Whig cause was
explicitly trumpeted, and history was consciously – and unabashedly – interpret-
ed through the lens of contemporary political struggle:
