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The Levellers and Natural Law: The Putney Debates of 1647

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Richard A. Gleissner
Richard A. Gleissner*
Affiliation:
George Mason University
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Extract

Natural law is one of the oldest concepts in Western philosophy. When the Psalmist asked Yahweh, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him,” he was struggling with the same problem that occupied thoughtful men in Greece: the need to understand man as he is and in his potentiality. Unlike the unknown Biblical poet, however, Plato and Aristotle found an answer with the aid of reason rather than revelation. For them, man is an entity in process of becoming, possessing an essential, cognizable nature that gives rise to certain inclinations he must fulfill. Until the Enlightenment, the idea of man's nature and his need to realize it served as the focus of much of secular thought, out of which developed principles of government and a distinctive ethic. But ordinary people were touched only by the practical consequences of such things. The great law codes and the teachings of the church combined with philosophy to work out the individual's relationship to others according to a teleological conception of law rooted in the very nature of things. Understandably, the ontological theses and conclusions drawn from the theory of natural law remained irrelevant and unknown to common folk.

In the midst of the English Civil War, the concept appeared in the welter of disputes and conflicting plans for the revitalization of all aspects of English life, invoked by ordinary men who were neither philosophers nor theologians, neither jurists nor statesmen. This paper considers the use of natural law by one group, the Levellers, at a dramatic moment in the turbulent period following the king's imprisonment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Fall 1980 , pp. 74 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1980

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References

1 Zagorin, Perez, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954), p. 29Google Scholar.

2 Frank, Joseph, The Levellers, A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn (New York, 1955), pp. 5–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brailsford, H.N., The Levellers and the English Revolution, Hill, Christopher (ed.) (Stanford, 1961), pp. 280–82Google Scholar. The Leveller Tracts, 1647-1653, Haller, William and Davies, Godfrey, (eds.) (Gloucester, 1964), pp. 8, 41–48Google Scholar. Manning, Brian, “The Levellers and Christianity,” in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, Manning, Brian (ed.) (New York, 1973), pp. 232–33Google Scholar.

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11 Frank, p. 6. He also says, “In contradistinction to Calvinism, the orientation of such a belief [in natural law] was, on the whole, political rather than religious, its initial impact synthetic rather than disintegrative.” For additional discussion of the relationship of natural law to Calvinism, see Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints, A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York, 1969), pp. 31-32, 35-36, 154Google Scholar.

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14 Examples of Plato's treatment of the subject may be found in Republic, 352a, 433a, 490a, 586c; Laws, 631b-e, 782d, 927b; Gorgias, 478, 499, 503. For Aristotle, see Physics, 192b, 198b; Nicomachean Ethics, 1097a, 1106a. Robertson, D.B., The Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy (New York, 1951), pp. 53–61Google Scholar.

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18 Ibid., pp. 85-86. The most authoritative recent discussion ofthe parable of the talents may be found in Jeremias, Joachim, Rediscovering the Parables (New York, 1966), pp. 45–50Google Scholar, which is an abridgement of the author's magisterial study The Parables of Jesus (New York, 1963)Google Scholar. Overton, , An Arrow, in Aylmer, , p. 70Google Scholar. One may also cite again his statement that “every one as he is himself, so he hath a self propriety, else could he not be himself,” as referring to the tendential character of man. On the natural inclination of man, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 94, Article 2 and 4 as an example ofthe treatment of this subject by the greatest ofthe medieval successors to Plato and Aristotle. In turn, Hooker leaned heavily upon the Thomistic development and exposition of natural law philosophy.

19 Pease, p. 217, says ofthe Levellers, “Like other men they could see in outward happenings evidence of divine approval of their work; but for guidance they ever looked to their principles and not to passing events. When contrasted in this respect with Cromwell and the Saints they are strangely modern.”

20 Clarke Papers, pp. 239-40. When possible I have used the updated version of the debates found in Blitzer, Charles (ed.), The Commonwealth of England, Documents of the English Civil War (New York, 1963), pp. 49–51Google Scholar. See Cromwell's remark regarding the obstacles arising from the Agreement that it “does contain in it very great alterations of the very government of the kingdom…. There will be very great mountains in the way of this.”

21 Clarke Papers, pp. 240, 245, 317. Blitzer, pp. 52, 56. On the relationship of conscience to natural law as Aquinas confronted the problem, see Summa, Question 94, Article 1 and 2.

22 Ibid., pp. 241-42. Manning, , “The Levellers,” p. 151Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., pp. 242, 262, 263; Blitzer, pp. 53, 62-63. How far Ireton departed in his remarks from traditional notions of justice may be seen by comparing them with Cicero's comments in the Laws, Book I, Chapter XV: “But if justice is conformity to written laws and national customs, and if … everything is to be tested by the standard of utility, then anyone who thinks it will be profitable to him will, if he is able, disregard and violate the laws. It follows that justice does not exist at all, if it does not exist in nature.” Virtues, said Cicero, “originate in our natural inclination to love our fellow-men, and this is the foundation of justice.” De Re Publica, De Legibus, Keyes, Clinton W. (trans.) (Cambridge, Mass., 1928)Google Scholar.

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25 Ibid., p. 263.

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28 Ibid., p. 189; III, 1.

29 Ibid. Hobbes added further emphasis to the need to obey covenants by citing sacred scripture in The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, Tonnies, Ferdinand, (ed.) (New York, 1969), I, 18, p. 96Google Scholar. See also De Cive, III, 1; III, 2.

30 Ibid., XIV, 21, pp. 286-87.

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32 Sigmund, p. 77; Mintz, pp. 26-27. See the interesting contrast that was drawn by John Dewey between Hobbes and the Levellers in his essay, “The Motivation of Hobbes' Political Philosophy,” in Ross, Ralph, Schneider, Herbert W., Waldman, Theodore, Thomas Hobbes In His Time (Minneapolis, 1974), p. 15Google Scholar.

33 Clarke Papers, p. 309. Blitzer, p. 72. Less than twenty-five years earlier, Grotius had upheld the superiority of natural law over positive law in De iure belli ac pacis (1625) saying, “the civil law cannot ordain anything which the natural law prohibits, nor prohibit what that ordains.” The Great Legal Philosophers: Selected Readings in Jurisprudence, Morris, Clarence (ed.) (Philadelphia, 1959), pp. 94–95Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., p. 260. Blitzer, p. 61. See A Declaration, or Representation … of the Army, for an example of the army's citation of natural law in a public pronouncement, Haller and Davies, pp. 52-63.

35 “Agreement,” Aylmer, p. 91. One Leveller, Edward Sexby, summed up the radicals, mistrust of the king and the current negotiations with him when he said, “We have labored to please a King, and I think, except we go about to cut all our [own] throats, we shall not please him.” Blitzer, p. 45.

36 Clarke Papers, p. 301; Blitzer, p. 65.

37 Ibid., pp. 302, 308; Blitzer, pp. 67, 71.

38 The argument along these lines recalls what Aquinas said in Question 90, Article 3 of the Summa: “A law, properly speaking, regards first and foremost the order of the common good. Now to order anything to the common good, belongs either to the whole people, or to someone who is the viceregent of the whole people. And therefore the making of a law belongs either to the whole people or to a public personage who has care of the whole people: Since in all other matters the directing of anything to the end concerns him to whom the end belongs.” Treatise on Law (South Bend, n.d.), p. 8. See the third “Agreement of the People,” Aylmer, p. 162, for a later assertion that the right to vote arose from the law of nature.

39 Clarke Papers, pp. 312, 320. For a discussion of the idea of a golden age in Anglo-Saxon times, see Brailsford, pp. 129-30, and Hill, Christopher, Puritanism and Revolution, The English Revolution of the 17th Century (New York, 1967), Chapter 3Google Scholar. Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down, Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York, 1975), pp. 158, 226, 272Google Scholar.

40 Ibid., p. 243. Overton, Richard, “An Appeal,” in Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, Wolfe, Don M. (ed.) (New York, 1967), pp. 162–63Google Scholar.

41 Hooker, , Ecclesiastical Polity, I, X, 4, pp. 241–42Google Scholar. His reference to “great and judicious men” was to Aristotle, , Politics, III, ivGoogle Scholar. See also I, X, 1, p. 239 in Hooker.

42 Clarke Papers, pp. 305, 320; Blitzer, p. 69. Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment, Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), pp. 374–78Google Scholar, for a discussion of the debates from a different angle, especially the concern about property rights.

43 The Case of the Army, Haller and Davies, p. 71; Clarke Papers, p. 318.

44 Clarke Papers, pp. 304-05; Blitzer, pp. 68-69.

45 Thomson, J.A.K., The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics Translated (Baltimore, 1975), II, 1106Google Scholar; see also I, 1197.

46 Clarke Papers, p. 318.

47 Ibid., p. 370.

48 Rainborough protested that Ireton's purpose was to identify the Levellers with anarchy. He said men like the Commissary “not only yourselves believe that men are inclining to anarchy, but you would make all men believe that…. I wish you would not make the world believe that we are for anarchy.” Ibid., pp. 308-09.

49 See the discussion of Leveller influence on later generations of English dissenting Whigs in Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (New York, 1968), pp. 3–5Google Scholar, and the connections with the American Revolution in Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar.

50 Aristotle, , Metaphysics, Tredennick, H. (trans.) (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), V, xvi, 3aGoogle Scholar.