From the English Civil War to the American Revolution
Leveller political sentiment survived semi-underground and influenced revolutionaries like Tom Paine and Richard Price
We host a reading group each Sunday at 3 PM EST. We are working through “Equal Human and Political Rights and Democratic Republicanism,” created by blog contributors. Below is the introduction to Section Four, covering the survival of Leveller egalitarianism, its explosive revival in 1776, and its philosophical justification.
The Leveller rebellion lasted only three years; its leaders were either killed or imprisoned; and mass political dissent in England remained subdued for the next one hundred years. Nevertheless, Leveller political sentiment survived semi-underground in non-conforming religious and educational institutions. The example of William Rainsborough is included to illustrate that Leveller political beliefs were also widespread in the North American colonies and were an important part of the political ideology justifying resistance to England in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in 1775. Then in January and February of 1776 two extraordinary political pamphlets were published: Tom Paine’s Common Sense in Philadelphia and Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty in England. Both sold approximately two hundred thousand copies (in populations of one million free adults in the colonies and two and one half million in England) and played a major role in creating modern mass democratic politics.
The focus of this section is on Price’s theory of human agency and the philosophical justification of universal and equal human rights. Still, we have to preface that discussion with a comment about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
Because the doctrine that “all men are created equal” is almost universally associated with the Declaration of Independence, and because this declaration was made by men who had decimated the native population of the continent and imported slaves to work their plantations, some explanation needs to be given why these words should not just be dismissed as rank hypocrisy.
We agree with Anthony Gidden’s framing of this problem in A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981):
I think there are elements of decisive importance in Marx's critique of the 'sham' character of citizenship. But I shall argue strongly against the implications that are often drawn from this — and for which some justification can be found in Marx's own dismissive comments upon bourgeois political pretensions — that 'bourgeois rights’ are monopolised solely by the bourgeoisie. In my view, the emergence of the 'public sphere' in the American and French Revolutions, predicated in principle upon universal rights and liberties of the whole societal community, is as fundamental a disjunction in history as the commodification of labor and property to which Marx showed it to be intimately related. However asymmetrical they may have been in regard to the emergent capitalist class system, citizenship rights opened up new vistas of freedom and equality that Marxism itself seeks to radicalise. In view of the encyclopedic scope of his studies of world history, it is worth quoting Toynbee's judgement on this:
‘For the first time since the dawn of civilisation, about five thousand years ago, the masses have now become alive to the possibility that their traditional way of life might be changed for the better and that this change might be brought about by their own action. This awakening of hope and purpose in the hearts and minds of the hitherto depressed three-quarters of the world's population will, I feel certain, stand in retrospect as the epoch-making element of our age.’
Whether one views it as a historical necessity or a chance confluence, the rise of capitalism was accompanied by a religious and political challenge to the divine right of bishops and kings to dictate beliefs and laws unilaterally. In its place, common people from many different ranks demanded religious freedom and political representation. Of course, the upper ranks wanted to keep those political rights for themselves; but once the principle of citizenship rights was declared, the lower ranks wanted them too. Maybe this is not what Marx had in mind when he wrote, “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own gravediggers,” but the point is the same: the principle of universal rights proclaimed by the nascent bourgeoisie has been turned against the bourgeoisie’s own failure to fulfill those rights, both in the countries where capitalism originated and in others conquered militarily. We see the hypocrisy but do not think that is a reason to reject the principle.
Is the Concept of Self-Evident Universal and Equal Rights Paradoxical?
In her popular book, Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt asks how human rights can be universal and self-evident if they are not universally recognized and have only been asserted in particular times and places:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ With this one sentence Jefferson turned a typical eighteenth-century document about political grievances into a lasting proclamation of human rights. (p. 15)
Thirteen years later, Jefferson was in Paris when the French began to think about drawing up a statement of their rights. In January 1789—several months before the fall of the Bastille—Jefferson’s friend, Marquis de Lafayette, veteran of the War of American Independence, drafted a French declaration, most likely with Jefferson’s help… On August 27 [the new National Assembly] voted to provisionally adopt the already approved articles as their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. (p. 16)
The document so frantically cobbled together was stunning in its sweep and simplicity. Never once mentioning king, nobility, or church, it declared the ‘natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man’ to be the foundation of any and all government. (p. 16)
Despite their differences in language, the two eighteenth-century declarations both rested on a claim of self-evidence. (p. 19)
This claim of self-evidence, crucial to human rights even now, gives rise to a paradox: if equality of rights is so self-evident, then why did this assertion have to be made and why was it only made in specific times and places? How can human rights be universal if they are not universally recognized?... Can they be ‘self-evident’ when scholars have argued for more than two hundred years about what Jefferson meant by his phrase? (pp. 19-20)
Human rights are difficult to pin down because their definition, indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason. The claim of self-evidence relies ultimately on an emotional appeal; it is convincing if it strikes a chord within each person. (p. 26)
Why must rights be set forth in a declaration?... The campaigns to abolish torture and cruel punishment point to one answer: a formal, public statement confirms the changes in underlying attitudes that have taken place. Yet the declarations of rights in 1776 and 1789 went further still. They did not just signal transformations in general attitudes and expectations. They helped effect a transfer of sovereignty. (pp. 113-4)
We have the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution as illustrations of Hunt’s point that the very existence of rights depends on emotion as well as reason because rebelling against tyranny obviously involves passionate emotions. We can also see how these rights are felt to be self-evidently true by the rebels. But Hunt is wrong to think that the lack of universal agreement on the content and self-evidence of these rights gives rise to a paradox: we should not expect political or intellectual consensus in a civil war! No paradox there.
Hunt’s observation that the declarations of both 1776 and 1789 were struggles to establish a new form of sovereignty points to how we should think about universality and self-evidence: not as a consensus universally agreed upon by all members of society in all times and places, but as the moral beliefs passionately held by those endeavoring to establish a new form of democratic sovereignty. Hunt loses sight of the centrality of this fundamental goal because she doesn’t recognize that the civil wars that began in the late eighteenth century to establish democracy are still ongoing. She cites the right to universal and equal suffrage in Article 21 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights but doesn’t realize this right has yet to be won in her own country. Her closing appeal for each of us to have empathy for victims of torture is laudable, but she fails to see or feel that she herself is not politically free. Hunt’s oversight is doubly puzzling because she also cites and recognizes the importance of Richard Price’s writings on this very subject at the beginning of the American Revolution.
Richard Price’s Theory of Human Agency and Equal Liberty
Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty is not a declaration of universal and equal rights but an explanation of the reasoning behind them. Price begins by dividing the nature of liberty into four categories, the first of which he calls physical liberty or the capacity we have as self-determining agents to make decisions about our actions. This generic capacity of agency can be used for good, evil, or anything in between. Lacking moral control, Price says agency can be driven by base lust, vile appetite, and a desire to yoke others into servitude. At one point he suggests such despicable motivations might be restrained by feelings of guilt, but failing that only the people in control of their own government have the power to restrain invaders of others’ liberty.
Price argues that an agent subjected to servitude, if they wish to be a self-directing agent not subject to the dominating will of another, must combine with others who believe in a like liberty for themselves. As Clause 4 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen phrased this principle some years later:
“Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.”
As for the limitation of these rights to “man,” Condorcet and others quickly recognized:
The rights of men follow only from the fact that they are feeling beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning about these ideas… Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily have equal rights… Either no individual in mankind has true rights, or all have the same ones; and whoever votes against the right of another, whatever be his religion, his color, or his sex, has from that moment abjured his own rights.
Universality and Self-Evidence in the Theory of Equal Agent Liberty
The moral theory of equal rights is universal in that the proponents of equal rights believe they should be established and enforced universally. They believe equal rights are self-evident because their denial means some are holding others in servitude of some kind. Obviously, those who enjoy dominance over others oppose a society with equal rights, so the universality and self-evidence of equal rights are not based on a universal consensus of all members of a society but on agreement among those who believe in these principles and strive for their realization.
As for the question of how a theory and political declaration arising at a particular time and place can have universal significance, that involves some reflection on how the rise of capitalist/citizenship modernity affects our understanding of the entire history and nature of human society. Marx declared, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The concept of self-determining agency and the morality of equal rights based on it is universalistic in a similar way. These broad theoretical and methodological issues are generally discussed today within the framework of social agency/structuration theory, a few examples of which by Giddens, Pitkin, Searle, and Gewirth are listed as additional readings. These theoretical issues will come up again when we discuss Marx’s theory of history and ideology, but the next section is about the confrontation between the rights of man and the rights of property in the French Revolution.
Sources: The Restoration of the Stuart Monarchy, Nonconformists, Dissenting Academies, William Rainsborough, Richard Price, Richard Price, selection from Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (1776), (full text for reference Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty), and Lynn Hunt, selections in the text below from Inventing Human Rights: A History (2007).