ABSTRACT

The political ideology of the Levellers expressed the wider political awareness of power derived from a class-consciousness. This consciousness was shaped and framed by the religious understanding prevalent among the lower-middle classes but also pressed towards a secular vision of communal identity in formative expressions of an emergent liberal democratic nationalism, shot through with elements of socialism. As we now know, liberalism, being essentially individualistic, does not fit easily with the communitarianism of nationalism and socialism, though modern Western societies have continued to attempt to ‘mix and match’ them in practice. The Levellers’ initiation of what have become continuous struggles to fit these diverse tendencies of thought into a coherent whole throws interesting light on some enduring issues in modern democratic theory and practice. Their aim was to persuade the parliamentarian leadership to accept that democratic representation could be the only legitimate process for authorising power in a republic. The arguments led them into an exploration of the conditions for a community of independent individuals – a liberal republic. In the course of this, they considered the community of individuals as a source of political authority and the necessity of the community’s authorisation for legitimate use of power by the state. These arguments, tying the concepts of democracy to political authority and political legitimacy, set the tone for all subsequent liberal-democratic thinking.