Liberty and Property by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Author:Ellen Meiksins Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

7

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

Between late October and early November of 1647, in the midst of civil war, something extraordinary happed at Putney, south of London. Certainly one of the most remarkable episodes in English history, it was and remains a unique historical event. In the course of civil war, the New Model Army, the distinctively well-organized and disciplined military force constructed by Oliver Cromwell and his supporters in their conflict with the royalists, was proving to be not just an effective military machine but a militant political force. Yet deep divisions had emerged between the army ‘grandees’ and radicals within the rank and file. Against the oligarchic leanings of Cromwell and his allies, and even in fear of a restored monarchy, radicals had drafted a constitution, the first ever in history, intended to establish something like a democratic form of government based on a conception of inalienable rights: ‘An Agreement of the People for a Firm and Present Peace, upon Grounds of Common-Right and Freedom; as it was Proposed by the Agents of the Five Regiments of Horse; and Since by the General Approbation of the Army, Offered to the Joint Concurrence of All Free COMMONS of ENGLAND’. This draft constitution was the subject of a thorough debate, which began in St Mary’s Church, Putney and continued at the lodgings of the Army’s quartermaster general.

That there exists a documentary record in the form of a transcript taken down at the time is a truly astonishing piece of historical luck. It allows us to follow, in the colourful and moving words of the participants themselves, a debate conducted not only in the cool light of reason but also in the heat of passion, about some of the most fundamental questions of social organization and political governance. These debates are being conducted not by philosophers or theologians but by activists and soldiers, speaking in their own language, often the language of the Levellers, political militants and theorists accustomed to addressing not scholars, priests or lawyers but craftsmen, yeoman farmers and the Army rank and file.

The Tudor Era

The remarkable events at Putney no doubt have much to do with personalities and the unpredictable contingencies of civil war; but the issues at stake and the terms in which the ideological battle was joined are inexplicable without reference to a larger historical context, the specific patterns of English economic and political development. In Chapter 1, we considered briefly how the social and political organization of England – in particular, the process of state-formation and the development of agrarian capitalism – differed from that of its neighbours and specifically from what may have appeared, in the seventeenth century, to be the most advanced and powerful kingdom, France. The ‘absolutist’ state in France was built on a foundation of corporate institutions and competing jurisdictions, while England already had a more strongly unitary state. The French ruling class still depended to a significant extent on ‘extra-economic’ powers, or ‘politically constituted property’, which now included office in the monarchical state, giving them access to the fruits of peasant labour in the form of taxes instead of only rents.

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