Teresa Bejan
speaker
149 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Teresa Bejan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We take that kind of sense of equality as sort of obvious.
But from the perspective of the history of political thought, it's not obvious at all.
Although the idea that every human being was equal is a very ancient idea.
You find it in Roman law.
You find it in Christianity and early modern natural law theorizing.
It was mainly understood as a kind of assertion of, well, every human is somehow equally or indifferently subject to
to a legal authority, be it the Roman emperor, be it the Christian God, be it the natural law.
What Lilburn does is sort of transform that into a kind of demand for social and political standing.
So just to quote for you, Lilburn's wonderful postscript containing a general proposition in the summer of 1646, he says that, quote,
"...all and every particular and individual man and woman that ever breathed in the world, who are and were by nature all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty, none of them having by nature any authority, dominion, or magisterial power one over above another, but by their mutual agreement or consent."
Well, certainly if we look closely at the language of Lilburn's postscript containing a general proposition, it seems pretty clearly to be everyone.
It's not just Englishmen.
It's all men.
And it's not just men.
It's women, too, rather explicitly.
But for a long time, I think historians have really focused on the sort of universalism of this level or promise of equality on the one hand, and then looking specifically at, for instance, the various revisions to the Agreement of the People, which introduce...
several exclusions, right?
So at Putney, there's a debate about the parliamentary franchise, what they call equal voice.
And Rainbow says, look, even the poorest man should have a voice as the greatest.
But he doesn't make a case for the poorest she having a vote in parliamentary elections.
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