The Leveling Spirit
By Luke Pickrell
A month into the American Constitutional Convention, James Madison warned that a well-designed government must contain the “leveling spirit” of the increasingly numerous agrarian laborers. To restrain popular pressure from below, he proposed a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper house — the Senate — as a necessary “elitist counterweight.” Madison’s invocation of the “leveling spirit” harked back to the English Civil War, a pivotal moment in the history of sovereignty and political rights.
The Levellers were the first mass-organized democratic movement to emerge during that war. Between 1647 and 1649, they gained significant influence within Parliament’s New Model Army and nearly won the support of a majority of soldiers. This possibility alarmed army leaders Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax, who, like other elite factions, feared the Levellers’ radical demands. The civil conflict included a range of contending forces: Royalists loyal to King Charles I and intent on restoring his powers; moderate Parliamentarians hoping to compromise with the king to establish a constitutional monarchy; and the leadership of the New Model Army, who sought to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords but opposed broadening political rights. In contrast, the Levellers pushed for a far more transformative agenda: abolishing the monarchy and Lords, establishing annual parliaments, enshrining religious freedom, and addressing economic grievances.
At the heart of the Levellers’ program was the idea that sovereignty should reside in a unicameral legislature, elected through semi-universal and equal manhood suffrage, and fully accountable to the people. They insisted that the House of Commons, not the king or the Lords, should be supreme. In their “Petition of March 1647,” they laid out a constitutional vision in which hereditary power would be subordinated to elected authority. Their various manifestos — most notably An Agreement of the People— demanded proportional representation and asserted that the people were the “original sole legislaters, and the true fountain, and earthly well-spring of all just power.” They declared: “There can be no liberty in any nation where the law giving power is not solely in the people or their representatives,” and famously, “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…”
This democratic republicanism echoed into later eras. During the period of post-Civil War Reconstruction, Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens sounded like a Leveller when he proclaimed, “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.” A century later, Victor Berger, a leading figure in the Socialist Party of America (SPA), echoed the same spirit: “Whereas the Senate, in particular, has become an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people… all legislative powers [should] be vested in the House of Representatives… 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 our current constitutional republic. Leveller William Walwyn called for a new written “Charter” based not on precedent but on reason, equity, and universal justice. Just as individuals can choose new ways of life, he argued, so too should nations be free to reshape their political structures in the interest of freedom and safety.
This principle—that each generation has the right to remake its institutions—was later echoed by Tom Paine, who 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.” Thomas Jefferson agreed: “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 17th-century England, such ideas were an affront to the doctrines of the Divine Right of Kings and the Great Chain of Being, which claimed that the social hierarchy was ordained by God. Today, a similar resistance to structural change is reflected in both major U.S. parties’ near-religious reverence for the Constitution.
More than a century before Paine published Common Sense, the Levellers were shaping public opinion through petitions, pamphlets, and speeches. Many later emigrated to the American colonies, including the brother of Thomas Rainsborough, one of the Levellers’ most prominent voices. Their radical legacy resurfaced in the 19th century with the British Chartists, who revived the call for a democratic republic with their six-point charter: universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, secret ballots, annual elections, salaries for MPs, and the abolition of property qualifications for office.
Today, the meaning of “democratic republic” diverges sharply in England and the United States. England eliminated its rotten boroughs in 1832 and embraced the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. The United States, however, retains a malapportioned Senate, where Wyoming (580,000 people, 90% white) has equal representation to California (40 million people, 35% white). Worse still, the U.S. Senate wields real veto power, unlike the British House of Lords, and the President, unlike any constitutional monarch, can veto legislation.
The Levellers’ vision—popular sovereignty, equal representation, and constitutional justice—still stands as a radical contrast to our modern constitutional system.