Teresa Bejan

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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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In Our Time · The Levellers · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

But actually, the real radicals, the real egalitarians in the period are the group known as the Diggers, led by the failed mystic and merchant Gerard Winstanley, who in the spring of 1649 begins to

dig and manure and plant in the wasteland upon George Hill.

So the diggers were kind of elevated as these proto-communist figures in the period who made the levellers and sort of Lilburn's rejection of any kind of economic levelling look like a sort of

to use the kind of Marxist language, the levellers appeared as just sort of bourgeois defenders of private property and free trade.

No, not quite.

And so I think, again, we need to get out from under this kind of modern historiography to sort of get to look anew at what was going on.

And so the first thing to say is that this idea that somehow...

Defending private property rights in the mid-1640s wasn't itself radical.

It was just completely ahistorical.

I mean, we're shortchanging level of radicalism in that respect.

The defense of the property rights of freeborn English men and women is part of a campaign against monopolies of all sorts.

So religious monopolies, economic monopolies, but also print monopolies.

So the idea that property rights also are part of a defense of freedom of speech.

But on the other hand, we're also ignoring the extent to which the diggers...

So when Stanley and his comrades on George Hill in 1649, they referred to themselves as the true levelers and are very self-consciously taking up these kinds of arguments from natural equality that you get in Lilburn and other leveler petitions and saying, this also means that we should be able to stand as equals in creation without buying and selling or anyone looking down on or lording over anyone else.

So I think that this is something that many modern political theorists and historians of political thought have maybe struggled with, sort of how to categorize the levelers and how, you know, I am a professor of political theory and I like to think of political theory as just the contemplation of politics in the abstract for the sake of doing it better.

And on that definition, they're doing political theory.

But they're doing it in a way, I think, that sort of offends maybe some intellectual historians, like maybe like Claire and also me and other guys, which is that we like to think that it's really sometimes the ideas and the arguments that are driving the bus and that the best ideas and the best arguments are the ones that matter most.

But I think many of the levelers, contemporaries at the time, were very attuned to the fact that a lot of the arguments the levelers were offering were not particularly good arguments at all.

So Lilburn is a great example.

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