Volume 19, Number 9 · November 30, 1972
The Ranters
By Keith Thomas
The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
by Christopher Hill
Viking, 353 pp., $8.95
Each generation re-creates the English revolution in its own image. In an age of Parliament and Empire the Victorians admired the morally earnest architects of constitutional liberty—Hampden, Pym, and the makers of the Petition of Right. Even Cromwell, whose relations with Parliament had been continuously unhappy, was paradoxically commemorated by the erection of a statue outside the Palace of Westminster. Later, with the coming of universal suffrage, interest shifted to the more radical figures who emerged in the wake of the Civil War, particularly the Levellers, whose dramatic assertion of universal political rights was revealed in the newly discovered text of the Putney Debates. The Levellers had proclaimed fundamental law as well as democracy, and in the 1930s and 1940s their extensive writings were assiduously edited by American scholars.
Review, 2805 words
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