LEVELLERS. — The Levellers constituted the extreme left wing of the English republicans during the Civil War of 1642–51. The term “Levellers” (“livellatore” and more properly “sovversivo” from levelling) had been adopted by the Leicestershire peasants who rose in 1607 against the enclosure of common lands; from 1647 it denoted the participants in the Putney ultra-democratic convention and remained as the name of the political group which, opposing first the monarchy and Presbyterian intolerance, then the army’s overweening power and Cromwell’s dictatorship, insisted on the principles of freedom of conscience, personal liberty, impartial justice, and self-government through frequent elections.
Led by figures such as John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, the Levellers, organized into ward committees in the towns and local committees in the counties, formed the first true political party in the modern sense, though still forced to operate semiclandestinely. Their publicistic activity was enormous, aimed at swaying public opinion (over 20,000 publications). Notable phases of their activity included, up to 1646, the struggle to defend the House of Commons against the House of Lords; in 1647, an alliance with the “Independent” factions of the army and the subsequent “Large Petition” of March against the Presbyterian majority in Parliament. After their alliance with the army broke down at the end of 1648, the Levellers, opposed by officers who had restored discipline and isolated by a still predominantly monarchist national consciousness, lost all political strength, were rendered powerless by Cromwell’s dictatorship, and denounced by their adversaries as subverters of every social distinction and advocates of common ownership. Later historiography (Hume, Guizot, etc.) and the conservative polemics of the 18th–19th centuries commonly used the term “Levellers” to denote egalitarian democrats; in fact, the Levellers, representing free traders, artisans, shopkeepers, and small landowners, championed a juridical-political egalitarianism rather than an economic one.