ABSTRACT
A political and especially a religious libertarian, Reverend Roger William was close to the Levellers—that great group of English laissez-faire individualists who constituted the "extreme leftwing" of the republican side in the English Civil War. The colony of Pennsylvania continued in the de facto state of individualist anarchism from the fall of 1684 to the end of 1688: four glorious years in which no outcry arose from the happy citizens about "anarchy" or "chaos." When William Penn returned to England, the governing of the colony fell on the Council of Pennsylvania. The resourceful Pennsylvanians embarked on a shrewd and determined campaign of non-violent resistance to the attempt to reimpose a State on a happy and stateless people. As the revolutionary situation intensified in Pennsylvania, the timid and shortsighted began to betray the revolutionary libertarian cause. Anarchy, however, was doomed, and governmental oppression, even without taxes, quickly returned to Pennsylvania.
