Teresa Bejan

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149 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 18 Jun

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In Our Time · The Levellers · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

slightly paradoxical nature of leveller reception.

So the leveller movement fails.

You know, the agreement of the people is not enacted.

But Lilburn is remembered and his legal activism is remembered.

And that lives on and very sort of successfully in a sort of self-conscious way.

I think there is also this kind of less self-conscious legacy.

And I would argue that some of these leveller arguments about equality are preserved, as it were, in the arguments of their critics.

So I'm interested in the way, for instance, that Thomas Hobbes ends up offering effectively a kind of satire of this leveler understanding of equality in the state of nature.

Hobbes says, OK, well, if we are sort of equally lords, then what we would have is a war of all against all in which these little lordlings try to vindicate their claims to kind of equal respect in ways that are politically disruptive.

But Hobbes' own critics, for instance, the Earl of Clarendon, also noticed the ways in which Hobbes ended up

sort of taking on some of the leveler demands in his political philosophy as well, particularly the claim that once we've left the state of nature, we still ought to acknowledge one another as equals by nature, not insult each other.

So Clarendon actually accuses Hobbes at one point of having written Leviathan in order to flatter the delight that the common people have in the word equality, which in truth means nothing more than keeping on their hats.

Well, so I think my colleagues are probably better able to speak to the specifics of kind of what's happening in European politics.

But certainly we shouldn't lose sight of the kind of transnational sort of radical Protestant kind of aspect of this.

So I mentioned Lilburn's initial trial before Stard's Chamber in 1638.

I mean, he's technically put on trial for smuggling Puritan tracts out of the Netherlands.

To be sold in London, right?

So there's quite a lot of kind of movement back and forth between radicals and a lot of the unlicensed printing is kind of going on in both places.

There's one particular pamphlet that is, again, published in Rotterdam, I think, and then smuggled into London in 1649 called Tyrannopacrit Discovered.

And so that's the tyrannical hypocrite.

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