ABSTRACT
in early nineteenth-century england Major John Cartwright (1740–1824), experienced campaigner in the movement for parliamentary reform, and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the influential founder of Philosophic Radicalism, made further contributions to the strain of ‘unmixed’ or pure democracy, introduced earlier into political Radicalism by the writings of Priestley, Paine, and Godwin in the 1790s. To these five prominent democratic republicans—Priestley, Paine, Godwin, Cartwright, and Bentham—the intellectual heirs of the seventeenth-century Leveller movement, was due whatever there was in England of the ideology of democracy, and consequently of hostility to the hereditary House of Lords, prior to the passage of the Great Reform Bill and the operation of the reformed mixed government.
