Where did the Levellers go? In their mid-seventeenth-century writings, John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and their associates advocated for a leveled society grounded in “common equitie.” The Levellers have been seen as protocommunists and as religious conservatives, as serious political thinkers and as mere offshoots of the weird-and-wonderful Commonwealth era in England. They fired up radicals in the 1790s and gave their name to a cheerfully hippyish band in the 1990s; they continue to inspire maverick pastors and internet discussion-board enthusiasts. In Collective Understanding Melissa Mowry contends that revisiting the Levellers’ challenges to established order exposes buried fault lines in literary history. Leveller radicalism, in Mowry’s bracing account, promises nothing less than to reshape our thinking about political modernity.
Collective Understanding takes the writings and “praxis” of the Levellers as its point of departure for a dramatic remapping of the “crucial century” from 1645 to 1742, long seen as a period...