Product Description

To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the Levellers. To the classical liberal historians they meant rather less than nothing. This neglect is puzzling. At the crisis of the English Revolution it was the Levellers and not from its commanders that the victorious New Model army derived its political ideas and its democratic drive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137662 in Books
• Published on: 1976-09-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

From the Author
To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the
Levellers. To the classical liberal historian they meant rather less than
nothing, this neglect is puzzling. At the crisis of the English Revolution
it was from the Levellers and not from its commanders that the victorious
New Model Army derived its political ideas and its democratic drive. Even
on a superficial glance the Levellers leaders are as personalities unusual
and, indeed, unique. King Charles had Lilburne flogged as a youngster from
Ludgate Hill to Palace Yard; Cromwell banished him in middle age to a
dungeon in Jersey.

But what we have rediscovered is not merely the fact that the Levellers
anticipated our fathers in most of the social and political reforms of the
next 300 years; the theme of this book is rather that they were, until
Cromwell crushed them, the dynamic pioneers, who had the initiative during
the most formative years of the Inter-regnum. They would have won for our
peasants in the mid-17th century what the Great Revolution gained for those
of France at the close of the 18th.
H.N.Brailsford