It is likely that many Oxford students have not heard of The Levellers. More may have heard of the Putney Debates. The Debates have recently been acknowledged as one of the most important moments in English history and as the crucible of modern constitutional democracy. More than a year earlier, King Charles I had lost the English Civil War—a conflict fought over how England would be governed—to forces led by Oliver Cromwell. The debates took place between the officers and the rank and file of Cromwell’s New Model Army to discuss the future constitution of England following the imprisonment of Charles.
The largest group involved in those debates, the Levellers, crafted arguments for equality and constitutional democracy, arguments that they framed as the “Agreements of the People.” Those agreements resonate today as the first popular, written expressions of constitutional democracy. With democracy now under attack, it is to the Levellers we must turn to for inspiration.
That we know of the Levellers’ thoughts and creed owes to the prevalence of printing at the time, to the recording of the Putney Debates by Sir William Clarke and a team of stenographers, and, it should be said, to a large amount of luck. The transcripts of the debates were lost, mislaid, or hidden for well over two hundred years until they cropped up at Oxford in 1890. The accidental absence of the transcripts of the debates also helps explain why they have not figured more prominently in analysis, commentary, and the history of the seventeenth century.
The various Leveller texts show them as distinct in their desire for equality and in the detailed, practical way in which they expressed this. The basis of the Levellers’ political code was the concept of natural rights, that is, that there should be freedom and equality among men or “freeborn” people, a principle that was developed by John Locke and Thomas Paine (Paine’s famous work Rights of Man was once derogatorily called “a levelling system”) and that carried through from the Levellers to the American Declaration of Independence. We might also tie natural rights to Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws because a core principle of the Levellers was the honest, unbiased making and application of the law.
The Levellers’ story and the agreements they crafted deserve to be dusted off and reexamined. Their aims, their sentiments, and the forces that propelled them are relevant to the world in which we live and provide an apt starting point for processing and ordering the many changes percolating through the international political-economic order today. Their achievement was to set out a contract between the people and those who represented and governed them. Today, there is little sense that such a contract is in place.
We can boil down the arguments of the Levellers and try to express them in today’s terms. They wanted a simplification of the law in plain English, an end to onerous indebtedness procedures, suffrage for most males, religious freedom, and political and electoral reform. They demanded an end to corruption in politics and within the judiciary. They wanted integrity from those in office but pessimistically warned (in the third agreement) that they had “by woefull experience found the prevalence of corrupt interests powerfully inclining most men once entrusted with authority.”
Practically, we can translate their wishes as more-representative parliamentary reform, measures to curb corruption, an ending of privileges and exemptions for members of Parliament and the Grandee classes, and measures to reduce politicians’ time in office. Furthermore, the Levellers signaled a preference for local or community representation and democracy (i.e., there should be no imposition of candidates or officers), probity in office, and civil behavior. Legally, the state would uphold natural rights, affirm religious freedom, enforce a transparent rule of law (in “plain English”), and enact progressive legal reform.
The Levellers’ agreements have several modern applications. First, the agreements are practical. They are based on common sense and revolve around concrete measures that can be put in place. Nor are they too idealistic or so specific as to cause splits. Second, the way the Levellers organized themselves may be a useful example to groups today in showing how a more streetwise approach to politics can work better.
The Leveller Code Today
In essence, the Levellers wanted a political system that fostered responsibility to the people on the part of their leaders, one where those leaders or representatives were more accountable. Their aim was a socio-political legal environment where there was no uneven distribution of outcomes. Given the resonances between the Levellers’ political climate and what many people today feel is a broken political contract, we can ask, What would they want if they existed today?
If the Agreements of the People were to be couched in the terms of how the world will look in, say, five years’ time in 2024, they might strike the following points. The first would probably center on tangible political reform, specifically on reducing corruption, on bringing political representatives closer to those who vote for them, and on permit- ting new blood to enter the political system. Tangible measures could take the form of term limits, restrictions on officials’ passing political positions on through their family, the use of information technology (even blockchain) to reduce corruption in procurement, a broad use of technology to reduce clientelism, public information on the funding and remuneration of political parties and individuals, and public monitoring of political mandates and programs. Importantly, this could take place at local as well as national-level politics.
The Levellers also had a no-nonsense approach to institutions. To put it concisely, they wanted institutions that were strong and fair and executed the law in a transparent way. The classical republican ethos of many of the Levellers is a pillar of the agreements, especially the last one, where there is a sense that institutions should be the bedrock on which the state operates.
The second point is equality, where the Levellers had in mind equality between all “freeborn” men (as highlighted earlier there was also an active women’s Leveller group). Today, the desire for equality is urgent and can take various forms, but an end to discrimination on the basis of gender, sexuality, color, and religion is a cornerstone. Economic equality can be expressed in many ways, but one might specify it as the provision of decent public goods (education, health, legal representation). Related to this, in some countries the legal system is a source of domination, violence, and intimidation. In others, it is more a case of the crafting of laws and regulations taking place far away from the people, with lobbyists involved in crafting the fine print of laws baked both in Brussels and on Capitol Hill in Washington.
The Levellers were also keen that the law be written and applied in plain English so that the ordinary man might understand it. Today, legal and financial systems are complex and willfully beyond the apprehension of many people. Improving financial literacy and, for example, making banks better communicate financial statements and products in a clear everyday manner might be one specific demand here.
In terms of economic policy, there is less recorded about the thoughts of the Levellers on economics than about their views on politics, but from what we know they were against the running up of large amounts of debt and the arbitrary resolution of indebtedness. In this respect they might well feel threatened by the very high levels of debt in today’s world and, to use the example of the eurozone crisis, by the very different and somewhat arbitrary way in which bad debts were resolved.
Condensing some of these thoughts, we might presumptuously make a first stab at a modern agreement, which could run as follows:
AGREEMENT OF THE PEOPLE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
This agreement is made with the aims of repairing the broken contract of trust between elected representatives and their electorates, of offering a constructive alternative to negative political and public debate, and of providing an expression of what we believe people want their societies to look like. Our goal is a world where people are not dominated by technology, by the food and goods they consume, or by finance and science; where societies are democratic; and where countries build high-quality institutions to support them. We want political systems that encourage responsibility and that focus decision making on long-term problems. We want laws that are enforced for everyone. Leaders—be they in business, politics, or other fields— should be responsible for the risks and imbalances they create. Human development as a central pillar of economic growth needs to be given much greater credence, and public goods such as privacy and education needs to be cherished.
Public goods are the fabric of societies and the makings of economies—too many of these are privatized; more still are run with no greater sense of purpose than cost cutting. We advocate that they be rejuvenated and taken seriously as part of the debate on public life.
Our societies live in a tyranny of imbalances: environmental dam- age, debt, obesity, low productivity, and the domination of our time by social media. We want this to end and we want politicians to act to rein in imbalances.
In public life, responsibility is actively evaded. Complacency and moral corruption are eating away at the body politic and must be stopped. We want politicians who are accountable but who exercise their power in a way that does no harm.
We want accountability in politics to be encouraged by term limits, limits on family monopolization of political positions, and the creation of incentives and supports for new blood to enter public life.
Representatives should be encouraged to take actions that are responsible. Public institutions like central banks should permit stability and be active in crises without fostering imbalances or diminishing the responsibility of elected bodies. Individual entities—be they companies, countries, or cities—should bear responsibility in a measurable way for the risks they create.
As countries grow larger and the problems they face grow more complex, governance must change so that regions and cities have more power to tackle problems at a local level and specifically at a city level. Immigration must be recognized as a major challenge, and dealt with as a contract of integration and assimilation between migrants and hosts.
We favor greater transparency and the use of technology to make clear the involvement of politicians and their associates in procure- ment and public contracts and to make effective the policing of and transparence of payments to and through political parties and to elected representatives themselves.
The law and its application has drifted far away from ordinary people in its complexity, in people’s ability to access legal advice, in the costs of being involved in legal action, and in the way in which legal systems can be more advantageous to companies than to individuals.
The law should be clearer and, in terms of its clarity and cost, should be equally applicable to all people and not favor companies over individuals. Exceptions to the law should be limited, redrafts of laws and the insertion of loopholes should be minimized, and legal costs should be reduced. Literacy regarding such areas as legal advice and financial products should be encouraged.
New question in the law and philosophy—such as the role of the state in surveillance, robots as economic and legal actors, new forms of war, and ethical issues surrounding DNA-based innovation—should ideally have high global standards, be grounded in historical and religious principles, and be made on the basis that they maintain equality among people.
Human well-being should become a greater policy focal point in terms of the impact that diet, pharmaceuticals, and environmental pollution have on it and also in terms of the role of mental health in health care. Mental health is the root cause of many social, medical, and justice-related problems. It must have a much more prominent place as an element in health care, justice, and social welfare systems.
Technology has always been a force in societies and economies, but it is now pushing economic, ethical, and philosophical barriers in areas like gene editing. Technology should be used to enable transparency in public life, and its impact on education and social cohesion should be managed by states. Social welfare systems and state infrastructure can benefit from technology, but the way they support society may need to change to reflect the way technology displaces people.
The intersection of technology and economics leads to imbalances in power, of governments over citizens, of data gatherers over data subjects, and of owners of technology over the rest. Ownership of technologically generated data must rest with its subjects, some technologies must be public goods, and there must be clear limits to governments’ use and holdings of data on their citizens. Ownership and transmission of personal data rests with individuals, and the right to use this data should rest strictly with them.
That is a first, rough draft of what a twenty-first century agreement might look like. I say rough, because I do not think I can do this alone and will in time need the help of many others, and, indeed, readers may have their own versions. Trying to reimagine and refit the Agreement of the People to today’s world is difficult. As a next step, I would be glad to hear what readers of the Review think.