LEVELLERS. - The L. constituted the extreme left wing of the English republicans in the civil war of 1642-51. The term L. ("leveller" and more properly "subversive," from levelling), had been adopted by the peasants of Leicestershire who rose up in 1607 against the enclosure of lands; from 1647 it denoted the participants in the ultra-democratic Putney debates and remained as the designation of the political group which, against the monarchy and Presbyterian intolerance first, and then against the overweening power of the army and Cromwell's dictatorship, claimed to assert the principles of freedom of conscience, personal liberty, the impartial administration of justice, and self-government through frequent elections.
Led by leaders such as John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, the L., organized into ward committees in the cities and local committees in the counties, constituted the first true political party in the modern sense of the word, though still forced to operate semi-clandestinely. Their publishing activity to influence public opinion was enormous (more than 20,000 publications). The salient phases of their activity were, until 1646, the struggle in defense of the House of Commons against the House of Lords; in 1647, the agreement with the "Independent" factions of the army and the subsequent "grand petition" of March against the Presbyterian majority of Parliament. Once their alliance with the army was broken at the end of 1648, the L., opposed by the officers who had reestablished discipline and isolated from the national consciousness, still predominantly monarchist, lost all political strength, were reduced to impotence by Cromwell's dictatorship and denounced by their adversaries as subverters of every social distinction and assertors of the community of goods. Subsequent historiography (Hume, Guizot, etc.) and the conservative polemical writing of the 18th-19th centuries commonly used the term "levellers" to denote egalitarian democrats; in fact the L., representatives of free traders, artisans, shopkeepers, and small landowners, were assertors of a juridical-political egalitarianism, not an economic one.
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Armando Saitta