"The Leveling Spirit"
Luke Pickrell explains the Levellers continued relevance
Photo by David De Hart
A month into the American Constitutional Convention, James Madison argued that a well-designed government should control the "leveling spirit" of the increasingly numerous agrarian laborers. Madison proposed a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper house (the Senate) as a necessary "elitist counterweight to popular pressure from below" (i). Madison's invocation of the "leveling spirit" as justification for the Senate harked back to the English Civil War and the conflict over sovereignty and how the British should be governed.
The Levellers were a mass-organized democratic movement that emerged during the English Civil War (ii). They had their greatest influence in Parliament's New Model Army, where they almost won a majority of soldiers to their ideas between 1647 and 1649. Army leaders Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax were horrified by this possibility. Joining the Levellers and other radicals in War were the Royalists, who were loyal to King Charles I and wanted to see him return to the throne with expanded powers; the majority of Parliament, who tried to make a deal with the king to establish a constitutional monarchy; and the leadership of Parliament’s New Model Army, who wanted to abolish the monarchy and House of Lords without touching property or expanding suffrage. The Levellers shared many goals, including overthrowing the king and lords, holding annual parliaments, realizing unlimited religious toleration, and redressing economic grievances.
The Levellers thought that all legislative power should reside in a unicameral legislature elected by semi-universal (iii) and equal manhood suffrage and accountable to its constituency; the House of Commons, not the king or lords, should be sovereign. “The Petition of March 1647” presented a series of demands leading toward a constitutional revolution in which the king and lords would be made less powerful than the Commons. In a series of manifestoes under the title “An Agreement of the People,” the Levellers argued for proportional representation in Parliament — a principle only realized in England in 1832 and still violated in the U.S. by the Senate. The People, they argued, were the “original sole legislaters, and the true fountain, and earthly well-spring of all just power.” They continued: “There can be no liberty in any nation where the law giving power is not solely in the people or their representatives,” and, “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he…every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government…”
During the abortive period of post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens sounded like a Leveller when he argued, “The whole sovereignty rests with the people, and is exercised through their representatives in Congress assembled…No other branch of the Government…possesses one single particle of the sovereignty of the nation.” The Levellers’ democratic republicanism was also evident in the thinking of Victor Berger, who, as a member of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), argued, “Whereas the Senate, in particular, has become an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth…all legislative powers be vested in the House of Representatives, whose enactments shall be the supreme law and the President shall have no power to veto them, nor shall any court have any power to invalidate them.”
The demand for equal suffrage was not the Levellers’ only position that, if resurrected today, would clash with the ideology of our existing constitutional republic. For example, William Walwyn argued that England needed a new written constitution (“Charter”) based not on past precedents but on reason, equity, and universal justice. Walwyn thought that just as someone should be able to change their way of life, the whole nation should be able to adjust itself to provide safety and freedom for the people.
Decades later, Tom Paine, no doubt influenced by the Levellers, wrote during the American Revolution, “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyranny.” Later, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” In mid-17th Century England, the idea that the existing political order could be remade was a glaring affront to the “Divine Right of Kings” and “Great Chain of Being,” which posited an inalterable (because God-given) hierarchical structure of existence. Today, the elite’s resistance to change manifests in the Republican and Democratic Party’s veneration of the U.S. Constitution.
The Levellers were the first mass-organized democratic movement in England and perhaps the world. More than one hundred years before Paine set the North American colony ablaze with Common Sense, the Levellers were adept at reaching the public through pamphlets, petitions, and vocal appeals to the crowd. Many Levellers moved to the North American colony, including the brother of Leveller Thomas Rainsborough. Democratic republican thought greatly influenced Tom Paine, including his argument that, like the people of the English mainland, colonists in America would be better off without a monarch. After nearly two decades of repression, the British Chartists raised again the banner of democratic republicanism: their six-point charter called for universal manhood suffrage, secret ballots, annual Parliamentary elections, constituencies of equal size (equal suffrage), salaries for MPs, and abolition of property qualification for becoming an MP.
Today, the demand for a democratic republic means something different in England than in the United States. In England, Parliament is sovereign, and rotten boroughs were eliminated in 1832. In the United States, however, the malapportioned Senate means that Wyoming and California have the same number of senators, even though Wyoming has a population of 580,000 and is 90% white, while California has a population of 40 million and is 35% white. This means that the United States still has a rotten borough system — and one that’s only getting more unequal, as Daniel Lazare explained in a recent post. Additionally, the United States is one of the few countries with a bicameral legislature and the only country in the world where the upper chamber (the Senate) has a veto. The King of England can't veto legislation, but the U.S. president can. This is a significant difference between the two countries.
i. Daniel Lazare, The Frozen Republic, 38-39
ii. Information about the Levellers and the English Civil War in this article comes from three sources: Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World, New York: Knopf, 2023; Don M Wolfe, Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1944; Radical History, “The forgotten radicals of the English Civil War | The Levellers," YouTube video, June 10, 2021.
iii. Many people, including C.B. McPherson, have discussed why the Levellers excluded people from suffrage rights whom they deemed unable to make an independent choice, such as enslaved people and wage laborers.
Luke Pickrell is the Lead Writer and Editor at
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