The Levellers’ revolution

John Rees, Verso Books, 400 pages, £25, hardback


The Levellers are central figures in the history of democracy. Rees argues that the Levellers became a “unique current within the English Revolution by being able to maintain a mass public presence through petitioning, printing and street demonstrations”. This required organisation and leadership.


Some of these figures are well known — John Lilburne, Richard Overton — but one of the strengths of the book is to rescue less well-known men and women and put them at the heart of the English Revolution. 


From the clattering printers’ workshops that stoked the uprising, to the rank and file of the New Model Army and the furious Putney debates where the Levellers argued with Oliver Cromwell for the future of English democracy, this story reasserts the revolutionary nature of the 1642–51 wars. And it pinpoints the role of ordinary people. 


Rees places the Levellers at the centre of the debates of 1647 when the nation was gripped by the question of what to do with the defeated Charles I. 


Without the Levellers, history may have missed its revolutionary moment. This book is a significant contribution to understanding how important radical ideas were to the creation of modern parliamentary rule. 


Reviews contributed by the Bookmarks socialist bookshop. 


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