PART III
THE POLITICAL MOMENT

In man creature and creator are united; in man there is material, fragment, excess, dirt, nonsense, chaos; in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day…. And your pity is for the "creature in man," for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified—that which necessarily must and should suffer. And our pity—do you not comprehend whom our converse pity is for when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?
—Nietzsche

Between October 1648 and January 1649, when Winstanley turned toward the earth and social radicalism, the New Model Army had captured the king and, in Pride's Purge, removed from Parliament those monarchical and Presbyterian members unwilling to act decisively against Charles. He was executed on January 26, four days after The New Law of Righteousness appeared. In the next months the course of the English Revolution was decided. Although the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished by Parliament in February, and a modified "Agreement of the People" was being discussed, Leveller and army radicals nonetheless began to suspect that they had been deceived and used by Cromwell and his supporters. As it became clear that parliamentary promises to consider land and electoral reform would not materialize, Levellers called for the appointment of agitators and the recall of the General Council of the army, a demand that had led to the famed Putney debates in the fall of 1647.

A Leveller pamphlet written early in the spring of 1649, England's New Chains , expressed the view that a "new state tyranny" was in the offing. In late March, Leveller leaders John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn were imprisoned in the Tower. In early April, as Winstanley began to dig, mutinies broke out when soldiers who refused to be shipped to Ireland were demobilized without payment of arrears.

In support of them and the activists in the Tower, there was a major demonstration in London in late April. Early in May one mutineer was executed in a show of force and resolve, but even more serious mutinies occurred. The mutinous regiments were defeated decisively at Burford on May 14, and the army was professionalized into precisely the mercenary body that agitators at Putney had defined as the basis of tyranny. England was officially declared a republic on May 19, but silenced Leveller radicals knew it fell far short of the reformed liberal society they had hoped to achieve.

As Michael Walzer writes in Exodus and Revolution , "In the early years of the Puritan Revolution [people] thought that the moment of fulfillment had arrived."^[1] But after the king had been executed and the mutinies suppressed, says Walzer, the English had come of age politically. In his reading, a revolution that began with New Testament promises of democracy, unanimity, and perfection was forced toward "toughminded realism." Political actors accepted what Walzer calls the prosaic realities and carnal needs that must be addressed by any "this-worldly" or "exodus politics," which Walzer associates with the Old Testament.

Cromwell, like the chastened Moses after the incident of the golden calf, taught the English to accept the necessity of outer rulers and teachers (and thus of property and priests), the legitimacy of violence to enforce a covenant, and the inevitability of "better and worse" being the criteria by which to judge success and justice. Walzer uses Marx's contrast of heavenly and earthly to stand him on his head: Walzer condemns as Christian and otherworldly any effort to criticize or overcome the Jewish realities represented by Moses. Cromwell, like Moses, represents for Walzer the value of a radicalism that accepts earthly limitation.^[2]

[1] Michael Walzer, Exodus Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 112.

[2] In The Revolution of the Saints (New York: Atheneum, 1968) Walzer links the millennial vision of the New Testament to the political vocation of Puritan saints, whose apocalyptic framework enabled them to remake themselves and the world. New Testament apocalypse fueled an Old Testament exodus, the practical achievement and exercise of power. Walzer links the Old and New testaments in order to cast the Puritans—and Leninists—as ascetic priests of revolution. In doing so, he appears to use the Puritans to defend Lenin against Rosa Luxemburg, and the Old Left against the New Left: ideological rigidity and political violence, he says, were and are unavoidable and essential for making the transition to modernity. In fact, however, Walzer demonizes radicalism by insisting that it must be fanatically ideological and violent. He is not defending Lenin but burying radicalism by conflating it with Leninism.

In Exodus and Revolution Walzer splits the Old and New testaments, divorcing radical visions from "the hard labor" of an earthly political vocation. Now those visions allow men to flee from the "carnal realities" attested to by "exodus" politics. Now he uses the Puritans to defend Karl Kautsky against Lenin as well as Luxemburg and to defend the Democratic party in the United States against ideologues of the New Left and Old Left (and presumably of the Right as well). Still convinced of the association between radicalism and fanaticism, Walzer defends social democratic politics explicitly. That politics is now associated with the Old Testament, and demonized radicalism with the New Testament.

Walzer's argument in favor of social democracy and against radicalism as he caricatures it, or in favor of social democracy as the only "realistic" form political radicalism can take, is of interest not only to those tracking the course of "Jewish intellectuals" away from their political roots. For Walzer casts his argument in specifically "Jewish" terms in order to challenge Marx and his heirs. He contends that the millennial dreams associated with Marx are in fact "Christian" or New Testament dreams of an otherworldly heaven that devalues and perverts practical politics. Thus, Marx appears as a millennial Christian thinker: concocting apocalyptic historical dreams to evade troubling earthly realities, Marx is really an assimilated Jew, taken in by gentile Hegelianisms, an apostate following Revelation rather than the "better or worse" morality of Exodus. In his own version of "On the Jewish Question" Walzer unmasks as Christian Marx's radical dream of transforming bourgeois egoism, to which Walzer would reconcile the reader. As a result, Walzer's exodus politics amounts to a social democratic alternative to bourgeois Jewishness.

In the terms used by Christopher Hill, however, the rise of Cromwell is not the beginning of wisdom but the end of revolution. For Hill, the coalition against the Norman Yoke broke apart once the king was killed: the class nature of the revolution was exposed as "the better sort" regrouped around Cromwell to defend property and political rule by the propertied. Walzer, looking from above, counts as maturity what Hill, looking from below, depicts as repression and betrayal.

It is by way of Marx's account of the Revolution of 1848 in France that Hill almost directly draws his analysis, and it is against Marx that Walzer directs his argument. In Marx's analysis, the February revolt against Louis Philippe was a "beautiful revolution" because political "poetry" about liberty and equality disguised the reality of class contradictions and thereby mobilized artisans and workers to support the bourgeoisie. Since workers believed the "beautiful phrases," they ousted the king but also agitated for a "social republic." Their effort to fulfill the poetry of February, however, generated what Marx called the "ugly revolution," when the propertied turned against, and massacred, the workers.^[3]

[3] In "The Class Struggles in France" Marx says:

The February Revolution was the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy, because the antagonisms which had flared up in it against the monarchy slumbered peacefully side by side, still undeveloped because the social struggle which formed its background had won only a joyous existence of phrases, words. The June Revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because things have taken the place of phrases, because the republic uncovered the head of the monster itself, by striking off the crown that shielded and concealed it.

The monster was the social question, the class struggle. See Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile: Political Writings , ed. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1974), vol. 2, p. 60.

For the leaders of the political revolution, the ugliness was the specter of social revolution; for the poor, the ugliness was the reality of class rule and repression, once disguised by beautiful political phrases. In the terms of "On the Jewish Question," Marx expected that the workers' defeat would discredit the poetry of a merely "political emancipation" and thereby generate a directly social revolution. Then, he declared, the real exodus will have begun: "The present generation is like the Jews, whom Moses led through the wilderness. They not only have a new world to conquer; they must perish in order to make room for the men who are equal to a new world."^[4]

Thus, whereas Walzer argues that Cromwell's political maturity was shown when he gave up the dream of a holy nation and accepted earthly limitations, Hill follows Marx and argues that Cromwell had achieved political sobriety about the social limitations of his class. Walzer finds in the priests of Moses the birth of realism about political education, and in the sword and purges of Moses the birth of honesty about violence; Hill, again following Marx, takes the priests and purges as signs of the emergence of overt class rule.

Accordingly, differing views of what constitutes realism and maturity (and thus disillusionment and betrayal), elicited by the issue of what a true exodus entails, are at stake in how one reads the course of the English Revolution. These concerns became the center of Winstanley's attention as he began to dig and to face repression. His struggle with the elder brothers' sense of realism, and with his own, constituted a "political moment" that yielded significant innovations in his thought.

Like Walzer and Hill, Winstanley developed arguments about political realism and maturity, using the concept of a genuine exodus to criticize the elder brothers and defend digging. Like Walzer, he professed to recover an Old Testament politics, but for him this did not mean reducing revolution to reform. Rather, his synthesis of the Old and New testaments generated an earthly radicalism committed to the real interests of the poor. Like Hill and Marx, then, Winstanley exposed and criticized the limitations of the propertied class leading a merely political reformation, but he did so because he was serious about Biblical language and the meaning of exodus. He did not reduce political speech to a merely poetic illusion. As a result, Winstanley developed a rare kind of political radicalism, which politicized both the poetry of redemption and the earthly interests of the poor. But the specific context for his political moment was the digging experiment itself.

[4] Ibid., p. 112.

Winstanley and four others began to dig on St. George's Hill on April 1, 1649, before the repression of the Levellers and the mutinous regiments. In this context, his millennial hopes perhaps appear understandable. Unlike Marx, he believed the promises of liberty and righteousness made by those leading the reformation: he knew their interests currently diverged from his, but he believed that Christ rising would lead everyone to be "of one heart and mind" (124). Thus, he urged his readers:

Seriously in love and humility consider this business of public community which I am carried forth … to advance as much as I can. And I can do no other, the law of love in my heart does so constrain me…. I hate none, I love all, I delight to see everyone live comfortably…. Therefore, if you find any selfishness in this work or discover anything that is destructive to the whole creation …, open your hearts as freely to me in declaring my weakness to me, as I have been open hearted in declaring that which I find and feel much life and strength in. (291)

Winstanley wrote these words, and the pamphlets of the next year, while living in a hut on "waste land," suffering hunger and "manuring the earth," convinced that he was contributing to a significant historical change:

And the truth is, experience shows us, that in this work of Community in the earth and in the fruits of the earth, is seen plainly a pitched battle between the Lamb and Dragon, between the Spirit of love … which is the lamb appearing in the flesh, and the power of envy, pride, and unrighteousness which is the dragon appearing in the flesh. And these two powers strive in the heart of every single man, and make single men strive in opposition one against another. (281)

As he would say much later, "this difference between lords of manors and the poor about the common land is the greatest controversy that hath rise up this last 600 years" (420).

Although Winstanley could not use terms like capitalism and socialism, or borrow from the social sciences the ostensibly neutral language of "modernization," he was aware that whether the poor retain or regain access to common lands was the crucial issue on which hinged England's exodus or path of development. Contrary to Walzer again, the contrast is not between the heaven of dreams and the earthly politics represented by Cromwell but between the earthly realities represented by the poor and those represented by Cromwell, and between the contrasting political languages by which those realities were articulated.

Winstanley's own sense of significance, however, was not shared by

observers, who appeared not to take diggers seriously. Toward the end of April, when the number of diggers had increased to fifty, one commentator remarked:

The new-fangled people that begin to dig on St. George's Hill in Surrey say they are like Adam, they expect a general restoration of the earth to its first condition, that they themselves were called to seek and begin this great work which will shortly go on throughout the whole earth…. They profess a great deal of mildness and would have the world believe they have dreamed dreams, seen visions, heard voices, and have dictates beyond man's knowing. They profess they will not fight, knowing that not to be good for them.

But there was an underside of fear in the barely veiled cynicism:

What this fanatical insurrection may grow into cannot be conceived, for Mahomet had as small and despicable a beginning, whose damnable infections have spread themselves many hundreds of years since over the face of half the Universe.^[5]

Correspondingly, local property owners were scornful but scared. They called on the Council of State to intervene militarily. The officer sent to investigate by General Fairfax reported that the landlords were being unduly alarmist, but Winstanley and another digger named Everard nevertheless were brought before Fairfax for an interview on April 20. On that same day, a week before the demonstration in London, Winstanley's The True Levellers Standard appeared. In this, his first pamphlet since digging began, he claimed that "the old world … is running up like parchment in the fire" (252) but he also objected that "you who are the powers of England" only "pretend to throw down that Norman Yoke," while in fact "[you] lift up … slavish tyranny" and "hold the people as much in bondage as the Bastard Conqueror himself" (259).

Fairfax refused to intervene in what he considered a local affair without significance, but local property owners forced or bribed their tenants to raid the diggers repeatedly, each time destroying crops and huts and beating people (including a pregnant woman who miscarried as a result). Because the colony continued to grow, in late July landlords went to court, bringing an action for trespassing against the diggers. When diggers refused to plead through a lawyer, they were condemned unheard. Since they had no assets to pay the fines imposed by the court, several were jailed, and bailiffs attempted to confiscate the cows Winstanley

[5] David Petergorsky, Left-Wing Democracy , pp. 165–66.

was tending for someone else. A Keystone Cops episode of cow chasing ensued; but though comical to read about, the cows were beaten, and they became for Winstanley a symbol of the elder brother's treatment of the earth, the poor, and himself.

In September the colony moved from St. George's Hill to nearby Cobham Heath, presumably in the hope of being left alone. But Francis Drake (lord of the manor at St. George's Hill and a member of Parliament purged by Colonel Pride) joined forces with Parson Platt (lord of the manor at Cobham and a local minister) to continue the harassment and begin as well a local boycott. In December 1649 Fairfax finally was pressured by Drake and Platt to call in his troops, and although by and large they did not intervene physically, their presence emboldened the locals, who destroyed houses, corn, and tools and beat cows and diggers. Since other digger colonies appeared that winter, however, Winstanley found reasons for hope. Unbelievably, by April 1650 the colony at Cobham could boast of eleven acres planted, six or seven houses built, and the beginnings of a national digger network. But in late April the colony was destroyed, finally and irrevocably.

The next three chapters explore how these circumstances politicized but also tested Winstanley's reverence. That reverence had now caused Winstanley to adopt the perspective and activities of the citizen. His synthesis of the Old and New testaments enabled him to address human needs and unmask ideology while speaking of rights, justice, and freedom. As he focused on a specifically national context in which people disagree about political institutions, political concepts, and how to get to Canaan, he came to grant the legitimacy of conflicting interpretations and interests. Thus, he developed a politics of dialogue that included a legitimate role for representative government and the exercise of state power. Having developed a psychological alternative to covetous individualism, and a social alternative to the market, he now created a political alternative to the covenant and reformation of Puritans and Levellers.

In part, however, Winstanley's reverence undermined the politicization it sponsored because it kept him bound to the purity of inward religiosity declared by Jeremiah:

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel…. Not according to the covenant I made with their fathers

in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, which my covenant they brake…. [But] I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts…. And … they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them. (Jeremiah 31:31–34)

Marx's criticism of Luther therefore applies to Winstanley: "He liberated man from external religiosity by making religiosity the innermost essence of man. He liberated the body from its chains because he fettered the heart with chains" (60). Since the god who becomes the essence of man (presumably as the conscience) still robs man of his power of invention and alienates him from something in himself (like anger), Marx takes his version of "the Jewish Question" to its final conclusion, which "is a matter of confession, no more. To have its sins forgiven, mankind has only to declare them to be what they really are" (15).

In contrast, Winstanley still attached a stigma to human imagination, anger, and power. His denial of man as creator, however routine for a religious thinker, was the basis of a republican politics in which created beings become citizens acting within horizons beyond human invention. But he therefore entered the agon of politics in the belief that sons and daughters would not be tainted by the prideful transgressions it required. Unwilling to grant the pride in his own politics, "to confess his sins to be what they are," he felt increasingly implicated in "the curse of pride" he meant to heal. In the context of his persecution by the elder brothers, his guilt drew him toward a cross that was partly of his own making. The narrative of Christ rising embodied a dream of purity that contradicted the citizen politics it fostered but also cast the shadow of crucifixion over the dream and the politics. Even as Winstanley was pressed toward self-sacrifice, however, he began, as Marx put it, "to struggle against his own internal priest, against his own priestly nature" (60).

Chapter V
Speaking Truth to Power

When great Men disagree
About Supremacy,
Then do they warn poor men
To aid and assist them
In setting up their self-will power,
And thus they do the poor devour.
—from the diggers' Christmas Carol

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
—Lewis Carroll

This chapter analyzes how the reversals of the spring and summer of 1649 lead Winstanley to a new understanding of political language and of the state as a potentially legitimate institution. Learning to act as a citizen, and not only as a saint who is a spokesman for the poor, he comes to describe England's reformation as a political process of creating a "public community" and "public freedom." In True Levellers Standard, A Watchword to the City of London and the Army, and A New Years Gift Winstanley uses already formulated arguments about class and inner covetousness to explain why elder brothers turn against the poor, but for the first time he analyzes the meaning of the political principles by which the Revolution was justified. By clarifying key concepts, he criticizes the betrayal of revolutionary promises, justifies digging, and proposes the actions that would make Parliament legitimate. Winstanley's arguments reflect his newfound sense that the social body requires the political form of a representative assembly. He does not embrace

but, begins to work toward, the idea of a public community that takes account of conflicting social interests through public-spirited debate about principles.

What is Happening to the Reformation?

Winstanley says that in the early 1640s elder brothers "complained of oppression … because their lands, inclosures, copyholds were intangled, and because their trades were destroyed by monopolizing patents. Thereupon, you that were the gentry when you assembled in Parliament called upon the common people to come and help you cast out oppression" (357). The common people knew the gentry "were summoned by the king's writ and chosen by the freeholders that were the successors of William the Conqueror's soldiers" (304). Nonetheless, "we looked upon you to be our chief counsel" because we too "groaned under the burden of the bad government … of the late King Charles" and because "you promised, in the name of the Almighty, to make us a free people" (304). Therefore, "we of the commonality" answered your call "to deliver this distressed, bleeding, dying nation out of bondage." A war began "between the king that represented William the Conqueror, and the body of the people that were enslaved" (303).

From his vantage point in the spring of 1649, however, Winstanley believes "you that complained were helped and freed" because "the top bow is lopped off the tree of tyranny, and kingly power in that particular is cast out" (357). But the poor are no better off: "Alas, oppression is a great tree still, and keeps the sun of freedom from the poor commons still." We remain in the shadow of "the horrible cheating that is in buying and selling," the "power of tithing priests over the tenths of our labor," "the power of lords of manors holding the free use of the commons and waste lands from the poor," and "the intolerable oppression either of bad laws or of bad judges corrupting good laws" (357). Unless these "branches" also are "lopped off," and the "great roots" of covetousness "grubbed up," the poor will not enjoy freedom; indeed, "the great spread tree of kingly power" will "grow again and recover fresh strength."

The problem is not simply a matter of omission, of not carrying reformation far enough. By the summer Winstanley openly declares that the elder brothers never intended to uproot the tree of tyranny: the problem is not only their ignorance of what needs to be done but also

their conscious intentions. Charles is gone, "yet his Colonels" (the lords of manors), "his counsellors and divines" (the lawyers and priests), and "his inferior officers and soldiers" (the freeholders and landlords) "are all striving to get into a body again that they may set up a new Norman Slavery over us" (330). Thus, the Civil War appears as a conflict among Norman descendants who never intended to lift the Norman Yoke: in the spring and summer of 1649 they regroup to consolidate and protect the power their fratricidal conflict had shaken temporarily.

Although the metaphor of the tree evokes root and branch social change, Winstanley relies on more direct bodily metaphors to describe the reimposition of the Norman Yoke. For the elder brothers form themselves into a new "body," located in Parliament and imposed on the "body" of the people (304, 330). Indeed, Winstanley invokes the classic monarchical metaphor of the people as a horse ridden by the king: the elder brothers "get the foot fast in the stirrup … to lift themselves up again into the Norman saddle." Winstanley fears that "you had killed him that rode on you that you may get up into his saddle to ride on others" (335). New tyrants with particular interests and oppressive intent use republican terms like liberty to disguise their designs. "Thou blindfolded, drowsy England," Winstanley warns, "the Enemy is upon thy back … and wilt thou not look out?" (335).

Why this is Happening: Intentions, Motives, and Meanings

Winstanley senses that there is a terrible disparity between what the elder brothers say and what they do (and fail to do). Initially, he argues that the Revolution's leaders are deceived both about the meaning of their words and about what they are doing. They genuinely, but mistakenly, believe that their actions fulfill the promise of freedom. They genuinely believe "it a righteous thing that some men are clothed with the objects of the earth, and so-called rich men … should be magistrates to rule over the poor, and that the poor should be servants, nay slaves, to the rich" (179).

A selfishness that denies the Golden Rule is only part of the problem, and it bothers Winstanley less than the fact that the elder brother is self-righteous and cannot conceive that there is a difference between what he calls god or justice and what is truly of the spirit and for the public good. True righteousness, however, requires making judgments about the difference between what one desires and what one calls good, and

thus requires humility in the face of our capacity for selfishness and rationalization, for confusion and delusion. But the elder brother "cherishes himself within: he thinks whatever he doth is good and whatever crosses that power in his heart doth cross the Lord" (227). He calls his selfish rule righteous and means it.

Yet Winstanley knows that the elder brothers are not wholly deluded, and thus he holds them responsible for what they say and do. He sees, for example, that what elder brothers "call sin in the common people," such as the appropriation of the earth, "is counted no sin in the action of them that maintain the kingdom" (324). He and they agree that theft is bad, that righteousness involves giving each his due, and that freedom requires access to the earth. They have linked the criterion of giving each his due to ideas of political and economic self-determination, but they do not see that their own control of the earth, which deprives the poor of land, is unrighteous according to their own criteria.

Accordingly, Winstanley tries to teach the elder brothers about the words they use seriously but mistakenly. He turns the criteria they profess against their interpretations of their own concepts and actions. Given their self-righteousness, however, he also tries to reveal the covetousness unconsciously ruling them. While arguing with them "like men, that can speak and act rationally" (282), he also must expose them as "devils" who "would be angels of light" (171). Using himself as an example, Winstanley says:

If I delight in any way of flesh, as to seek peace in creatures abroad … [and] I do hear the words of experience from some others, declaring such actions to be the powers of the flesh, … Presently, those words take peace … from proud flesh and fill the whole soul with anger … and torment. And this is another operation which pure language produces, which is a lancing of the dead flesh that the disease may be cured. For this wounding … is medicine to heal him. (234)

If they could admit their real motivations—and face their shame—they would relinquish the fig leaves of ideological speech, understand the true meaning of their words, and act differently.

Winstanley also comes to believe that elder brothers consciously engage in "Machiavellian cheats":

Every man is ready to say they fight for the country, and what they do, they do for the good of the country…. But if, when they have the power to settle freedom, they takest [sic ] possession of the earth into their own particular hands and makest their brothers work for them … they have fought and acted for themselves, not for their country. Here their hypocrisy is discovered….

Common Freedom, which is the rule I would have practiced and not talked on, was the pretense, but particular freedom to themselves was their intent. (516)

According to this interpretation, the elder brothers intend to oppress the poor and know this is not righteous, but they also know they can succeed in their design only by promising freedom. They are not blind and self-righteous blowhards but cynics. Winstanley therefore holds them responsible in a more direct way and considers their sin less excusable.

Even here, however, Winstanley asks why the Revolution's leaders feel compelled to violate norms they understand. They believe that gaining earthly nourishment requires the oppression of others, even though they know that is not just. In a world ruled by covetousness they come to believe that there is only domination or submission, so they strive to be masters rather than slaves. Thus, they knowingly use language to mobilize support for the selfish aims they disguise. They understand that title to the earth is essential to the freedom of anyone, but are "afraid and ashamed to own" this insight "because it comes clothed in a clownish garment" (316). Ashamed that others would call them foolish idealists, and fearful that such a freedom for all would leave them vulnerable to domination, they choose to engage in "cheats."

In this interpretation, covetousness blinds the elder brothers, not to the meaning of words, but to the possibility of enacting them in a way that gains what they deserve without sacrificing others. The pedagogical problem for Winstanley, then, is to persuade them to understand their interest and identity differently so that they no longer scorn the idea of mutuality. That task requires unmasking their cynicism to expose the fear "that if they love and succor others, yet others will not love them." Only then will they admit their need and learn to address their fear.

Winstanley's two accounts suggest both that rulers are deceived about the actions their claims really entail and that rulers understand concepts but feel compelled to violate them. Winstanley speaks not to two audiences, however, but rather to one audience he understands in two different ways. He is not being incoherent but responding precisely to real tensions in Puritan politics.

In The Machiavellian Moment J. G. A. Pocock argues that Puritans manifest the tensions among vocabularies of custom, grace, and republican liberty, each of which addresses earthly interests in a principled and open way. He insists that within each vocabulary there is no tension between claims to freedom and arguments about property, a claim that precludes the assertion that the Puritans were deceptive, or deceived,

about the relationship between their words and their interests. By recovering the real intentions of actors and the meaning they ascribed to their words, Pocock opposes those theorists, like Hobbes and Marx, who reduce complexities of speech and action to the ideological reflection of either individual appetite and self-interest or simple bourgeois class interest. Pocock thereby subverts, indeed, buries, the idea that political language is ideological , in the sense of mystifying or hiding underlying social interests, as if the alternative to reductionism is taking the elder brothers literally at their word.

Winstanley uses the vocabularies of grace, custom, and liberty, but he attends to the tension between the universalist language of saint and citizen and limited social interests. He is sensitive to a disparity between claims and acts that Pocock seems to deny and attests to a contradiction between social interests and political language that Pocock obscures. As a result, Winstanley explains what Pocock ignores—a contemporary skepticism about the intentions and "hypocrisy" of Puritans so widespread as to include monarchists, Levellers, and, perhaps most famously, Hobbes. In contrast to Hobbes and Marx, however, Winstanley does not use such disparities to reject the political discourse of his time but criticizes ideology without devaluing speech. Yet he is vulnerable to Hobbes's argument about the conventionality of language and to Marx's argument about unresolvable class conflict. Contrasting Winstanley first with Hobbes and then with Marx will reveal what is fruitful in Winstanley's politics of dialogue as well as the tensions at the heart of political engagement itself.

Taking Speech Seriously: Winstanley and Hobbes

Like Pocock and Winstanley, Hobbes roots the English Civil War in interpretative conflict about political concepts derived from religion, political tradition, and republicanism. Hobbes argues that these vocabularies undermine political authority and preclude its reconstitution. Indeed, he believes that making judgments (about words like justice and freedom) is the emblem of rebellion and invariably causes an anarchy of proliferating interpretations, a state of war, for which political language itself provides no resolution.

It is not surprising, then, that Hobbes uses the Garden of Eden story to depict the reformers as Adam, to equate sin with the political judgment of authority, to associate politically explosive concepts with the fatal

apple, and sovereign power with god. God's reproof to Adam and Eve, he says, "clearly though allegorically signifieth that the commands of them that have the right to command are not by his subjects to be censured or disputed" (L/157). Since it is a short and virtually foreordained step from judgment of rulers to regicide, Hobbes's god asks Adam, "Who told thee that he was a tyrant? Hast thou eaten of the tree …? For why dost thou call him a tyrant … except that thou, being a private man, usurpest to thyself the knowledge of good and evil?" (DC/245).

Hobbes therefore discredits the available languages of political judgment as well as the motives of political actors; but he also constructs a mortal god that rules a garden in which words no longer are apples tempting Adam to rebel. By redefining justice and covenant, freedom and magistracy, he creates a vocabulary designed to defend authority. Once justice is redefined narrowly as the keeping of covenants, covenanted authority cannot be called unjust, and it is the rebel who becomes unjust by definition. Once freedom is redefined to mean what the law permits, no one can assert that authority deprives people of their liberty. If magistracy is redefined as any power that provides protection, no one can complain of tyranny as long as they are likely to continue living.^[1]

Winstanley agrees with Hobbes that the English are in a wilderness condition because of what Winstanley calls "the particular and confining ways" in which they define political interests and concepts. Hobbes says this is the bitter political fruit of the natural temptation to judge rulers by necessarily self-serving opinion. In contrast, Winstanley maintains that the English have failed to exercise properly the "justice and judgment" by which they must endeavor righteousness. Attacking as a Norman Yoke the emerging state power that Hobbes tries to strengthen and legitimize, Winstanley finds in political language itself the grounds for shared judgments, the criteria for a public or political response to England's situation.

To Winstanley, for example, the concept magistracy involves criteria by which to judge whether speech and action violate or honor its meaning.

[1] To Hobbes, judgment about human art is analogous to Adam and Eve's judgment about god's art because judgment is "the most ancient and diabolical of temptations" (DC/245). To judge is to "pry into" what is given by god or the mortal god and "transgress the bounds god hath set us and gaze upon him irreverently" (L/344). Hobbes worries that gazing irreverently on human art will strip us down to god's art, our nakedness, which he fears. Winstanley reveres the nakedness that is god's art in a way that Hobbes cannot and does not, and therefore he wants to strip away the veils of culture. Notice, however, that both attack "irreverence."

"Magistracy," he says, "is a good name, and the mystery of iniquity hath not only got this but other excellent names … that under the cover of a good name, he may go undiscovered; and he puts bad names on things that are good" (472). If rulers divide the earth and mankind, acting in "particular and confining ways," then they are tyrants who do not warrant the name of magistracy, which involves criteria of trusteeship and universality of benefit. If rulers call themselves magistrates, then they either are deceived or are using the word as a "cover" to disguise their true intent and real interests.

Accordingly, Winstanley engages in a process of shaming: "The babes and sucklings will draw off his veil and show all his nakedness and shame him" (473). By assimilating language to innocent nature, or childhood, and opposing it to the veils of a corrupt culture, he suggests the authenticity of the child's speech. His commonsense or naively literal approach to the meaning of words exposes the nakedness of those who use words deceptively. Thus, their shame is an admission that they have violated standards they themselves embrace, and not only invoke. Those standards indicate how they could be clothed in righteousness: one need not abandon political speech or human judgment in order to find a common ground for peace; political speech provides the standards for justifiable criticism and for a new order.

Winstanley's image of the child shaming—and teaching—authority, however, also suggests precisely the indignant self-righteousness or innocent certainty that Hobbes fears. By associating his words with "babes and sucklings," Winstanley dissimulates his own adult act of interpretation, suggesting that the meaning of words is natural or godgiven, fixed or virtually innate, rather than conventional, ambiguous, and learned. How, then, does Winstanley justify his claim that he has the right understanding of words and the actions they entail?

Winstanley repeatedly reminds his readers of key parliamentary declarations. The first was the Solemn League and Covenant, adopted in September 1643, which promised to endeavor a "real reformation" for the sake of liberty. The second was the proclamation of February 1649, which asserted "that it had been found by experience … that the Office of King in this Nation … is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people of this nation and ought to be abolished." The third was the act of May 1649, which declared England a "Free Commonwealth" to be governed by "representatives of the people in Parliament … without any King or House of Lords." From these declarations Winstanley draws his key concepts: the

covenant (sworn by each person with every other person and with god) to endeavor a reformation that brings freedom to all by making England a commonwealth .

Winstanley asks two sets of questions. First, what is the meaning of these words? (Do people use the concepts correctly?) Secondly, what actions do the words require? (Do people act according to the meaning of their words?) By grappling with these questions, Winstanley justifies his contention that there is a profound disparity between what the elder brothers say and what they do. He thereby can show how the meanings of their own words justify digging and require them to act differently.

According to Winstanley, the liberty that the English have covenanted to seek "lies where a man receives nourishment," and thus he says that freedom "lies herein principally, to have the land of their nativity for their livelihood" (287). How does he justify this assertion? First, "natural experience," especially in the Civil War, reveals that "all men seek the earth" because "they see their freedom lies in plenty and their bondage in poverty" (520). Secondly, he looks at their use of the word free . For example, the elder brothers taught him that a servant or hireling is not free (and therefore not entitled to political rights) because being free requires that one not work for wages, not depend on another for a livelihood, and not be subjected to another's will (428).

On precisely these grounds the rebels had maintained that the king violated the public good and enslaved the people: he controlled their livelihood and deprived them of the right to speak and act politically. For the rebels, freedom links nourishment and self-determination and is constituted politically in terms of rights. By their own criteria, then, the elder brothers are justified in associating property with freedom, but Winstanley also is justified in calling the ownership of property a "half freedom" (519) since it gives some their birthright to the earth at the cost of others' being made "unfree."^[2]

[2] Christopher Hill argues that in the common usage of the time, all wage laborers were by definition unfree:

Even the Levellers, the most radical of all seventeenth-century political groupings, would have excluded paupers and servants (i.e., wage laborers) from the franchise, because they were unfree. The leveller franchise would have been restricted to "freeborn Englishmen." Wage-laborers and paupers had lost their birthright because they had become economically dependent on others; they had lost their property in their own persons and labor…. There is plenty of confirmatory evidence for Professor Macpherson's argument that in the sixteenth and seventeenth century those in receipt of wages were regarded as unfree. ("Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labor," in Change and Continuity in 17th Century England [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975], pp. 223–24)

As this analysis suggests, the third way Winstanley justifies his argument about freedom is through the idea of righteousness, which he associates with the Golden Rule and with the principle of giving and receiving our due (according to our nature and necessity as creatures). Winstanley says the elder brothers should ask, would I want to be hedged out of the earth and forced to be a hireling? They also should ask, what are the benefits of creation, and what is required for all people to enjoy them? These two perspectives comprise the "True Leveller's Standard," which excludes or excepts no one, brings real benefits to all, and honors the lessons of usage and experience. According to this standard, Winstanley says, "if the reformation be according to the Word of God," the poor must have a right to consent actively to their government, as some of the Levellers maintained; but also the English must grant that "the poorest he hath as true a title and just a right to the land as the richest man" (321).

Because the concept of freedom is deeply implicated with needs and power and with ideas of membership and entitlement, it is the flip side of Winstanley's idea of justice. For him, justice or righteousness is a regulative idea of equity that distributes access to, and control of, nourishment, whereas freedom is gaining that nourishment in the right sort of way. Thus, in Winstanley's understanding, Parliament's promise to "make England a free people" and the declaration that England is a "commonwealth" are logically related. Winstanley follows the strongest and most literal sense of the word commonwealth: "to warrant the name of commonwealth," he says, Parliament must make the land a "common treasury to all her children" (323). But he also invokes a more flexible and strategic sense of the word: "Unless we that are poor commoners have some part of the land to live upon freely, as well as the gentry, [then] it cannot be a commonwealth" (348).

Because he has built on, but also transformed, the elder brothers' understanding of freedom, Winstanley speaks of learning:

Is our 8 years war come round about to lay us down again in the kennel of injustice as much or more than before? Are we no further learned yet? O ye rulers of England … Will you always hold us in one Lesson? Surely you will make dunces of us; then all the boys in other lands will laugh at us: Come, I pray let us … go forward in our learning. (361)

There are, however, two senses of learning he has in mind. In the first, one learns about freedom by reasoning about one's own uses of a word and its regulating criteria, by attending honestly to one's experience,

and by examining that to which England has covenanted. This sense Of learning suggests the conventionality of Winstanley's interpretations and points to the inductive process by which he arrived at them. Indeed, he comes increasingly to rely on people's ability to "speak like men, rationally," about the "reason and equity" of their standards and practices (287).

In a second sense, however, learning originates with god. By declaring that god is initially the author of his ideas, he does not mean to deny that he is working within the ordinary usage of words, for he insists on taking that seriously. Partly, he is accounting for the transforming perspective that preceded his reevaluation of concepts and practices. As he rhymes, a year after digging:

Freedom is the mark at which all men should aim
But what true freedom is, few men doth know by name.
But now a light is rise and nere shall fall
How every man by name shall freedom call. (ESU/9)

Only through the light within, he believes, is he able to criticize the particular interpretations and practices others accept as natural. In this way, he escapes the trap of either believing in the elder brothers' justice or believing that there is no such thing as justice, in the same way as he once escaped the trap of either believing in their god or believing there is no god.

However, Winstanley also invokes god in order to assert that his interpretation of freedom is the only right one. Apparently, to have shown how his interpretation is better is not sufficient, especially since his understanding of better breaks with received wisdom. It is as if his continuing sense that his legitimacy depends on reverence for god, for an authority he has not invented, is extended to include reverence for language as an authority we also do not invent: god's truth is the meaning that inheres to words, which he has distinguished from the meanings we imagine.

Winstanley's reverence for the spoken word and its meaning, once expressed as the idea of bearing witness, now appears in the liberty of a citizen , who speaks to clarify the covenant and acts to affirm it. In Biblical terms, covenanting gives rise to the vocation of prophecy: the prophet is a citizen who testifies to the meaning of promises and, thus, to the disparity between what people have promised and their practices. In this way, Winstanley links his scriptural project to the republican project of citizenship, which distinguishes between what is public,

shared, and virtuous and what is private, exclusive, and corrupt. In contrast to Hobbes, then, Winstanley draws on a history of concepts and commitments, usage and criteria, in an effort to suggest the shared (and god-given) meanings that could provide a just peace.

Addressing the elder brothers in this way, however, does not answer Hobbes's most troubling insight. Hobbes turns to the state and relies on the technical device of redefining concepts, in part because he believes that history, common discourse, and political dialogue do not provide a common ground that could end the Civil War. Indeed, it appears that the Civil War and the dispossession of the poor testify to fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable, conflicts about precisely the norms that Winstanley's dialogic politics must presume are shared.

It seems that Winstanley's belief in a truth beyond human invention, his seriousness about speech, and his desire for political engagement require him to believe that the elder brothers could and will listen to him—and even change—though he himself has analyzed the covetousness and interests that make this outcome unlikely. To explore this contradiction further, however, one must contrast Winstanley with Marx.

Taking Speech Seriously: Winstanley and Marx

In Pocock's terms, Hobbes replaces the language of conscience, political tradition, and republican virtue with the liberal language of appetite, interest, and rationality. Treating the latter as a scientific solution to the problems created by the former, Hobbes moves beyond Puritanism. Marx uses a theory of history, class struggle, and ideology to discuss the contradiction between political "poetry" of the saintly citizen and his prosaic interests as a member of an emerging bourgeois class. In this way, Marx moves not only beyond the poetry of Puritanism but also beyond the prose of Hobbes and liberalism.

In his famous introduction to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx grants that middle-class revolutionaries believed their words (for a time) but insists that words function only as tools of self-deception, disguise, and mobilization. In "the stern classical tradition of the Roman republic," or in "the language, passions, and illusions of the Old Testament," revolutionaries in France and England found "the ideals, art forms, and self-deceptions they needed in order to hide from themselves the limited bourgeois content of their struggles and to maintain their enthusiasm at the high level appropriate to great historical

tragedy." In describing how bourgeois revolutionaries "resurrect the dead," Marx uses a rarely noted metaphor:

In the same way, the beginner who has learned a new language always re-translates it into his mother tongue: he can only be said to have appropriated the spirit of the new language and to be able to express himself in it freely, when he can manipulate it without reference to the old, and when he forgets his original language while using the new one.

He goes on to say that "bourgeois society in its sober reality created its own true interpreters," who followed the prescient Hobbes, in effect separating from the past and speaking a prose appropriate to the new world they had created.^[3]

Accordingly, Marx himself does not take the "mother tongue" to be meaningful, and just as he expects the bourgeoisie to speak the sober prose of class interest, so too he expects the proletariat to speak a prose appropriate to its own class interests. Diverging forms of prose will yield no common political ground or culture, which appears only through mystified poetry. The point here is not to make the argument that Winstanley was a revolutionary who "timidly conjures up the spirits of the past to help" him make a new world. Rather, Marx's theory implies that Winstanley could not establish the right perspective on the elder brothers' language, and therefore his own, because he lacked a theory of history and class struggle. Moreover, as long as there is a propertied class, one infers from Marx, no kind of dialogue can lead rulers to interpret political phrases in a way that genuinely includes all people.

Even though Marx is manifestly animated by a sense of injustice, and thus by a sense of the meaning of the word justice, he only considers such concepts as poetry to be read in terms of ideological function. The way he exposes the social content behind words leads him to deny, in effect, that there could be a meaning or content in words. At most, he imagines a class whose universal interest guarantees that each will receive his or her due. That is, his rage at injustice appears as the claim that there is no real justice but only succeeding (and increasingly universal) forms of class rule.

While Marx wraps his argument about ideology in the mantle of a historical science of class struggle, Winstanley wears a sense of betrayal on his sleeve. As the "younger brother," Winstanley continues to take

[3] Surveys from Exile: Marx's Political Writings, ed. David Fernbach (New York: Random House, 1973), 2:147–49.

seriously the concepts the elder brothers taught but now violate. Indeed, Winstanley's discovery of his own critical voice has depended not on rejecting the mother tongue but on making it his own, transforming it in a way he can own. Moreover, the poetry of saint and citizen provides him, as that poetry in fact provides Marx, with the criteria by which to criticize a revolution with limited "social content." Because Winstanley does not deny his debt to the mother tongue, however, he exposes ideology in the name of disclosing the meaningfulness of speech. Therefore, he is concerned not just with the poor, for he believes the elder brothers betray what is best in themselves when they betray their words and others.

Behind the difference between Marx and Winstanley lies a deeper tension pervasive in the tradition of political theory at least since Plato's struggle with the Sophists: the relationship between might and right in language. Consider the encounter between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Book I of Plato's Republic . Thrasymachus perhaps can be seen as the first social scientist. He announces that justice is the rule of the strong: what people call justice is really what the strong have defined it to be, and what they define it to be is a function of their interests. As an angry unmasker of ideology, Thrasymachus not only exposes the content behind phrases but also denies that the word justice has a meaning by which one could judge interests or acts as unjust. Socrates grants that what people call justice surely may reflect the interests of the strong, but he insists that when we say justice, we do not mean the rule of the strong. We mean something like fairness or each person receiving, having, and doing what is due.

Whereas Thrasymachus looks at what we call justice in sociological terms, Socrates explores the meaning of the concept and the actions it entails. Readers who dismiss the Socratic case as an example of foolish "idealism" compared to Thrasymachus's "realism" ignore the Socratic rejoinder: if Thrasymachus were wholly right, why is he such an angry man? He is angry because he knows that what people call justice is often unjust. But how does he know that? What people call justice violates the word's meaning, which he knows but which he refuses to "own."^[4]

Like Thrasymachus's argument, Marx's disillusioning science of class ultimately arises from a sense of justice that it discounts and cannot explain

[4] The argument in this chapter about the relationship between a class analysis and a Socratic commitment to the meaning of words is deeply indebted to Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), chapter 5 in particular.

(since, after all, if justice really is the rule of the strong, then how can Marx account for his indignation?). Like Marx, Winstanley has the Thrasymachian insight, but unlike Marx, he also follows Socrates and uses the meaning of the word justice to criticize practices people call just. Therefore, Winstanley addresses the elder brothers, whereas Marx analyzes them, addressing only the proletariat. Nonetheless, Marx and Thrasymachus might well question Winstanley's belief that the elder brothers could choose to act differently.

Winstanley does not lack a theory of the social interests that create a rule of the strong, nor does he lack a theory of history in which those interests develop, for he argues that conflict between elder and younger brothers is precisely the key fact in a history that culminates in "universal community." But this historical scheme is based on the idea of universal grace, as god "leads" all people to know and honor righteousness. Thus, Winstanley engages in the dialogue Marx precludes because of faith in a historical process different from Marx's. He is not naive about social interests, but his theory of history teaches that people are free beings and rational because they are children not of modes of production but of god. All can be "redeemed" because each is endowed with a capacity for "justice and judgment" that is not, he believes, ultimately determined by social position (or covetousness).

Winstanley must believe in the accessibility of the elder brothers because otherwise he would violate his animating faith, which also, despite all the evidence he himself offers to the contrary, makes possible his politics of speech and engagement. More broadly, perhaps a politics of dialogue must be premised on a faith in the capacity for "justice and judgment," even if not theologically derived. Accordingly, Winstanley may be trapped in a contradictory position, but not because of a failure of insight into power relations: if commitments to membership, mutuality, and choice are essential to, or the premise of, political dialogue, then they always will be contradicted by actual social divisions and will not mesh with a class analysis and its compelling insights about "the rule of the strong."

Thus, Winstanley, without the advantage of hindsight and bound to a millennial faith and a politics of dialogue, asserts the historical possibility of persuading the elder brothers to be faithful to a covenant they profess to uphold but whose meanings they interpret in a way that excludes the poor. Writing as a prophet who teaches the rights and obligations that could create freedom for all, Winstanley makes two kinds of arguments, which now can be explored. First, he argues that digging is

rightful, and neither illegal nor dangerous to public liberty. What warrants digging also discloses the obligations of those in power, so secondly, he outlines what Parliament must do if it is to be legitimate and deserve to be called a magistracy.

How the Covenant Defines Right Action

To Winstanley, getting one's words right does not suffice: words must be lived and acted. As a digger, he says he bears witness to "the substantial truth, brought forth into action, which the ministers have preached of and all religious men have made profession of" (408). Owning speech in action is essential because "certainly, God … is not a God of words only, but of deeds; for it is a badge of hypocrisy for a man to say and not to do" (407). Since the elder brothers harass the diggers, however, Winstanley must clarify how digging is a way of "owning" the "covenant and oath to endeavor reformation and to bring in liberty." One passage in the True Levellers Standard contains the key elements in Winstanley's argument. The diggers are harassed, he says:

because they stand to maintain a universal liberty and freedom which is not only our birthright, which our Maker gives us, but which thou hast promised to restore unto us … and which likewise we have bought with our money, in taxes, freequartering, and bloodshed. (256)

First, they have a right to dig because the earth is their birthright: "The earth was not made for some but for all to live comfortably upon the fruits of it because all require it" (199). Secondly, human need and god's promised inheritance yield an argument about the promises between people. Winstanley says to Parliament: "You promised that if we would adventure person and purse to restore England from under that Norman oppression, you would make us a free people" (343). Given the meaning of freedom and Parliament's promise, digging is legitimate.

But thirdly, Winstanley shifts from what is promised to the fact that a promise is a bargain or contract:

For Parliament promised, if we would pay taxes, give freequarter and adventure our lives against Charles and his party, they would make us a free people. These three being done by us, as well as by themselves, we claim this our bargain by law of contract with them, to be a free people with them. (276)

They acted as they did on the presumption that their promise entails reciprocity and real benefits, especially since the parties promised to

make mutual and real sacrifices. If they do not gain land and freedom, "what benefit shall the common people have (that suffered most in the wars) by the victory that is got over the king? It had been better for the common people that there had been no such conquest, for they are impoverished in their estates by freequarter and taxes" (287).

Of course, the elder brothers deny that the national covenant entitles the poor to the earth, and instead insist that digging is illegal, a form of trespass or theft. Therefore, Winstanley develops a fourth argument, educating them about title to the earth. Where does title come from, such that some men can label others trespassers or thieves? "The king held title as he was conqueror," and the lords hold title to the commons "by no stronger hold than the king's will"; and since "the kings head is cut off," Winstanley argues, the lords "have lost their royalty to the common land," at the very least (288).

The question of title is now not legal but political. Just as William conquered England and "took the land for his own and called that his freedom," so, too, "seeing all sorts of people have given assistance to recovering England from under the Norman Yoke, surely all sorts, both gentry in their enclosures and commonality in their commons, ought to have freedom, not compelling one to work for wages for another" (287). On the grounds of their contribution to the conquest, "we plead our propriety in the common land as truly our own by virtue of this victory over the king," and not only because elder brothers promised freedom (343).

By asking how title originates, however, Winstanley suggests that might makes right, which means he loses any basis for objecting to the elder brothers' effort to forcibly reimpose the Norman Yoke on the poor. He therefore asks, What made, or makes, the conquest of Charles legitimate? The elder brothers had justified an admittedly illegal revolt (and mobilized the poor) by invoking a higher principle of legitimacy, "Salus Populi, the safety, peace and preservation of the whole body of the people, excepting none." This "ancient fundamental" law "gave life and strength to the Parliament and Army to take up arms against the king; for they had not the least letter of any written law for their warrant at that time, all the laws being for the King and none against him" (430).

Only an appeal to salus populi made conquest politically possible and justifiable, and only honoring that principle makes conquest legitimate. Otherwise, it will be said that "the gentry of England assembled in Parliament, killed the king for his power and government as a thief kills a true man for his money" (308). In the light of salus populi, elder

brothers appear as a robber band, whereas diggers appear as the "life and marrow of the Parliament's cause" (366). Contrary to what elder brothers maintain, the action of diggers honors the only law that justified revolt and that now governs what is determined to be legal or illegal. That Winstanley argues this way reveals two fundamental shifts in his understanding of politics: he has begun to define the actions that would make Parliament legitimate, and (as will be explored in the next chapter) he has accepted that violence can be legitimate.^[5]

Legitimate State Power

In The New Law of Righteousness Winstanley seemed unambiguously opposed to the state. Its origins in violence and its character as an instrument of class rule made it tainted, dangerous, and unjust. As he begins to dig, he again invokes Israel's mistake in choosing Saul, declaring: "We told you … we were not against any that would have Magistrate and laws to govern, as the Nations of the world are governed, but … we shall need neither the one nor the other" (282). By August 1649, however, he has formulated a political argument about what the Parliament and Army must do to be legitimate: "While we are in pursuit of the covenant, [we] expect that Parliament that made the covenant … to assist us herein, against all who oppose us in this righteous work of making the earth a common treasury" (326). Now he insists:

You blame us who are Common People as though we would have no government; truly Gentlemen, we desire a righteous government with all our hearts, but the government we have gives freedom and livelihood to the gentry … and the poor that works to get it can hardly live and if they cannot work like slaves then they must starve. (361)

[5] When Winstanley says that conquest confers rights (to the spoils), he sounds like Hobbes, who argues that conquerors win the right to rule, and it is the recognition of that right that creates peace. But here the difference with Winstanley emerges, for Winstanley says:

If this freedom [to the earth] be denied the common people … then Parliament, Army, and Judges will deny equity and reason, whereupon the laws of a well-governed commonwealth ought to be built. If this equity be denied, then there can be no law but club law among the people; and if the sword must reign, then every party will be striving to bear the sword; and then, farewell peace. (373)

Both theorists fear "club law," but Winstanley derives it from illegitimate rule, whereas Hobbes derives it precisely from arguments about legitimacy. Therefore, Winstanley seeks peace by locating the principle that warrants the exercise of power and rights, whereas it is this very effort that Hobbes would prevent, for it jeopardizes the sovereignty of any state power.

In December Winstanley finds a Biblical metaphor for legitimate outer rulers:

We hope that there will not be any kingly power over us to rule at will and we to be slaves, as the power has been, but that you will rule in love as Moses and Joshua did the children of Israel before any kingly power came in, and the Parliament will be as the elders of Israel, chosen freely by the people to advise … and assist … us. (348)

To honor the covenant and be a good authority, like Moses and Joshua, what must Parliament do? "If the fault lies in the laws, and much does, burn your old law books … and set up a government upon your own foundation: do not put new wine into old bottles, but as your government must be new, so let the laws be new" (358). This means, as Moses instructed the Hebrews, "look not upon other lands to be your pattern," but make laws that honor the "True Levellers Standard."

But what acts show reverence for that standard? If freedom "lies herein principally, to have the land of their nativity for their livelihood," then the main thing Parliament should "look upon is the land, which calls upon her children to be freed from the entanglements of Norman taskmasters" (304). That is because "our freedom must not lie within the clasps of a book, in words that may be read; nor in the bare title of victory; but it must be a freedom really enjoyed or else it will do us no good" (429). At the very least, then, the poor must be allowed to dig the commons. To truly establish freedom, however, Parliament must approach social bondage systematically and institutionally. As Winstanley says, "The king's blood was not our burden, it was those oppressing Norman laws whereby he enslaved us" (308). "Mistake me not, I do not say cast out the persons of men: No, I do not desire their fingers to ache; but I say cast out their power, whereby they hold the people in bondage, as the king held them in bondage" (372). Therefore, "all the several limbs and members must be cast out before kingly power can be pulled up root and branch." Since Parliament has abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords, Winstanley advises, "take away the power of Lords of Manors, and of Tithing Priests, and the intolerable oppression of judges" (372). Only these actions, and not mere regicide, constitute "the beginning of public freedom to the whole land" (439).

Winstanley knows, however, that "the nation's representative" has been chosen from the Norman taskmasters who oppress the poor. In theory, Parliament could be chosen by the few and still represent the many, but even this arrangement would not fulfill the requirements of freedom, for as Winstanley says of Joshua, rulers must be freely chosen

by all the people. And strategically, Winstanley knows that the composition of Parliament must change if it is to encourage social change. Accordingly, in the winter of 1650 he argues that if Parliament is to fulfill its promise of freedom, it must create a government of representatives chosen by all the people.

Parliament's acts to cast out the king and establish England as a free commonwealth justify such political reform. Only if the people "enjoy successive Parliaments … shall we be freed from the corruption of particular men" acting as "perpetual governors" (ESU/9). After all, that was Parliament's objection to monarchy:

If any should assume a power to abide constantly in that Parliamentary seat, and so to rule as if they were conquerors over the people … then they do thereby endeavor to bring in Kingly power, and themselves … corrupt commonwealth government. (ESU/10–11)

When Winstanley reminds his readers that "Parliament declared what they did … not for themselves but for the public freedom," he takes that to mean "everyone shall have his full liberty in the land for his livelihood and likewise in the choice of the representing power" (ESU/12).

Once again, Winstanley appears naive about the elder brothers even as he analyzes the "yoke" they impose. Politically or rhetorically, however, his problem is formulating a policy that attends to their sense of interest while honoring the meaning of their words and the interests of others. "If you establish the old Norman laws," he warns, "then you pull down the guilt of King Charles' blood on your own heads," and, he adds, "give just occasion to the common people never to trust the fair words of a Parliament any more, as you were always slow in trusting the king" (307). And as the king learned, when "the people fall off from you, you shall fall of a sudden like a great tree that is undermined at the root" (390). But the rulers can secure their particular interest in a way that also benefits the poor: "Let the gentry have their enclosures and the poor their commons" (305). This minimum demand acknowledges the rulers' own right to land while granting the poor their right as well. If elder brothers granted the rights and needs of others, Winstanley maintains, they also would feel more secure in the enjoyment of their own.^[6]

[6] The immediate danger is not a revolt of the poor but a counterrevolution by supporters of monarchy. In a delicate maneuver, Winstanley is trying to reinforce the republican political loyalties of the men who killed the king, by reminding them that without the support of the poor, their own liberties and rights (especially to property) will be subject once again to arbitrary power. In other words, he is trying to persuade them that the royalists are greater enemies than the poor (307).

But Winstanley also asks, as if wondering aloud, "Surely, if these lords and freeholders have their enclosures established to them in peace, is not that freedom enough? Must they needs have the Commons Lands likewise?" (307). He knows they do not really need the common lands, but since he knows their anxiety, he fears they will be "as Ahab, that was restless til he had Naboth's Vineyard, and so in the midst of abundance yet they will eat the bread out of the poors mouths" (307). By picturing them as Ahab, for whom nothing was enough, Winstanley means to warn them of self-destruction, but his image also suggests his own doubts about their ability to act differently.

Winstanley as Citizen: Theory and Action

What is striking about Winstanley's defense of digging and his argument about legitimate government is his ability to relate issues of need and interest to a political understanding of freedom and justice. He works out a political understanding of the tension in the existence of creatures shaped both by their needs and by their capacity for choice. He now gives a political response to his abiding question: how can humans meet their needs in a way that makes and keeps them free? In terms of rights and the meaning of a political covenant, diggers demand control over their livelihood and the right to exercise their agency as free men and women seeking to establish "public community" (291).

By turning the questions of what people need into the question of what they are entitled to, Winstanley gives necessity and social interests a political form and makes digging a political act. By politicizing bodily necessities and household concerns in terms of justice and for the sake of freedom, he puts earthly realities into political terms. By insisting that a legitimate government must address earthly need, and by insisting that freedom is to be felt and enjoyed in daily life, he also gives politics an earthly ground. Winstanley's politics attends to daily realities (how people feed themselves) while his understanding of daily life incorporates the intentionality and choice implicit in political speech.

In this way, Winstanley joins what most political theorists separate: need, or what is most basic (and necessary to existence); and freedom, or what is most noble and meaningful (and necessary to the good life). Whereas many theorists split need and freedom because they lack a mediating or synthesizing idea of justice, Winstanley's concern for justice discloses a political way to grant legitimacy to both. Citizenship becomes

the activity of meeting needs in political terms and through specifically political forms.^[7]

The politicization implied in this theory of citizenship and public community is confirmed by another and related development. Before he began digging, Winstanley imagined a unitary community in which particularity was effaced, "swallowed in love," as people achieved unanimity about words and deeds. He could not grant the possibility of legitimate differences because that would have implied the conventionality—and above all, the particularity—of his interpretation, which would have brought into doubt his claim to be god's instrument and undermined his own sense of legitimacy. In this regard he was like the elder brothers, but he felt enormous pressure to succeed where they had failed."^[8]

During Winstanley's year as a digger, however, he is forced to confront the problem of plurality, of reconciling diverse and conflicting interests and interpretations. He still insists that his motives are pure: "Self-love to my own particular body does not carry me along in the managing of this business" (329). He still believes that abolishing property is the best way to guarantee everyone's freedom. But he grants that the gentry's enclosures do represent freedom, although "only for them" and at the expense of the poor. He therefore accepts their right to enclosures if the poor (by equity) have a right to land as well. As a result, he grants that a legitimate commonwealth could be based on enclosures and commons.

Thus, his argument about commonwealth moves from the idea of a unitary household to something like the idea of the Hebrew nation composed of tribes that are different and sometimes in conflict. A "commonwealth's government" exists to reconcile such differences; people become citizens when they learn that they must take into account their differences and their similarities. Winstanley starts to accept a certain plurality of differences within the boundary of assuring that all people can enjoy the earth, which everyone defines as crucial to freedom (305, 308, 326, 413).

[7] These arguments are indebted to Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, "Justice: On Relating Public and Private," Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 327–52.

[8] Winstanley's idea of truth and Marx's idea of science are attempts to claim that they do not disguise limited social interests and that they, as authors, are not subject to the corruption of limited interest or particularistic imagination. Their words do not conceal. For both theorists, the experience of revolution and the disparity between words and actions appear to have generated an intense desire to find a language that releases humans from ideological discourse.

In his year as a digger, then, Winstanley becomes a citizen by struggling to reconcile his sense of a unitary and god-given community grounded in a fixed standard of righteousness and his awareness that he lives in a world of diversity and conflict. This struggle is salutary: he avoids both the relativism that disavows judgment and the fixity that denies plurality; he learns how community is a political creation and neither automatic nor manifestly god-given. God-given truths no longer preclude politics but rather mark the perimeters of legitimate political action. As a result, he no longer enters the agon of politics to abolish it but instead accepts it in order to make society and its members more just and free.

The practical import of these developments is that after a year of digging, in the spring of 1650, Winstanley urges the poor to "take the Engagement," the oath of loyalty to the republic, in spite of Parliament's obvious deficiencies and its failure thus far to fulfill its promises. How is this change to be interpreted?

There is no doubt that Winstanley still operates within the millennial framework of Exodus: he still hopes to uproot kingly power and establish instead a true commonwealth. But he has developed a more strategic view of social change. He now conceives an outward and political form of the Father's internal magistracy and the poor's agency; "True Magistracy" has become the political expression of what was once simply an internal and social process. That he brings politics and magistracy to the foreground in this way, however, does not require that he take the Engagement. Surely, he knows that the formal declaration of a republic represents only "the bare title of a victory" and thus only a "freedom to be read" rather than enjoyed. Therefore, his changing sense of what the poor require must have led him to pledge his loyalty in spite of his reservations.

In the most practical political terms, Winstanley must know that the diggers' survival requires state protection from local gentry and freeholders. If the poor take the Engagement, he can demand that protection in return. The desperation one might read in this act is mitigated by the fact that the purged Parliament was considering electoral reform, which gave hope to those seeking land reform. This too would justify taking the Engagement.

In the long run, and granting his uncertainty about Parliament's final position, Winstanley seems to believe that establishing republican principles is still the precondition for making the English a free people. He pledges not so much to the government as to principles by which it declares

itself legitimate. Those principles justify further social change, for they entitle the poor to demand an independent ground in the earth, "successive Parliaments," and "their freedom in choosing their representatives" (ESU/10).

In hindsight, of course, we know that Winstanley is mistaken about what is possible. But he also takes the Engagement for reasons far deeper than strategic gambles. Winstanley has covenanted not only to obey god but also to see to it that god is obeyed; he cannot abandon the revolution and pretend that he, at least, has fulfilled his obligations. In this sense, his reverence has brought him more deeply into the morally problematic political world. Indeed, for the sake of the freedom of the poor he had endorsed bloodshed; by Justifying digging in terms of the king's conquest, he has made himself complicit in moral transgression and the nation's blood guilt. Therefore, his innocence now hinges on redeeming such sacrifices by actually establishing freedom. He cannot refuse to pledge, but at all costs he must succeed in reforming the regime, to whose destiny he is deeply bound by the piety that requires him to justify and atone for his transgressions.

Chapter VI The Curse of Cain

Freedom is not won,
Neither by sword nor gun,
Though we have eight years stay'd,
And have our moneys pay'd:
Then clubs and diamonds cast away,
For harts and spades must win the day.
—a digger song

For although martial severity, self-discipline and danger have been the conspicuous characteristics of my strange life . . .if I lived like a soldier, it would have been a silly misapprehension to believe that I should therefore live as a soldier; yes, if it is permissible to describe and define intellectually an emotional treasure as noble as freedom, then it may be said that to live like a soldier but not as a soldier, figuratively but not literally, to be allowed in short to live symbolically, spells true freedom.
—Thomas Mann, Felix Krull

In the year of digging, Winstanley modifies his basic views about leadership and violence so that certain fissures and pressures appear in his thought and action. He maintains his initial belief that the politics of "the Dragon" reenacts Cain's crime, and he defends dialogue and nonviolence as the politics of "the Lamb"; but he also argues that the diggers are conquerors entitled to a share of the "spoils" won in the armed victory over Charles.

Winstanley's analysis of political violence is not fixed and static, nor is it an abstract account by one whose hands feel clean. As his effort to distinguish absolutely between the politics of the Dragon and of the Lamb becomes an effort to justify when each is appropriate and legitimate, he himself takes on the transgression of violence and the hopeless task of redeeming it. As this man of love becomes a citizen, he confronts

a dilemma: can Abel, the younger brother, regain his inheritance without becoming like Cain?

Winstanley's Initial Position

In March 1649 a triumphant army had just deposed the king and forced his execution. Levellers tried to take advantage of this situation, to gain acceptance for an "Agreement of the People" that would extend the franchise and reform Parliament. But in the debate about their proposal, Cromwell and even more radical intellectuals like Milton agreed that there was no social basis even for Leveller democracy. Christopher Hill concurs: "The mass of the population was unsophisticated politically and still under the influence of landlords and pastors: to give such men the vote … would be to strengthen rather than weaken the power of the conservatives."^[1] Therefore, until the poor were prepared for self-rule, leaders must not be subject to popular control. On these grounds, however, army and Parliamentary leaders suppressed the Levellers and mutinous regiments. They purported to follow Moses' example: reaching Canaan required violence against rebellious Hebrews and war against external enemies.

As a result, by 1651 many ex-rebels agreed with Hobbes that England could escape the wilderness of the interregnum only by acknowledging the centrality of sovereignty and the sword to any stable, let alone just, order. In Hobbes's drama of the state of nature, the murdered father returns in the scientific dress of Leviathan: insisting that "covenants without the sword are but words," and denying that the state requires a justification beyond the protection of social existence itself, Hobbes appropriates the Mosaic model and turns it to secular purposes. He defends what is now called a monopoly of legitimate violence, which would become the premise for the private pursuit of all other goods.^[2]

Before the mutinies and purges in the spring of 1649, Winstanley had

[1] Christopher Hill, God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1970), pp. 206–8.

[2] A Thrasymachian therefore might say that conquest, or might, is the basis of right and argue that there is no justice (L/219). Such men are correct about might, Hobbes says, but incorrect about justice: sovereign law is just by definition; there is no standard of justice behind, beneath, or higher than the law, except the natural law that says justice is keeping covenants, that is, obeying constituted law. The alternative to this understanding, he says, is an endless cycle of rebellion:

They will all of them justify the war by which their power was first gotten and whereon they think their right dependeth and not on the possession. As if, for example, the right of the Kings of England did depend on the goodness of the cause of William the Conqueror … wherein whilst they needlessly think to justify themselves, they justify all the successful rebellions that ambition shall at any time raise against them…. There is scarce a commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified. (L/506)

developed his own arguments about "what is to be done." Unlike the Puritans and Hobbes, Winstanley in The New Law of Righteousness unequivocally denounced violence as "the power of the flesh" and rejected a reformation led by "outer saviors" or controlled by "the hands of the few" (181–82). The premise of his argument was that violence is the most extreme denial of an equality between creatures that derives from the fact that all embody a spirit that is greater than each. Thus, says Winstanley:

If any man can say, he can give life, then he bath the power to take away life; but if the power of life and death be only in the hands of the Lord, then surely he is a murderer of the creation that takes away the life of his fellow creature, man, by any law whatsoever. (197)

Like violence, therefore, the claim to be an "outer savior" also dishonors the god within and violates the limits that define humanness. In each case, the effort to "be as a god" makes people "fight and devour like beasts" rather than be "moderate and speak and carry themselves like men, rationally" (282).

Like other modern critics of political violence, Winstanley articulated the limits that should define human action and argued that means are ends in the making: we betray our ends if we do not honor them in our present action; if we profess to be lifting the curse of pride, then we must renounce whatever constitutes it. Accordingly, Winstanley argued, Puritan radicals present neither a real alternative to kingly power nor a living example of what he called "a power contrary" (382). Indeed, he appeared to believe that no politics, let alone violence, can "settle" the reformation, that is, "build up" a true alternative to kingly power:

The whole earth is corrupt and it cannot he purged by the hand of creatures, for all creatures lie under the curse and groan to be delivered, and the more they strive the more they entangle themselves in the mud…. Surely no flesh can settle this work for all flesh is corrupt; this work shall be done by the power of the Lord, killing covetousness and making mankind generally to be of one heart and one mind. (186–87)

The "work" of "killing covetousness," Winstanley maintained, will be accomplished "without either sword or weapons" and without "selfish

counsellors and selfish governors," but rather "by the universal spirit of the divine power, which is Christ in mankind, making them all to act in one spirit and in and after one law of reason and equity" (181–82). The only power that can lift the curse of pride and violence is "a power contrary, … love and patience acted with a cheerful life" (456). Since "Christ came not to destroy but to save," one who honors him does not abjure all action but honors his method, which works "on the flesh but not by the flesh," by wielding "the sword of love, patience, and truth" (181, 471).

Before examining what Winstanley meant by the sword of Christ and how he then wields it as a digger, let us consider first the political implications of his initial argument by contrasting it to an explicit defense of the legitimacy of leadership and violence. J. G. A. Pocock, for instance, views the New Model Army before the mutinies of 1649 as an armed prophet: violence is not only an ineluctable fact of political life but also an essential and unavoidable means to found and preserve a republic. Following Machiavelli, Pocock writes that "Prophets, whether true or false, require the sword because they are innovators":

The prophet's inspiration and mission do not deliver him from the political context created by innovation, and he must continue to use secular arms for reasons inherent in that context…. [Innovation] makes enemies who are fervent because they know what they have lost, and friends who are lukewarm because they do not yet know what they have gained, not having yet had enough experience of it: precisely the problem of the fleshpots of Egypt.^[3]

Such a political argument has its own moral underpinning: just as moral virtue arises specifically from acknowledging and taking responsibility for violence, so republican virtue arises only when citizens take collective responsibility for it. For moral and political reasons, then, Machiavelli condemns those who foist responsibility for violence onto god or mercenaries. People become citizens only when they are willing to jeopardize their souls and risk their bodies—literally to fight for their freedom. And that sort of citizenship is engendered by the emulation of great leaders.

From this point of view, Winstanley is selfish and irresponsible. He is too concerned with his personal goodness to do good. As Bertolt Brecht warns, "Take care when you leave the world / You were not only good /

[3] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 171–72.

But leave a good world." Moreover, Winstanley dooms his cause to defeat because, again in Brecht's words, "Only force helps where force rules; only men help where men are." As Lenin argues, if the gift of freedom requires the sword of iron, then those like Winstanley, whom Lenin calls "slaves of love," will never be free.^[4]

Winstanley, however, was making an argument about political effectiveness as well as moral goodness, which he believed are related. The armed prophet

that seems to prevail over another says, God gave him his victory, though his conquest be tyranny over his brothers, making the King of Righteousness the author of sorrows…. Victories that are got by the sword are but victories of the Murderer, and the joy of those victories is but the joy of Cain, when he had killed his brother Abel. (297)

What are the consequences of such victories? "Freedom gotten by the sword is an established bondage to some part of creation…. Victory gotten by the sword is a victory that slaves get one over another" (378–79). The losers become the slaves of the new tyrants, who themselves are slaves to covetousness within. In time the conquered rise up and kill their masters, and the process is repeated. "For if I kill you" in the name of god, justice, or freedom, "I am a murderer. If a third man comes and kills me for murdering you, he is a murderer of me; and so by the government of first Adam, murder hath been called justice when it is but the curse" (193).

Winstanley's point is that a state built on conquest is built on division, and division and inequality generate potentially violent resentment and discontent. Then the victors will feel compelled to reenact their fratricidal crime:

Oh, saith imaginary, covetous, proud, self-seeking flesh, If I take not the sword to restrain the unruliness of mankind, we shall not live one by another. But his interest is not in love to peace, but that he may rule over all himself and beat down others under him. (488)

What outer saviors call a righteous necessity is the result of a victory that creates slaves. Winstanley tells the victors that the crimes with which the polity begins will be its bad conscience; the divisions which its foundation initiates are crimes whose effects will haunt the rulers.

[4] Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956 (New York: Methuen, 1976); V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (New York: International Publishers, 1969).

The community will be weak at its roots, in the hearts of its members, because change cannot be forced. An order can be legitimate and stable only if it is made by all, equally and consensually.

But what is the point of making this argument against violence after a victorious war? In The New Law of Righteousness it sounds as if Winstanley had stood aside from violence for moral and political reasons, convinced it could not give birth to freedom. Yet he grants that it is by "wars, councils, and the hands of men" that "the government of Esau shall be beaten down and the enemy shall destroy one another" (205). Thus, the fight of the Dragons appears to prepare the way for the spirit of the Lamb, which generates nonviolent social change. "England, know this," he declares at the outset of digging, "thy striving now is not only Dragon against Dragon … but now thou beginst to fight against the Lamb, the Dove, the meek spirit, the power of love" (297). Once the parliamentary Dragon has destroyed the monarchical Dragon, the "hand of the Lord … will be the healer, restorer, and giver of the New Law of Righteousness, by spreading himself everywhere and so drawing all things into himself" (205).

One has the uneasy feeling that Winstanley's noninvolvement has entitled him to play the agent of Christ: the innocent younger brother is entitled to a freedom that is partly the result of Parliament's sinful victory over Charles, from which he is meant to stand apart so that he can embody "a power contrary." To be sure, Winstanley believes that noninvolvement is intended as a gift to the elder brothers: because the poor are innocent, they will be able to wash white others' sins by bearing witness to the spirit of the Lamb. But he also wishes to stay pure: he can redeem the crimes of others, and bring in freedom, without himself transgressing or suffering the guilt that requires expiation. This dream, that one can become a citizen while remaining a saint, is transformed and jeopardized by his experience as a digger.^[5]

[5] There is considerable ambiguity in Winstanley's account of the redemptive narrative because he seems uncertain about the role of the dragon and the sword. In part, he says that any victory gotten by the sword is the victory of Cain. But he also insists that war is necessary because it alone can destroy kingly power, in part by discrediting violence:

When you see Army against Army, it is but Kingly Power dividing, tearing, and devouring itself; for as he riseth by his own sword so he shall fall by his sword … til the creation be cleansed of these plagues; and that curse which hath destroyed the earth shall now in a period of time destroy itself. (467)

As violence destroys kingly power, but also discredits itself, a power contrary can be demonstrated by those whose hands are clean.

Harassment

Beginning in June 1649 diggers were physically beaten, their huts and crops destroyed, and several of them arrested and tried for trespassing. Winstanley's August pamphlet, A Watchword to the City of London and the Army , is particularly crucial because it explains their physical and legal harassment through a theory of the new Norman Yoke and justifies nonviolent digging as the way to wield "the sword of Christ."

His narrative in this pamphlet, however, is repeatedly broken by anguished references to the plight of the cows he tended, which bailiffs physically abused and tried to confiscate in an effort to gain payment in kind for the damages assessed by the court. Winstanley intentionally uses the cows to symbolize what is at stake in his differences with the elder brothers. Unlike his other literary devices and metaphors, however, Winstanley's references to the cows actually fracture his narrative form and political argument and create an extremely disjointed, even rambling, text. Winstanley cannot master his own metaphor, but it discloses the feelings and contradictions that shape—and misshape—Winstanley's arguments about violence and nonviolence.

How the elder brothers use, sell, and beat the cows provides a metaphor for how they treat the poor and the earth. Most obviously, the Normans rob the people of their livelihood and nourishment: "And this Norman camp are got into so numerous a body already that they have appointed sutlers to drive away the cows which were my livelihood" (331). As Winstanley says of himself, "If I could not get meat to eat, I would feed on bread, milk and cheese, and if they take the cows … then I'll feed on bread and beer" (328). Meanwhile, the cows "were to be killed to victual the camp, that is, to feed … freeholders and others, the snapsack boys and ammunition drabs that helped drive away the cows, that they might be encouraged by a belly full of stolen goods to stick the closer to the business another time" (331).

Thus, the cows represent both the poor and an "unnurtured" source of nourishment. Indeed, the transformation of nourishment and fellow creatures into commodities for others is literally an act of violence: as the Normans take away the cows, "they beat them with their clubs, that the cows heads and sides did swell, which grieved tender hearts to see" (329). Accordingly, the Normans' attitude toward the cows represents the exact opposite of digging: they deny reciprocity with the earth and with "fellow creatures." This alone explains why

the fury of this Norman camp against the diggers is so great that they would not only drive away all the cows upon the ground, but spoil the corn too, and when they had done all this mischief, the bailiffs and other Norman snapsack boys went howling and shouting as if they were dancing at a whitson ale, so glad they are to do mischief to the diggers. (335)

Winstanley is especially concerned about the cows because they do not belong to him: he is a trustee tending this source of nourishment, a fellow creature. He says he told the bailiffs, "Here is my body, take me that I may come to speak to those Normans that have stolen our land from us, and let the cows go, for they are not mine" (328). By taking the cows, elder brothers hypocritically disregard rightful ownership, but the whole episode also exposes the hypocrisy of their profession to uphold law and virtue, to be trustees for the people and the land.

"This power of covetousness is he that does countenance murder and theft in them that maintain the kingdom by the sword of iron and punishes it in others" (324). The law itself is merely a tool of this covetousness, believes Winstanley, who points out that the jury that decided in the freeholders' favor "was made of rich freeholders and such as stand strongly for the Norman power; and though our digging upon that barren common land bath done the common much good, yet this jury brings in damages of ten pounds a man" (327). "Under the color of justice," the elder brothers rob the poor of their livelihood, confiscate and abuse the nourishment they hold in trust, engage in "theft and tumult," deprive people of the right to speak, and themselves refuse to speak "like men" (336). It must be "that the god from whom they claim title to the land as proper to them, shutting out others, is covetousness the murderer, the swordly power, the great red dragon, who is called the god of this world" (385).

At the same time, the cows symbolize what Winstanley takes to be the truth about diggers and himself, which is the innocent suffering endured by those who try to nourish the earth and others. Just as the "reason in creation" is upheld by the cows providing milk and manure, so too the diggers only meant to feed the poor and "nurture unnurtured ground." Like the innocent cows, the diggers

have plowed and dig'd upon Georges Hill in Surrey, to sow corn for the succor of man, offering no offence to any, but carrying ourselves in love and peace towards all, having no intent to meddle with any mans enclosures or propriety, til it be freely given us by themselves, but [intending] only to improve the commons and waste lands … for the relief of ourselves and others. (301)

Like the cows, diggers are punished for an act of love that is blameless and even praiseworthy.

Obviously, diggers are not cows; but Winstanley maintains that like cows they are the innocent victims of persecution by evil people. When he laments the plight of the cows, he draws an important distinction: "And yet these cows were never upon George Hill, and never digged upon that ground, and yet the poor beasts must suffer because they give milk to feed me" (329). Unlike the cows, the diggers choose to be on George Hill; nonetheless, Winstanley insists that diggers are as innocent as the cows. Eager to prove that diggers are neither trespassers nor transgressors of any moral law, he declares:

We find … love in our hearts toward all, to enemies as well as friends; we would have none live in beggary, poverty, or sorrow, but [hope] that everyone might enjoy the benefit of his creation: we have peace in our hearts and quiet rejoicing in our work, filled with sweet content, though we have but a dish of roots and bread for our food. (262)

In part, Winstanley is trying to assuage the fears of the elder brothers in order to survive: they project their own impulses and motives onto diggers, and thus misunderstand them: "Enemies filled with fury falsely report of us that we have intent to fortify ourselves and afterwards to fight against others and take away their goods from them, which is a thing we abhor" (281). Theft and violence characterize the elder brothers, however, not the diggers: "Community will force nothing from anyone, but only take what is given in love" (383). He encourages his enemies: "Cherish the diggers, for they love you and would not have your finger ache if they could help it; and why be so bitter against them?" (333).

Of course, Winstanley knows the elder brothers are "so furious against us" because "we endeavor to dig up their tithes, lawyers, fees, prisons, and all that art and trade of darkness whereby they get money under color of law" (335). When he says, "All we desire is to live quietly in the land of our nativity by our righteous labor, upon common land that is our own," he knows full well that he hopes thereby to uproot their government and property. The rulers are right to see the diggers as making more than an innocent claim to a small piece of land: "Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he hath enemies" (316). But Winstanley insists that he is committing no transgression, intending no harm, and even engaging in an "act of love." How does he feel justified in this assertion?

The Politics of Love

Winstanley can maintain that digging is an act of love in the paternal sense of seeking what is best:

Alas, you poor blind earth moles, you strive to take away my livelihood and the liberty of this poor weak frame, my body of flesh, which is my house I dwell in for a time; but I strive to cast down your kingdom of Darkness, and to open Hell gates and to break asunder the Devils bands wherewith you are tied, that you, my enemies, may live in peace. And that is all the harm I would have you to have. (333)

Until the elder brothers undergo the shift in perspective he calls "Christ rising," however, the diggers will be seen as, and in fact be, a threat to those who gain nourishment through the labor of others.

Despite disagreements about what is best, however, elder brothers can see the truth of his loving intentions by how he acts. Thus, his refusal to take their property by force demonstrates that he intends not to jeopardize their rightful interest in nourishment. By letting each person "stand and fall to his own master" (283), and by insisting on rational speech and rejecting coercion, Winstanley accords respect or love to each person as a peer. Thus, he keeps appealing to the rulers, "Let our cause have a public trial," in which the merits of his proposals can be debated, subject to "the Judgement of all rational and righteous men" (407).

Speaking to Mr. Drake, "a Parliament man" and "therefore a man counted able to speak rationally," Winstanley argues: "We know if your laws be built on reason and equity, you ought both to have heard us speak and read our answer, for that is no righteous law whereby to keep a commonwealth in peace, when one sort shall be suffered to speak but not another" (321). Speech and deliberation are essentially human; the question of what is best ought to be settled by rational debate between people treated as equals:

Let your ministers plead with us the Scriptures, and let your lawyers plead with us in the equity and reason of your own law. And if you prove us transgressors, then we shall lay down our work and acknowledge that we have trespassed against you, and then punish us. But if we prove by Scripture and Reason that undeniably the land belongs to one as well as another, then you shall own our work, justify our cause, and declare that you have done wrong to Christ. (338)

That he is willing to honor the conclusions of rational discourse demonstrates to the elder brothers how "to carry yourselves like man to man," that is, to honor the Christian message they profess. Thus, he asserts:

You will see in time … that our actions and conversation is the very life of scripture and holds forth the true power of God and Christ. For is not the end of all preaching, praying, and profession wrapped up in this action, namely, Love your Enemies and do to all men as you would they should do to you? (365)

The Golden Rule, which entails loving one's enemies, is "the substantial truth brought forth into action" by the diggers. Winstanley loves his enemies not only because of the truth to which he bears witness but also because of the way he testifies to it. In affirmative terms, diggers must "speak like men" because that is how they deserve to be treated; in negative terms, diggers cannot resort to violence if the elder brothers refuse to talk or listen. Accordingly, he says that when elder brothers physically abuse them, "we must not fight but suffer" (275) in order to maintain the integrity of their position and honor the Golden Rule:

Our spirit waits in quiet and peace upon our Father for deliverance; and if he give our blood into thy hand for thee to spill, know this, that He is our Almighty Captain…. Our blood and life shall not be unwilling to be delivered up in meekness to maintain universal liberty, that so the curse on our part may be taken off creation. (256)

Such is the logic of his reverence, whose consequences he has reckoned carefully: "We shall not be startled, neither at prison nor Death, while we are about this work [because] we have been made to sit down and count what it may cost us in undertaking such a work, and we know the full sum, and are resolved to give all that we have to buy this pearl which we see in the field" (263). Winstanley's nonviolence is not blind adherence to principle but a conscious choice about the best way to undertake reform.

What, then, does Winstanley mean by saying that diggers use "the sword of Christ," a "sword of love, patience and truth" (471)? In part, the image suggests how the diggers should surmount in themselves the covetousness they would overcome in others. As he says, those who wield the sword of Christ live by a love found within. If violence is a weakness, then love is a power that strengthens a person internally, enabling him or her to overcome resentment and vengefulness. By bearing witness to the power of this love, one is reminded of its presence in others. The sword of Christ is also the patience to accept that the struggle against the flesh is a painful process, a fight in which the enemy is one's own weakness and pride. By extension, Christ's sword is the patience to accept the pace of love's struggle with this enemy in others. Finally, Christ's sword is the truth that humans are responsible for what

rules, and rules in, them. This truth binds diggers to acknowledge the same individual responsibility in others.

In these ways, Christ's sword "kills covetousness" in the diggers by teaching them the mutuality they must exemplify to others. Diggers must overcome their own impulses toward self-righteousness and "rash anger," their own inclination to deny the humanity of their enemies, and their own desire to strike back violently. Only then will the diggers' action toward (the flesh in) others embody the love that heals, the patience that succors, and the truths that empower and bind. By wielding the sword of Christ, diggers will transform themselves and thereby affirm the elder brothers' power and responsibility to struggle against evil.

As this analysis suggests, Winstanley believes his love can help engender love in others; he believes that nonviolent action will transform those who witness it as well as those who engage in it. He notes the change in those who once were enemies:

Many of the country people that were offended at first now begin to be moderate and see righteousness in our work, and to own it, excepting one or two covetous freeholders that would have all the commons to themselves…. And we expect that these angry neighbors, whom we never wronged, will in time see their furious rashness to be their folly, and become moderate and speak and carry themselves like men, rationally, and leave off pushing with their horns like beasts. (282)

But on what grounds can Winstanley "hope in time that love and patience will conquer our furious enemies"? (335). In his account of covetousness, people avoid knowledge of the flesh that rules them by attributing their own violent impulses to their enemies. To Winstanley, however, the Dragon and the Lamb not only "make single men strive in opposition one against another," but also "these two powers strive in the heart of every single man," in the form of the "spirit of love" and the "power of envy, pride, and unrighteousness" (281). Accordingly, diggers "put our bodies in thy hand" in order to force the elder brothers to confront the inner conflict they externalize.

As yielding, beaten bodies, diggers will strip freeholders' violence of its ideological cover, exposing the rage that keeps them from acknowledging their Christian professions: "If you say [that God] bids you to love your enemies, then I demand of you, why do you … stir up the people to beat, to imprison, to put to death?" (291). Then, elder brothers can face the truth of Winstanley's declaration about them: "You lie under the power of death and bondage and know not, or at least doth not actually hold forth that you know that spirit which in words you

seem to profess. You speak and preach the life of love, but you have not the power of it" (445).

Facing their own rage inwardly, on the appropriate battlefield, elder brothers can make the "experimental discovery" of "the Dragon appearing in the flesh." Thus, digger nonviolence, like their speech, is intended to "lance" the self-righteous armor of the flesh, "leaving you naked and bare, and making you ashamed." But the "wound" diggers inflict is meant to cure: diggers demonstrate a "power contrary," "that powerful spirit of love," which elder brothers also will discover striving within them.

As the metaphor of the sword suggests, Winstanley tries to fight evil and affirm a power contrary by living as a soldier, not literally, but figuratively. Only by fighting symbolically, he believes, can one exemplify the self-respect and equality in the name of which one acts and thereby change one's adversaries without betraying one's principles. Thus, Winstanley develops a practice of nonviolence for reasons not unlike those of religious activists in the early civil rights movement in the United States. Like Winstanley, Martin Luther King believed that non-violent resistance confronted the nation not only with its evil and the reality of the poor, but also with the right way to own its democratic and Christian professions. Accordingly, each believed that shaming adversaries is an act of love that helps restore them to the love within and to their brethren in the body of mankind. As Winstanley puts it, "I look upon you as part of the creation that must be restored" (391). Indeed, "covetous, hardhearted, self-seeking children … openly seekest [love's] destruction," but those testifying to Christ "bear all things patiently" because "love secretly seekest thy preservation" (297).

The nonviolent protests of god's beloved sons and daughters arises from a violation of dignity and mutuality, which must be honored by rebels if they are to maintain their integrity and demonstrate a power contrary. It is because of a common commitment to such a politics of limits that one also can compare Winstanley to Camus: both articulate a kind of action that does not involve self-betrayal, and both define such action in terms of the capacity to "speak and carry ourselves like men, rationally," as Winstanley puts it. For both theorists, the rebel demonstrates truth without imposing it—a truth that acknowledges the love and reason in each person and requires genuine consent. Accordingly, Winstanley and Camus reject monologue (tyranny), babble (ideology), and silence (violence) as inappropriate to the estate of humans.

To be sure, the parallel with Camus can go only so far. Camus points

up what is problematic in the nonviolence devised by religious thinkers. In the absence of god, Camus argues, moral limits can be discovered only by way of the transgression and guilt that reveal them. Moreover, in the absence of moral certainty, a rebel always risks transgression. Finally, violence is unjustifiable, but it may be unavoidable. Since evil is the inescapable shadow of morality, the rebel must renounce the idea of purity and recognize the impossibility of salvation. Thus, Camus's rebel does not radically dissociate Cain and Abel or moralize politics in terms of innocence and salvation.

In contrast, Winstanley begins with reverence for god-given limits and therefore becomes a rebel who believes he can avoid transgression altogether. Because of his faith in a god whose purposes he embodies, he believes that limits can be learned without crime, which jeopardizes innocence. Indeed, his faith in god precludes the tragic recognition that is the basis of Camus's argument about rebellion: Winstanley radically dissociates Abel's reverence for god-given limits and Cain's transgression. Elder brothers may learn about the god within and mutual recognition by confronting their own transgression, but diggers insist that innocence is the basis of their own rebellion. Correspondingly, Winstanley sees that digging has made his enemies angry but does not admit that he himself is justifiably angry and because of that anger turns the world upside down. It is the claim of innocence, and the disclaimer of anger, whose causes and political consequences need to be examined.^[6]

[6] Camus must find a principle of limits without relying on a theological perspective; but like Winstanley, he insists that people must renounce the desire to play god, which he interprets as a prideful denial of the limits of the human estate. For both, those who rebel against injustice are justified only if they act in terms of what is common to all humans. As Camus says, "The freedom the rebel claims, he claims for all; the freedom he refuses, he refuses to all. He is not only slave against master, but man against the world of master and slave" (The Rebel [New York: Random House 1956], p. 284). Thus, Camus's rebel speaks in the name of a natural community: "It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men—even the man who insults and oppresses him—have a natural community" (16). In a similar way, Winstanley uses the reason and love within each (but not belonging to anyone) and the natural community grounded in the earth (which belongs to all and includes even the oppressor) to define legitimate action and criticize prideful politics.

Both theorists want to avoid the human effort to father themselves and deny limitation. But Camus, without a god, insists that men must give up ideology and revolution, for he fears that these lead rebels to play god and commit murder in the name of bringing salvation in historical time. In contrast, Winstanley's theodicy, which reveals the possibility of salvation but also the legitimate way to seek it, frees him to engage in a far more systematic radicalism. But Winstanley is far less profound in his understanding of the moral dilemma in politics. He does not suffer on the cross Camus erects between transgression and moral limits; therefore, he is immoral in Camus's terms, since he insists on his innocence .

Violence, Anger, and Transgression

Let us grant that Winstanley has principled moral and political reasons to criticize the armed prophet and reject violence; that he is prudent in his refusal to "harm" a vastly superior and armed force, and that he is trying to change his adversaries by exemplifying a power contrary; even that he is motivated by love to the extent that he does act with a respect his enemies merely profess. But his identification with the cows and his claim to be the loving and innocent victim of others' violent transgressions do not simply exemplify a power contrary. For although the diggers themselves renounce violence, they also endorse the conquest—even violent conquest—of the king. And although Winstanley declares himself to be purely loving, he also demonstrates the right use of the anger he disclaims.

In The New Law of Righteousness Winstanley insisted that the poor should remain wholly innocent of involvement in the victories of succeeding Cains. In June 1649, however, Winstanley argues that the army and Parliament are accountable to the poor because they were chosen as "servants" of the "whole body of the English people" for "an appointed time" and "a particular work" (276). If a dragon has become the servant of the poor, they are in turn responsible for the action of what is now their agent. So the poor are to inherit the earth by virtue of their involvement, not withdrawal. No longer beneficiaries of the conflict between dragons because they are innocent bystanders, the poor now are beneficiaries because they authorize a victorious dragon they contend is their servant. The poor have become conquerors, entitled to a share in the "spoils of victory." Yet Winstanley still defines these spoils as the fruit of sin. By making the Dragon their agent, haven't the poor become Cains? Or is violence no longer sinful if it makes freedom possible?

To gain title to the earth, Winstanley here claims responsibility for the victory over Charles. But conquest involves the sacrifice of innocents (including the king, "whose blood was not our burden") and reflects the prideful presumption that one is entitled to take another's life. By claiming the fruits of conquest, he has become complicit in the blood crimes he continues to condemn. He still insists on the purity of his motives and ultimate intentions, but he has violated or contradicted both his claim to love and the nonviolence required by the Golden Rule. Thus, his argument about conquest is likely to feel like the justification of a crime, a deed about which he must have ambivalent feelings. How, then, does he reconcile his claim to conquest and title and his feelings and arguments about pride and violence?

Winstanley does not explicitly address this contradiction in himself and the poor, but his own guilt appears indirectly in his reiterated desire to make the conquest legitimate, which would atone, one surmises, for his own sense of transgression. His feelings are reflected through his argument to and about the elder brothers: they can justify the transgression of violence by creating a community that excludes none and recognizes all. Implicitly, then, his own atonement depends on their action. If Parliament does not restore the earth to the "whole body of the people," Winstanley is left feeling responsible for blood crimes it prevents him from redeeming. Thus, he admits his own problem with transgression implicitly, but not explicitly, in the urgency of his efforts to ensure that Parliament truly acts as the servant of the poor.

In each pamphlet as a digger he argues that Parliament will not be a Cain if it honors the "fundamental law" that justified taking up arms: it should share the land with all who participated in the conquest, and it should renounce violence within the nation. Now that the king is cast out, Winstanley believes that he must teach Parliament and the army how to be servants of the Lamb (and faithful to the word of god, which is love) as well as servants of the poor (and faithful to the covenant of men, which is liberty).

While still insisting that violence is never justified because it violates any righteous end, Winstanley now argues that it can be justified, but only if it leads to that end. He still insists that people have no right to kill because they lack the power to create life; that is, a death cannot be redeemed by any other compensating act. But he also implies that humans do have the power of redemption—or at least a legitimate way to atone. Winstanley still maintains that crimes of slavery and violence can be cleansed only by a Lamb whose spirit is pure. But now he also says that transgressions committed to uproot slavery can be expiated if those who are complicit begin to honor the spirit of the Lamb. The poor still represent that spirit, but now they are conquerors who must purify their own sins.

One might expect that Winstanley's idea of personal legitimacy would have changed, as well, so that he no longer feels bound to notions of purity and innocence and no longer defines righteousness in terms of meekness. But he continues to make such assertions, along with pious and unequivocal rejections of violence. Thus, one sees him splitting, his claims as a conqueror and his assertions of meekness alternating within a single paragraph even as the contradiction goes unacknowledged. He could reconcile the contradiction explicitly, through the idea of a reborn

commonwealth that would provide both the limit and warrant of violence and the means to atone for it. But he never addresses directly his contradictory statements about violence and love, nor does he analyze his own complicity in the relationship between transgression and atonement; therefore, he does not work through his conflicting notions of what constitutes legitimate action.

It is in his argument that the diggers are wholly loving, however, that one finds his other attempt to resolve the dilemma of violence and guilt. As building a reborn commonwealth is one way to expiate violent crimes, so digger nonviolence is another. The transgression entailed by asserting that the poor are conquerors is both denied and admitted in Winstanley's portrayal of diggers as wholly loving. Although he argues explicitly that their innocence and love are proved by their nonviolence, it implicitly atones for their complicity in violence. Principles aside, Winstanley's nonviolence works out the anger and guilt he denies.

As a result, however, a further splitting and another form of self-denial emerge: in his effort to atone, Winstanley portrays diggers as wholly loving, identifies them with the innocent and beaten cows, and thereby dissimulates the very anger that makes digging—and nonviolence—possible. Diggers, in fact, are soldiers of Christ only because they use their indignation and rage rightly. Indeed, the point of digging is to turn fearful and ashamed "dogs," as he calls tenants who obediently follow the landlords' orders, into a certain kind of fighter (367–68). Rather than turn against themselves in obsequious self-hatred or ascetic self-punishment, diggers give their anger a principled form and thus become masters of themselves.

How they master their anger can be seen in the following passage, in which Winstanley may well be speaking of himself:

Reason is that living power of light that is in all things…. It lies in the bottom of love, of justice, of wisdom; for if the Spirit Reason did not uphold and moderate these, they would be madness, nay, they could not be called by their names; for Reason guides them in order and leads them to their right end, which is not to preserve a part, but the whole creation. [Reason] makes justice to be justice, or love to be love: for without this moderator and ruler, they would be madness, the self-willedness of the flesh, and not that which we call them. (104–5)

The desire for love and justice, which entails anger at their denial, is guided by reason to preserve the whole rather than released as murderous "self-willedness of the flesh." But it is this anger, which enables

diggers to "fight like men, not beasts," that Winstanley feels compelled to deny.

Erik Erikson's reflections about Gandhi apply to Winstanley: "I seemed to sense the presence of a kind of untruth in the very protestation of truth; of something unclean when all the words spelled out an unreal purity; above all, of violence where non-violence was the professed issue." Erikson's point is that those who work for peace, for a politics that does not uphold the curse of violence, must be aware of their ambivalence, of the potential love in hate and the presence of hate in love. Winstanley displays what he sees in others: a pretension of love masking rage—although he does not act murderously. Erikson goes on to say of himself: "My job is not to pierce the pretense, but to ask why it is necessary at all."^[7]

Following Nietzsche, one could say that Winstanley is a Christian who embraces nonviolence because he is incapable of acting otherwise: he turns his impotence into a moral virtue while fantasizing the punishment of the powerful. I cannot disprove this interpretation, but my feeling is that Winstanley is not rationalizing impotence. If he were really weak, he could not fight servitude, overcome his fear of social ostracism, and put his body on the line by taking over the commons land. If there is a weakness in Winstanley, it is his unwillingness or inability to face his own anger, which he nonetheless puts to good use. It is his self-denial that has a bad smell—the smell of the dunghill, because according to his own analysis, the will to purity is a sure sign of anger directed against something in the self that is considered unclean.

The culture of the elder brothers defines godliness as being "moderate" and "reasonable." In the Putney debates all the disputants agreed that moderate behavior was a sign of godliness, of one's willingness to consider another's point of view and thus to seek the public good. But this norm of civility can be oppressive because those who are dispossessed are likely to be unhappy, angry, and immoderate. If their anger is expressed outright, it is taken as a symptom of wildness, irrationality, or selfishness and is used to justify their continued oppression. In the effort to appear moderate, therefore, the powerless may dissimulate, or turn against themselves the anger it is not legitimate to express openly. Some of this may be going on in Winstanley, whose desire to be legitimate takes the form of claiming to be the real Isaac, who fulfills the elder brothers' professed values. By this angry inversion, he tries to satisfy

[7] Erik Erikson, Gandhi's Truth (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 231, 239.

norms that, given his circumstances and interests, create a difficult contradiction between how he actually feels and how he feels obliged to behave.

In Winstanley this contradiction takes a particularly intense form because of his diagnosis of the angry and immoderate behavior of the elder brothers. They believe that the "zealous" service of God and country is a legitimate way to use their anger. Winstanley argues, however, that their conscious anger derives from the unconscious rage that he, like them, associates with the back part and with pride. Thus, he believes that their acknowledged anger at their enemies disguises a deeper and unacknowledged anger in themselves. Ruled by this shameful anger, they are "the devils within" who lack "the inward power" to live up to their professions to saintliness (378).

Because the elder brothers feel entitled by their god to be angry, Winstanley calls their god covetousness. He insists that god alone has the right to be angry, whereas the good son is obliged to relinquish the pride of "judgment and vengeance." By submitting to god's will, he would radically distinguish himself from Cain and justify his own assertion that no unconscious pride rules him. Thus, he "commits our cause to thee, O King of Righteousness, to judge between us and them that strive against us" (396) because this decision is not in his personal power as a body nor in his authority as a creature. Since final judgments are not for him, or any mortal, to make, he feels free to focus on his own limited "work," which is to testify to the spirit of love.

But it also can be said that Winstanley feels loving because he has surrendered vengeance to a god he believes will vindicate him:

This power of love is the King of Righteousness … the restoring power that is now rising up to change all things into his own nature…. He will be your judge, for vengeance is his. And for any wrong you have done me, as I can tell you of many, yet I have given all matters of judgment and vengeance into his hand, and I am sure he will do right and discover him that is the true trespasser that takes away my rights from me. (332)

Because Winstanley believes that god will do the dirty work of purging and restoring covetous creatures, he is not ruled by his desire to punish; by surrendering it to a god whose righteousness and power he can trust, he does overcome vengefulness in his own action.

Yet the very fact that Winstanley "gives" vengeance to god suggests that he is not totally like the harmless cows, nor totally unlike those angry others who persecute them. Moreover, by splitting off his anger,

he preserves his sense of innocence and legitimacy; but he cannot make an argument that anger is legitimate, or that it can be given a legitimate form. As a result, Winstanley is driven into an emotional corner by his angry feelings about harassment, the failure of the revolution, and the sacrifices he is prevented from redeeming.

Vengeance and Self-Sacrifice

Since Winstanley and his colony are subject to harassment, while the blood crimes of the conquest go unredeemed, he begins a dialogue with god:

Ever since I did obey thy voice, to speak and act this truth [that the earth should become a common treasury], I am hated, reproached, and oppressed on every side. And so I see, Father, that England yet does choose to fight with the sword of iron and covetousness, rather than by the sword of the spirit, which is love. And what thy purpose is with this land, or with my body, I know not; but establish thy power in me, and then do what pleases thee. (328–29)

He asks god, Is it thy will that the diggers and cows be punished? This question raises another: which of thy purposes do I really embody? Winstanley must reconsider whether in fact he is honoring god's will. His introspection leads him in two contrasting directions, each of which works out the anger he cannot own directly.

If it is god's will that he should be hated, he must stay humble to reaffirm that he is the reverent son who above all else loves his father: "I'll stand and see what he will do with me, for as yet I know not…. And so I said, Father do what thou wilt, this cause is thine, and thou knowest that the love to righteousness makes me do what I do" (328). Humbling himself to what appears to be god's will, he renews his faith that god loves him:

These and such like sweet thoughts dwelt upon my heart as I went along, and I felt myself like a man in a storm, standing under shelter upon a hill in peace, waiting til the storm be over to see the end of it, and of many other things that my eye is fixed upon. (329)

Imagining himself sheltered by god's love for him, however, he also can dream of god's vengeance on those who harass him:

And you all must and shall be torn to pieces and scattered and shamed for your excessive pride, covetousness, hardness of heart, self-love, and hypocrisy. And your verbal professions shall be loathed by all and be cast out, as

stinking imaginary dung of false-hearted ones, who profess love in words and in actions deny love. (447)

If Winstanley admitted he were angry at god as well as at other creatures, he would not feel legitimate. Since the only legitimate anger is god's, who has the right to judge and punish, Winstanley's own anger appears in fantasies of divine retribution, while he continues to declare that he loves purely.

For instance, as Moses, the mouthpiece of god, Winstanley feels entitled to announce god's wrath:

In the name of the Lord that hath drawn me forth to speak to thee … I command thee, to let Israel go free…. If thou wilt not … then know that whereas I brought ten plagues upon [Pharaoh], I will multiply my plagues upon thee, til I make thee wary and miserably ashamed. (265)

As if struck by the violence of his words, however, he adds, "This conquest over thee shall be got, not by sword or weapon, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts" (265). The anger he surrenders to god often overwhelms even the idiom of Christ:

O ye rulers of the earth, kiss the son … least his anger fall upon you…. He shook heaven and earth when Moses law was cast out, but he will shake heaven and earth even now much more, and nothing shall stand but what is lovely; be wise, scorn not the counsel of the poor, least you be whipped by your own rod. (390)

Especially after the episode with the cows, Winstanley's declarations of his own meekness are colored by his anger:

Though you should kill my body or starve me in prison, yet know, the more you strive, the more troubles your hearts shall be filled with, and do the worst you can to hinder public freedom, you shall come off losers in the end. (332)

But he immediately adds: "I mean, you shall lose your kingdom of darkness, though I lose my livelihood, the poor cows" (333).

Thus, his growing rage increasingly effaces the boundary between angry god and loving son: if the elder brothers do not "put into sincere action" their "promises, oaths, and engagements," says Winstanley, "the lamb will show himself to be a lion and tear you to pieces for your most abominable dissembling hypocrisy, and give your land to a people who better deserve it" (386).^[8]

[8] There is evidence for a Nietzschean argument about the resentment of the weak in Winstanley's repeated references to the pity he feels for the elder brothers, specifically for the suffering that god will inflict on them or that their own covetousness will cause them. He pities not only their defeated "striving as it were for life" but also the torment they will suffer:

There is a time appointed of the righteous judge, that all flesh shall see itself in its own colors, and when the flesh doth see itself in its own beastly shape, he will appear so deformed, so piteous a confused chaos of misery and shame, that the sight thereof shall be a great torment to himself. (223)

Their impending suffering enables him to say, "I pity you for the torment your spirit must go through" (391). He pities the elder brothers for the suffering he anticipates they will undergo, and indeed, wills on them. Psychologically, Winstanley's belief that god will punish (and restore) allows him to indulge feelings of pity while displacing his angry feelings onto god, who does the punishing. Thus, his analysis of the elder brothers suggests Nietzsche's arguments about resentment and weakness, but so do his own declarations of pity.

As he collapses the distinction that assures his legitimacy, Winstanley reveals the anger about which he is ambivalent. That ambivalence is indicated in his other response to the suffering of the diggers, cows, and himself: his indignation and his fantasies of vengeance are paralleled by a growing guilt. It is noteworthy that in his description the cows suffer because he is on the commons; they are sacrificed because they gave him milk or nurtured his action. It is likely that the treatment of the cows also symbolizes his sense that the diggers, too, are punished for the visions he had; the cows' suffering symbolizes the price others pay for his actions, which he desperately insists are not transgressions dictated by his pride but acts of love enjoined by god's will.

In part, his words suggest that whereas the cows are really innocent, he is not, and therefore it is he, not they, who deserves to suffer. It is as if Isaac, having witnessed the truly innocent suffering of the ram sacrificed in his stead, had insisted that he too must suffer to atone for that sacrifice. In part, however, Winstanley maintains that it is love for god that led him to the commons and caused others' suffering; god is the author of his actions. But he cannot angrily blame god, and instead he feels responsible as the willing instrument of god, even if it was god's will that he carried out.

Accordingly, whereas Job indignantly contends with god and proclaims his unwillingness to suffer, Winstanley insists on his "worthiness" to suffer (393). Job truly feels innocent and righteous, but Winstanley feels called to suffer, as if he does not feel innocent or feels obliged to prove his innocence (which otherwise is in jeopardy). His unexpiated guilt and his unacceptable anger drive him into the paradoxical position of embracing the suffering about which he is indignant. Indeed, perhaps

he feels "worthy" to suffer because he does hate the elder brothers as well as the god whose will apparently requires suffering.

He had hoped that his love could redeem the transgression of others; then he had hoped that his love could redeem his own transgressions; but now his attempt at redemption generates more anger and entails more suffering. The example of the crucified Christ, which he had hoped to avoid, returns as an answer to his need for atonement. Enraged at the persecution of Christ in and as the poor, Winstanley feels obliged to identify with the crucified Christ and offers himself for sacrifice.^[9]

Winstanley resists the notion that dirty human hands have a right to shape the world. As the instrument of god, he would "turn the world upside down" without committing transgression. As his year as a digger unfolds, he struggles with that desire for purity, especially as he discovers that his idea of goodness causes others to suffer and fails to build a better world. Though he is pulled toward an overt acknowledgment of legitimate violence, he never openly accepts his anger or complicity in transgression. At the same time, however, he offers a powerful example of what it means to sublimate anger, to give it a principled and political form, and therefore to shape the world in a more loving way. His politics arise, then, from the admirable desire not to make the world worse in the struggle to make it just, but also from the questionable need to remain pure.

[9] In a very insightful essay about psychology and politics, Susan Griffin argues:

There are two kinds of anger. The first is accurate and appropriate; it is known . But the second is not accurately placed. It is displaced and therefore unknown . The first anger … liberates one, both in mind and body. But the second anger … imprisons. It becomes obsessive; it turns into bitterness; it leads to self-defeat; it turns us against ourselves. Because this second anger hides another and deeper anger, the true anger, of which one is ashamed. Therefore … [one] who does not explore her own emotions is in danger of turning against herself.

What Griffin says about the "deeper" anger applies to Winstanley, for it seems likely that he lives, as she suggests, "with the constant and inarticulate feeling that one's inner self is evil, wrong, or even repulsive. And moreover, since one is hiding, one is actually lying, and this lie compounds one's feelings of wrongness. It is thus inevitable that displaced anger will lead to self-hatred and even to a desire for self-punishment" (Susan Griffin, "The Way of All Ideology," Signs 7, no. 3 [Spring 1982]: 641–60).

Chapter VII
Sexual Politics and the Beast Within

Those moralists who command man first of all and above all to gain control of himself thus afflict him with a peculiar disease…. Whatever may henceforth push, pull, attract, or impel … from inside or outside, it will always seem to him as if his self-control were endangered…. He stands … the eternal guardian of his castle, since he has turned himself into a castle. Of course, he can achieve greatness this way. But he has certainly become insufferable for others, difficult for himself, and impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful fortuities of his soul. Also from all further instruction . For one must be able to lose oneself occasionally if one wants to learn something from things different from oneself.
—Nietzsche

In December 1649 Parson Platt finally succeeded in persuading General Fairfax to intervene, and for the first time since June the army stood by while tenant farmers destroyed the diggers' shacks. Winstanley knows that Christ was not crucified only by Pilate: he was betrayed by Judas, one of the apostles. In the winter of 1649–50 Winstanley begins to account for the complicity of the poor in the failure of the revolution and in the harassment of the diggers; he begins to speak directly to the poor, who have been doing Platt's dirty work.

To some degree Winstanley portrays the poor as innocent victims of false promises: "If common freedom were not pretended, the commoners of the land would never dance after the pipe of self-seeking wits" (534). The poor clearly understand freedom but have been betrayed and coerced. Accordingly, he says that "the poor tenants pulled down our houses" because they feared "they should be turned out

of service or their livings." Nonetheless, Winstanley does not excuse the poor:

If any fearful and covetous tenant[s] … do beat the poor men off from planting the Commons, then they have broke the Engagement and Law of the land, and both Lords and tenants are conspiring to uphold or bring in the Kingly and Lordly Power again … and are traitors to the Commonwealth of England. (412)

The poor are not simply "poor enforced slaves"; they choose to be victims when instead they could dig.

Accordingly, Winstanley addresses their fear in order to engender different choices. To his "brethren" he says, "let not slavish fear possess the hearts of the poor" because, he insists, "the army hath purchased your freedom, … the Parliament hath declared for your freedom, and all the laws of the commonwealth are your protection" (413). He also reminds the poor that digging could bring real benefits to those with desperate needs: "Will you live in straits and die in poverty when you may live comfortably?" (408). The prevention of famine, the indignity of begging, the danger of theft, are mentioned as "encouragements, out of many, to move you to stand up for your freedom in the land by acting with plow and spade upon the commons." Indeed, he says, "nothing is wanting on your part but courage and faithfulness" (413).

Although increasingly ambivalent about the younger brothers, Winstanley's initial view of them lacks the demonic element found in his attitude toward the elder brothers. In the spring of 1650, however, Winstanley announces his discovery of a "beast" in the poor. He writes a "Vindication of the Diggers, who are slandered with the Ranting action. And my end is only to advance the kingdom of peace in and among mankind, which is and will be torn to pieces by the ranting power, if reason do not kill this five headed or sensitive Beast" (403).

Ranters play Judas to his Christ because they profess love and community and reject the Puritan ethic and property, but embrace sexual promiscuity and idleness, foment quarrels, seduce or rape digger women, father bastard offspring, and tempt young adults with their libertine ways. "Beware of this ranting practice: for it is that golden, pleasing, and deceitful bait whereby foolish young men are taken, ensnared, and wrapped up in many bondages. It is a nursery of idleness, hardness of heart, and hypocrisy, making men to speak one thing and do another, that they may enjoy their destroying delights" (ESU/14). While Winstanley criticizes the ranters, however, the elder brothers use the "ranter

practice" to slander and discredit the diggers, as if the diggers were ranters or made ranters possible.

As Winstanley's antinomian revolt of the spirit is ensnared in a revolt of the flesh, he is caught between the ranter Beast and the kingly Dragon. His cultural alternative to ranters and the Protestant ethic clarifies Winstanley's complicated relationship to his own Puritan antecedents and leads into the heart of the tensions that animate his thought and politics.

The Ranters

Who were the ranters? They included demobilized troops and defeated Levellers, unemployed vagabonds and rebellious young people, religious "seekers" and former political activists. These people had been led to an individualist, relativist hedonism, which reflected outrage at political oppression, ridicule of Puritan hypocrisy, cynicism about moral standards, and despair about worldly commitments of any sort. In defiance of Puritan injunctions about work, love, and political obedience, and in despair about political resistance, they cynically, angrily, and joyously embraced the bodily present.

Conservative Puritans, perceiving what they considered a revolt of the flesh, charged that ranters would have

no Christ within; no scripture to be a rule; no ordinances, no law, but their lusts; no heaven or glory but here; no sin but what men fancied to be so; no condemnation of sin but in the consciences of ignorant ones.^[1]

According to Christopher Hill, however, there was a positive and liberating truth in what the elder brothers condemned as blasphemy:

[The ranters'] materialistic pantheism is a denial of the dualism which separates God in heaven from sinful man on earth…. God is not a Great Taskmaster: he is member of the community of my one flesh, one matter. The world is not a vale of tears…. Ranters insisted that matter is good because we live here and now.^[2]

That all matter is good because the spirit is embodied in the flesh meant to ranters that judgment and sin were eliminated along with law and the Puritan covenant of works.

[1] Quoted in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 190.

[2] Ibid., p. 165.

When a conservative like Richard Baxter warned that they merely intended to sanction "hideous blasphemy and continuous whoredom," however, he was not without grounds. Ranter Laurence Clarkson, for example, confirmed Baxter's fears:

There is no such act as drunkenness, adultery, and theft in God…. Sin hath its conception only in the imagination…. What act soever is done by thee in light and love is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery…. No matter what Scripture, saints, or churches say, if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.^[3]

But ranters quite consciously used the idea of Christian liberty to expose the conventionality, and thus the social purpose, of Puritan ideas of sin. Sin was a way to sanctify property, the patriarchal family, and the state: it is not by chance that Clarkson specified theft and adultery, which presume that the earth and women are property. Ranters also tried to release people from the personal torment and inner division engendered by ideas of sin, which stigmatized sexuality and repressed each person's sense of inner justification.

Freedom from Puritan moral restraints was expressed by ranters in several ways. They declared their freedom by swearing: Abiezzer Coppe said he had suppressed himself for twenty-seven years and then simply let go . Hill remarks about Coppe:

Great tensions must lie behind attitudes to swearing, whether in his indulgence after 1646 or in his earlier repression…. Swearing was an act of defiance, both of God and of middle class standards…. Bibliolatry led to a [Puritan] phobia about swearing; rejection of the Bible made it possible again, and with it, a release of the repression which gave the Puritan middle class their moral energy.^[4]

For ranters, release from repression also meant the freedom to embrace sexuality without shame or guilt. And letting go of guilt meant that ranters did not feel compelled to justify themselves through diligent labor in a calling. In fact, they reveled in idleness, the Puritan nightmare. In the name of love and spirit, ranters attacked the Puritan ethic of chastity and repression, compulsive labor and anxious self-control. Hill says:

The Ranter emphasis on love is perhaps mainly a negative reaction to nascent capitalism, a cry for human brotherhood, freedom, and unity against

[3] Ibid., p. 172.

[4] Ibid., p. 160.

the divisive forces of a harsh ethic enforced by the harsh discipline of the market…. Much of Ranterism was less a new ethic than an extension downward of the attitudes of the traditional leisure classes—dislike of labor, sexual promiscuity, swearing, an emphasis on works rather than faith. All these linked the upper and lower classes in opposition to the intermediate proponents of the Protestant Ethic.^[5]

Overthrowing the internal tyranny of the Puritan superego meant that anger, no longer directed against the self, was directed at external enemies: swearing, promiscuity, and idleness were loaded with angry defiance and self-consciously political intent. Coppe declared that "honor, nobility, gentility, property, superfluity" had been the "father of hellish, horrid pride, … yea, the cause of all the blood that hath ever been shed, from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of the last Levellers that were shot to death." Their blood cried out for vengeance: "Now the necks of horrid pride" must be "chopped off at one blow" so that "parity, equality, community" might establish "universal love, universal peace, and perfect freedom."^[6]

But ranters disavowed discipline and therefore the vocation of conscientious political labor. Although politically aware, they were disillusioned about the possibility of organized political activity and hostile to the strictures it entailed. Ranters were not soldiers, even of Christ, but Dionysians. They undermined family, property, and the state not through organized politics but by subverting their basis in personal repression. The ranters acted as cultural guerrillas, stirring up what the Puritan fathers repressed.

In Hill's wonderful and sympathetic account, surely shaped by the "counterculture" of the 1960s, ranters carried political revolt onto the terrain of culture. Hill emphasizes the similarities between ranters and Winstanley, for each located spirit in the body and the body in nature, trying to overcome possessiveness and social division. Each developed an analysis of Puritan superego and law, linking psychological repression to the rule of a class and its moral standards. Each made an antinomian attack on judgments and laws as fleshly inventions and defended instead a new community knit together by the power of love.

Ranters, however, intentionally disrupted the digger colony and apparently considered Winstanley a prig, a charlatan, and a hypocrite. In turn, Winstanley condemned them as a "beast" that "tempted" and

[5] Ibid., p. 274.

[6] Ibid., pp. 168–69.

then "devoured" the poor. He was sensitive to what Hill minimizes in the ranters: not only did they displace politics into cultural revolt, but their effort to subvert Puritan values and institutions also seemed to undermine the possibility of enduring commitments to work and worldly accomplishment, conjugal love, and an organized moral life. They seemed to deny that such commitments could be gratifying . For these reasons, Winstanley declared the ranters to be yet another "false savior," while ranters seemed to challenge precisely the piety and rage they brought out in Winstanley. To understand their differences, one needs to consider Winstanley's initial and basic attitude toward sex, which reveals so much else about him and became the most charged issue between them.

Sex and Morality

When Winstanley wrote The New Law of Righteousness, he imagined that the elder brothers would accuse him of favoring theft, tumult, idleness, and "excessive community with women." As a moderate and loving Isaac, however, Winstanley dismissed such accusations as the projection of a covetous imagination. But he also insisted that the community of earth and spirit would abolish such behavior by "killing" covetousness:

This universal power of a righteous law shall be so plainly writ in every ones heart that none shall desire to have more than another, or to be Lord over another, or to lay claim to anything as his; this phrase of Mine and Thine shall be swallowed up in the law of righteous actions one to another, for they shall all live as brethren, every one doing as he would be done by. (183)

When the righteous law rules within, he imagined, there will be an abundance of what is essential to life, and "pride and envy likewise [will be] killed," so that no one will scramble for precedence or for more than is necessary for survival:

All shall cheerfully put to their hands to make these things that are needful, one helping another; there shall be none Lord over others, but everyone shall be a lord of him self, subject to the law of righteousness, reason and equity, which shall dwell and rule in him, which is the Lord. (184)

Winstanley's presumption was that the power of love and reason would create a harmony between desire and imagination so that people would not want more than what is righteous or appropriate to their nature and necessity as creatures.

Accordingly, to those who feared that abolishing "mine and thine" means endorsing or allowing "the community of women," that is, means the destruction of the family, Winstanley replied:

For when man was made, he was made male and female, one man and one woman conjoined together by the law of love…. Reason did not make one man and many women, or one woman and many men to join together, to make the Creation perfect, but male and female in the singular number; this is enough to increase seed. And he or she that requires more wives or more husbands than one, walks contrary to the Law of Righteousness, and shall bear their shame. (185)

As with theft, so with promiscuity and adultery: the desire for superfluous goods or numerous sexual partners expresses an inappropriate reliance on "objects without" and reflects an inner hunger that nothing human or perishable can satisfy. As with labor, so with sexuality: Winstanley's notion of righteousness was meant to define the legitimate way to exerise a necessary human capacity so that people meet their needs in a way that makes them free. The necessity of procreation, he seemed to be saying, requires only one mate, and sexuality is legitimate only in relation to that mate. Monogamous heterosexuality is therefore the fruit of maturity: "Though this immoderate lust after strange flesh rules in the bodies of men now, while the first Adam is King, yet it shall not be so when the second man rises to reign, for then chastity is one glory of the Kingdom" (185).

Sexuality was included in the profound sense of limits animating Winstanley's notion of legitimacy. Legitimate sex was limited to marriage, and perhaps even to procreation, although his reference to what is "enough to increase seed" does not have to mean that sex may occur only for that reason. He confined sex to marriage partly because of his concern for "mutual preservation." To Winstanley, adultery and promiscuity qualified as exploitive behavior because neither really assures the "Preservation" of the "strange flesh," and adultery would seem to disregard the preservation of one's mate as well. At the same time, he criticized husbands and fathers who treat wives and children like servants because love requires an equality that precludes domination or exploitation (159).

As with violence, so with sex: Winstanley sought to distinguish between impulses and actions that are "beastly" and those that are "human." Although acting "like men" does not require the purification of sexuality, as he would have people purify anger, there was in practice a comparable effort to integrate powerful, natural, and one could say

instinct-laden impulses into moral relations with others. Like other activities (labor) and impulses (anger), sex involves other people and therefore has a moral quality that must be honored if it is to be legitimate. Just as he tried to transform violence into "experienced speech" between mutually recognized equals, so he intended to transform "lust after strange flesh" into a mutually enhancing sexual bond between covenanted equals. He did not value sex in its own right: he measured humanness or righteousness by how thoroughly people knit together desire and morality, or their nature and their choices, by finding "the reason" in impulses and relationships.

Thus, Winstanley was not ascetic in any simple way; but neither was his a Dionysian Christianity, like Norman O. Brown's. Winstanley did not embrace sexuality and its joys, and one imagines that his repeated language of "love" sublimated and universalized what otherwise might be expressed directly in sex. One could infer, then, that though he defended monogamy, he might have feared too intense and sexual an attachment to even one person. Indeed, Winstanley's effort to articulate a moral understanding of the life of humans as creatures may involve an unavoidable and underlying sense that sexual desire is a particularly troublesome aspect of human nature. To those who would be free within, the power of sexual desire and the power of those taken as sexual objects might be seen as threatening to the moderation and integrity of the self and to the righteous concern for the preservation of others. By defending monogamy, however, Winstanley meant to find the "reason at the bottom of love" so that it does not become "mere self-willedness of the flesh."

What he dismissed in The New Law of Righteousness as the covetous imagination of the elder brothers, however, appears in the flesh as the Beast overcoming the poor, thereby justifying the rulers' violent inclination to oppress the diggers. Ranters do represent a demonic version or parody of Winstanley's practices and principles, a return of his repressed, of the lust, rage, and selfishness he tries to purify through digging.

Winstanley's Critique of the Ranters

It is tempting to consider Winstanley's response to the ranters as a new "stage" in the course of his learning. He began with what could be called an "oral" stage, as his language of sincere milk addressed

issues of nourishment and what Erik Erikson calls "basic trust." Next, Winstanley attended to an "anal" stage, as his argument about manuring the earth addressed issues of self-control, work, and worldly accomplishment. Now, he attends to a "genital" stage, as he addresses issues of sexuality and commitment, facing the relationship between the self and the other in its most mature and difficult form.

One should not take such "stages" literally, but they do suggest the kinds of issues and arguments that Winstanley brings to bear on sexuality and the ranters. Having learned that freedom and happiness depend on trusting the Father within and reciprocating the love of the Common Mother, he now argues that freedom is realized through sexual and moral reciprocity with another person. In addition, his criticism of ranter sexuality recapitulates the imagery and arguments of his earlier texts. Oral and excremental metaphors disclose what he believes is wrong with ranters' relationships to their bodies and to others, but as before, they also suggest his own ambivalences.

When Winstanley characterizes the ranter practices that violate digger principles, he returns to his theory of the Fall:

The ranter practice … is a kingdom that lies in objects, as in outward enjoyment of meat, drink, pleasures, and women; so that the man within can have no quiet rest unless he enjoy these outward objects in excess, all of which are vanishable. Therefore it is the devil's kingdom of darkness. (399)

Because the "immoderate ranting practice of the senses" rejects the guiding and moderating power of reason, says Winstanley, the ranters indulge in "abundant eating and drinking, and actual community with variety of women … which is the life of the beast." The ranters' voracious hunger for objects in the kingdom without "is destructive to the body, house, or temple wherein reason or the spiritual power dwells; it brings disease, infirmities, weakness, and rottenness upon the body and so ruins the house about a mans ears, that he cannot live in peace." Moreover, "diseases of the body cause sorrows of mind … for when you want your delight in excessive copulation with women, and in superabundant eating and drinking, which is a wasteful spending of the treasures of the earth, then anger, rage, and variety of vexations possess the mind or man within" (399–400).

Ranters are fallen Adams, driven by inner emptiness and rage to "spend" themselves in the pursuit of a satisfaction no object can provide. In the process, they turn the world and others into objects they "waste" immoderately and selfishly. As always, Winstanley sees powerfully attractive objects seducing men, who at the same time are compelled

from within by their hunger and imagination. But ranters are different from the elder brothers, who seek to control sources of nourishment they anxiously need. In response to their methodical and ascetic accumulation of objects and their dutiful regulation of women and sexuality, ranters overthrow ascetic ideals, property, and marriage.

In turn, Winstanley argues that "letting go" of the Puritan conscience has freed ranters not only from guilt but also from self-control so that the self is overwhelmed by its desire. Rejection of orthodox forms leaves ranters wild, not regenerate. As they cast out the Puritan superego, ranters are devoured by the desire and the objects it is supposed to control. Because ranters represent the return of what the elder brothers would repress, Winstanley says that "this ranting power is the resurrection of the doggish, beastly nature … of the filthy unrighteous power in all his branches" (402).

Ranters still are covetous toward objects and people and therefore reveal the emotional core of Puritan practice: they have abolished property and marriage but do not heal inner hunger and possessiveness. Winstanley's language suggests that ranter rejection of Puritan forms exposes the childish impulses and fantasies that truly constitute the flesh. Indeed, Winstanley's proliferating images of consuming and devouring depict the ranter beast as if it were a child, a strange suggestion since children do not manifest genital sexuality. But Winstanley's oral image suggests what troubles him about the ranters' sexuality.

Imagine that the oral hunger of the ranter man, if expressed in sexual relationships, is greedy desire for a woman, as if she were an all-giving mother, a bountiful object, and not really a person with needs of her own. As a result, in his sexual conduct he will embrace sensuality but treat the woman as a maternal source of nourishment to be devoured, not nurtured. Imagine that the self-control associated with anality appears sexually in the anxious control of a woman, as if she were a dangerous temptress eliciting passions threatening to male autonomy. Sexuality under the dominion of "the back part" is a step forward in the sense that the woman is treated as a potentially moral agent, but at the price of sensuality. Her dangerous sexuality requires that both partners rigorously impose chastity and restrict sexuality to procreation. Accordingly, Puritans theorize a moral relationship between men and women, but sexuality is guilt-ridden and duty-bound, and women bear a special stigma and burden.

By overthrowing typically Puritan self-control and guilt, ranter men recover the sensuality associated with the idea of woman as nurturant. But since their desire is unrelated to her needs, she remains exclusively

an object. Neither the orthodox nor the ranters conceive of an instinctual desire genuinely gratified by sex with another person whose own desire is recognized and gratified. In contrast, Winstanley appears to be defending a sexual relationship that is both sensual and moral, dominated neither by greed and oral hunger nor by guilt and control.^[7]

For this reason, Winstanley anticipates Marx's argument that the developmental character of human desire is especially revealed in sexual relationships. In "the relation between man and woman," says Marx, one can find the "unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised" truth by which one can judge the whole level of human development:

The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man and woman…. In this relationship … is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become the human essence for man…. In this relationship is revealed too, the extent to which man's need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need— the extent to which he is in his individual existence at the same time a social being.^[8]

Both theorists argue that because it is a natural impulse that involves others, sex typifies one's relationship to one's body and to others, and thus embodies the character of culture. Accordingly, Winstanley and Marx evaluate how natural drives are tied to moral relations, and they find in sexuality a measure of how civilized, or "human," people are. Their criterion is "humanness," that is, the extent to which the act of meeting needs involves the self-conscious recognition of others as subjects in their own right. Each theorist allows that sex can be a genuinely and mutually gratifying act, in which physical pleasure is heightened by a self-conscious need for the other as a person.

Both Winstanley and Marx therefore object to the "property relation" in which wife and children lose autonomy and become the servants of the husband, as sexual desire is attenuated by fear, guilt, and possessiveness. In addition, each theorist objects to a merely "negative transcendence" of private property and marriage because desire remains exploitive or "one-sided."^[9]

[7] Winstanley's response to the ranters and the orthodox suggests a view not unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne's in "The Maypole of Marrymount."

[8] Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Reader , p. 83.

[9] About "primitive communism," Marx says:

The positive transcendence of private property—i.e. the sensuous appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life—is not to be considered merely in the sense of direct one-sided gratification, merely in the sense of possessing, having…. Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it … when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.—in short, when it is used by us. (87)

But whereas Marx's idea of mutuality appears as the result of a historical progression and arises only by passing through primitive communism, Winstanley explicitly depicts genuinely reciprocal sexuality as an ever-present possibility from which men and women "fall" into beastly covetousness:

The ranting practice is a peacebreaker; it breaks the peace in families and rents in pieces mankind. For when true love hath united a man and a woman to be husband and wife, and they live in peace, when the ranting power or king lust of flesh comes in, he separates those very friends, causing both to run into the sea of confusion, madness, and destruction, to leave each other and children, or to live in discontent with each other. (400)

The imagery of the sea suggests Winstanley's own fear of the Dionysian character of a certain kind of sexuality, and perhaps of sexuality as such. His fear, however, is related to his concern for moral reciprocity, and his warning about destruction refers not only to the self but also to women and children.

In this regard, Winstanley's language is striking:

Therefore, know all ye lascivious feeders … that ye are breeders of foul, filthy, beastly, abominable children, which come into the world to preach to the nation in which they appear what … filthy sin or lascivious feeding heat hath begot, for lascivious feeding causeth lascivious acting. (403)

Evoking the Biblical tale of Ishmael, Winstanley calls the ranters' children "filthy and abominable." He uses excremental language to reject the poisoned fruit he finds shameful. Yet the children merely "preach to the nation" about the character of the parents. He warns that "the children begotten through this forced immoderate heat of lust prove furious and full of rage" (400). His apportioning of blame among the parents, however, suggests his overt and covert concerns.

Winstanley appears to blame male partners especially, for he views women as the chief victims of a "King Lust" that arises most powerfully in men:

Mother and child are like to have the worst of it, for the men will be gone and leave them, and regard them no more than other women, like a bull that begets a calf, that never takes care neither for cow nor calf, after he hath had his pleasure. Therefore you women, beware. (401)

As before, the imagery of the cow denotes innocence victimized by beastliness, this time by lust, which for Winstanley is specifically a "false generating fire" because it is fueled by the unacknowledged desire to punish, use, and abandon. Like the children he fathers, the male is dominated by rage and hunger, which he directs at women, whom he treats as cows. Winstanley therefore warns, in verse:

Beware you women of the ranting crew
And call not freedom those things that are vain
For if a child you get by ranting deeds
The man is gone and leaves the child your gain.
Then you and yours are left by such free men
For other women are as free for them. (ESU/14)

These passages suggest that Winstanley deals with Hagars and Ishmael, and the heirs of Ishmael, in a strikingly different way from that of the Puritans, who tend to punish them and exonerate Abraham. Whereas ministers reassert paternal power by demonizing women's sexuality, Winstanley declares men the chief culprits, whose lack of self-control prevents "true union" and victimizes children.

Yet the imagery of the cow also suggests Winstanley's ambivalence about women. Many ranters were women, who presumably chose the lusty life rather than a "union," true or otherwise. Winstanley rightly points to the ways they can be victimized by sexual liberty, but he does so by casting women as cows, symbols of nurturance, victims and objects of male desire, not agents of their own desire. By symbolizing women in this way, he suggests that they are not the lustful ones, an assertion that reveals, perhaps, his own wish that they be as he depicts them, willing and respected sources of nurturance, without lust. Thus, he overtly challenges the exploitation of women but also denies their own lusty agency because his idea of reverent reciprocity depends on idealization. He still needs to see women in a certain confining—and confined—way: like god and nature, women must be safe sources of nourishment.

Nonetheless, his symbolism of women enables him to transpose his argument about ranter sexuality into one about the ranter relationship to the wealth and labor of the community at large. What "distempers" a family also disrupts "whole nations":

They that are the sons and daughters of that unrational power neither can nor will work, but live idle, … cheating others that are simple and of civil, flexible nature, so that by seeking their own freedom they inbondage others,

which is selfish but not universal love, for true love seeks the preservation of others as of oneself. (401)

A "true love" between conjugal partners corresponds to the community itself as a household in which members strive for their mutual preservation. Just as ranters seek liberty from Puritan sexual injunctions in a way that exploits women, so they seek liberty from the work ethic in a way that exploits others, or the community in general. For it is the ranter "nature" to "get what he can from others labor, to eat up others and make them poor, and then to laugh and rejoice in others poverty" (401). To "live idle on another mans labors" recapitulates the sin of the gentry and reveals again the exploitive and resentful motive at the heart of ranter liberty. Like the woman's body and being, the labor of others (the wealth of a community) is parasitically wasted and consumed. And just as the ranter Beast disrupts the spirit of mutual preservation within the family, so too it "inflames" people to "destructive" acts like "quarreling, killing, burning houses or corn" (400)."^[10]

To Winstanley, ranters combine aggrandizement rationalized as love, and weakness indulged as liberation; they resurrect and universalize the wantonness of childhood—they behave like bad children. They are unwilling or unable to form mature bonds, work for worldly accomplishment, or even feed themselves through their own labor; they refuse to act responsibly toward those they in fact need. Accordingly, they live, consume, and play in the context of utter dependency on the work and bodies of others. This dependency, which they call freedom, exposes the truth about them.

There is surely a temperamental element in Winstanley's critique. Winstanley does not shock, invert a stigma, or outrage the uptight; ranters are exuberantly excessive, theatrical, and immoderate. They are Groucho Marxists, whereas he is essentially a mild-mannered man, uncomfortable with excess, fanaticism, or display. Rather than "letting

[10] In a parallel way, Marx describes

the bestial form of counterposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property. It may be said that this idea of the community of women gives away the secret of this as yet crude and thoughtless communism. Just as the woman passes from marriage to a general prostitution, so the entire world of wealth … passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. General envy, constituting itself as a power, is the disguise in which avarice re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way, in the form of envy and the urge to reduce to a common level. (82–83)

go," he puts his energy into cooperative work and loving politics. Thus, he plays Apollo to their Dionysus, trying to hold together what they tear to pieces: his defense of the marriage bond bespeaks his commitment to the deeper marriage of head and heart, mind and senses, reason and emotion, discipline and liberty. His temperament and his commitment to empowering the poor require an alternative to both the Puritans' empire of repression and accumulation and the ranters' "primitive communism" of remission and envious resentment.

Winstanley's Response

To use a Biblical metaphor, Winstanley is in the wilderness and sees the ranters dancing around the golden calf of their desire. He understands and shares their desire not to go to a Canaan ruled by stern fathers and punitive law, but he believes they replicate the fathers' exploitation, leave intact the fathers' law, and undermine the commitments that could overthrow it. From Winstanley's point of view, ranters not only reject the fathers' exodus, so to speak, but also preclude the possibility of an exodus within and against that exodus.

Winstanley is especially concerned that many of the poor will be tempted to join in the dance. Those "most likely to be tempted and set upon and torn to pieces by this devouring beast," he warns, are "you that are merely civil and of a loving and flexible disposition, wanting in the strength of reason and the life of universal love" (403). The merely civil are not the orthodox, who are not of a loving and flexible disposition, but the young people who participated in the movement beyond and against Puritan orthodoxy. They will be tempted by the ranters not so much because of a repressed desire for sensual enjoyment as because of their inability and unwillingness to judge:

Rather than proud civility be counted ignorant, it … first stands looking and saying, I can say nothing against this ranting practice, and then afterwards yields, and then is ensnared and taken by the subtle devouring ranting Beast. But he that obeys reasons law within shall escape that snare.

Civility appears as tolerance but is fearful of being left naked by changing fashions of the inner light. The refusal to judge expresses not only fear of the opinion of others but also the desire for remission from judgment altogether, and therefore from sin and guilt, which is precisely what the ranters offer: "The ranting power would make this covenant with all men, to put out their eyes … and to see by his eyes … and then he calls them high-lighted creatures; otherwise, he tells them they

live below him" (401). Those who "yield" to the ranters are thereafter "ensnared" because they lack the autonomy that comes from commitment to the inward authority of reason.

Ranters will emerge and be found appealing because of the real difficulty of making judgments in a time when social and political upheaval unsettles and discredits moral standards, and because of the desire in such times to be released from all standards, which necessarily appear arbitrary and are likely to feel oppressive. Ranters feed on the impulse to rebel against traditional authority, which not only entails social criticism, individualism, and tolerance but also, in the context of political defeat, appears as the refusal to make judgments and commitments. The question Winstanley must address, then, is how to respond both to ranters and to those they seduce."^[11]

Winstanley rejects the approach of the elder brothers, who wield the sword to force the stiff-necked and weak-willed to obey, for a "purge" only reenacts the paternal tyranny that is the real problem:

Let none go about to suppress the ranting power by their punishing hand, for it is the work of the Righteous and Rational spirit within, not thy hand without, that must suppress it. But if thou wilt needs be punishing, then see thou be without sin thyself and then cast the first stone at the Ranter. (402)

Moreover, repression will only backfire, by intensifying the resentment of the poor: "to suppress sinners by force," he warns, "wilt thereby but increase their rage and thy own trouble." Therefore, "let everyone alone, to stand and fall to their own master."

[11] When moral standards are seen to be conventional, and felt to be oppressive, but changing the world seems impossible, those who once agitated for social change are likely to express in cultural terms their political defiance and their despair. Powerlessness and rebellion can appear as loving life in the present, but it is a life narrowed to an absorption in the sensations of the body. As the 1960s demonstrated, cultural experimenters can emerge as part of a political movement of rebellion and can humanize it; but they only become "ranters" when political change fails or is repressed, or when people begin to despair of its efficacy. Whereas cultural revolt disavows politics, political rebels form rigidly ideological sects, like the Weather Underground. In the 1640s, too, a synthesis of cultural and political revolt broke apart, for along with ranters there were the Fifth Monarchists, who embraced violence in the name of "forcing the end." The separation of political action from cultural experiment tends to drive each toward violence and narcissism because activists lose a sense of ongoing participation in a public movement with shared values.

In these terms, Winstanley's response to this situation presents an especially interesting parallel with the ideas of Christopher Lasch, who has sought to rejoin culture and politics through an implicitly Puritan affirmation of moral authority and conscientious labor. Whereas Lasch associates renewal with paternal authority, however, Winstanley tries to build an ego strong enough to be liberated from paternal authority and therefore able to form a community that moves beyond Puritanism. For an account of the 1960s that resonates with the conflict between Winstanley and the ranters, see Michael Rogin, "In the Defense of the New Left," democracy (November 1983): 106–16.

Winstanley's response to the culture of despair accepts the aspiration for liberation in those whose "loving and flexible disposition" has made them susceptible to ranting. In contrast to Puritan fathers, he tries to formulate a discipline that truly liberates. Winstanley may be close to the ranters' Christian liberty, however much he thinks they have perverted it, but he has absorbed, not rejected, the original Puritan emphasis on moral self-discipline and regenerate community. Therefore, while he criticizes the Puritan form of conscience and community, he rejects neither moral judgment nor communal bonds. He responds to the ranters by affirming but transforming the disciplines they deny, but without acting like a Puritan father imposing his own fleshly inventions.

Winstanley's first antidote to the ranters is the cooperative work by which people feed themselves and "enrich" the commonwealth. This labor should not be a compulsive and enslaving form of penance; rather, "it is for the health of their bodies, it is pleasure to the mind, to be free in labor one with another" (593). Such "righteous, moderate working," he imagines, will promote personal efficacy and worldly ties, which "prevent the evil of idleness and the danger of the Ranter Power" (402). Winstanley says that "the earth ought to be a common treasury to all"; but concerning women he declares, "Let every man have his own wife and every woman her own husband" (366–67). Thus, his second antidote to the ranters is monogamous marriage based on choice and desire: "Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love, if they can obtain the love and liking of that party … and neither birth nor portion shall hinder the match" (599). The alternative to legalistic or arranged conjugal ties should be committed relationships, which would strengthen each member and protect them from the ranter power.

Winstanley insists that the genuinely gratifying practice of work and love, by making people "free within" and effective in the world, can counteract the conditions that give rise to the ranter beast. But he knows that some diggers, while engaging in practices that accord with "the reason" in creation, are still tempted. The key, then, is knowing self-consciously the reason in oneself and in one's practices. How can people come to learn and "own" that reason?

In part, he believes that reason is a capacity akin to prudence, and therefore can be learned best by experience. Accordingly, he takes a hands-off approach: "If any should be ensnared by the subtle devouring ranting beast, … I profess to have nothing to do with them, but leave them to their own master, who will pay them with torment of mind and

diseases in their bodies" (367). He feels sure that once the "ranter power … shows himself a complete man of darkness," he will "come to judgement and so be cast out of heaven, that is, out of mankind" (402).

To those who have not been ensnared yet, and perhaps to aid those who have, Winstanley also explicitly teaches the principle of mutual preservation, which animates digger practices. To exemplify mutual preservation while respecting the moral autonomy of those who deny it, he counsels: "Let not sinners punish others for sin, but let the power of thy reason and righteous action shame them, and so beat down their unrational actions." If diggers "keep close to the law of righteous reason," he anticipates that they "shall presently see a return of the Ranters; for that spirit within them must shame them, and turn them, and pull them out of darkness." But how can he expect to shame people who, declaring they have been released from all judgment, appear so utterly shameless? Such questions force Winstanley to deal with cynicism and the problem of justifying moral standards.

Responding to Cynicism

In the name of conscience or the inner light, antinomians (including Winstanley) challenged the Puritans' effort to cement a new community judging itself by new criteria. Ranters and Winstanley saw the Puritan effort to create a new order as the imposition of a mistaken view of reality that would serve the interests of the few. An order that might appear natural, incontrovertible, and just to later generations appears to Winstanley and ranters as subjective, man-made, particular, and repressive.

But Winstanley and the ranters go in different directions from this point. Ranters attack the authority of all conventions and the validity of all standards. Sin and justice are "merely" arbitrary and subjective mental categories, they say, and therefore do not require particular kinds of action. To the pure, all is pure; what feels good is good. This belief partly reflects a liberation from ruling interpretations of justice and sin. But it also expresses a cynical way of dealing with the conventionality of standards and concepts. Ranters do not say that the meaning of justice, or right and wrong, entails certain actions different from those advocated by the elder brothers. Rather, they say there is no such thing as justice and sin, or that each person defines these concepts for himself or herself. As a result, these and other evaluative words are divorced from action and deprived of their meaning. In effect, ranters refuse to be responsible for meaning what they say (and for the meaning of what they

say) and will not be held accountable for their actions. They will do whatever they want and call it whatever they want.

The valid insight of the ranters into the conventionality of standards like sin and justice and their defense of the inner light become a way for the individual to sanction any and all behavior. By dismissing standards as entirely personal or arbitrary, they renounce the effort to reason about, or justify, their own values while denying that any could be commonly valid. Thus, Winstanley condemns them for being "unrational" as well as "immoderate."

Clearly, ranters try to subvert the moral authority they rightly take as illegitimate. They may intend to say that "reason" is wholly ideological, convention unavoidably arbitrary, and "immoderate" behavior wholly natural. In part, though, they cynically use the conventionality of standards to overthrow all restraint and deny all accountability. Regardless of intention, their kind of rebellion creates a "devouring" process that negates all standards. Salutary resistance to authority becomes selfdestructive: since all values are merely subjective and arbitrary, ranters deprive of authority even those values in whose name they rebel. Meanwhile, those "of a loving and flexible disposition" are "ensnared" because they cannot affirm the authority and validity of their own values. The personal consequence of ranting is that people lose the sense that there is or could be a legitimate and binding personal authority within them; the political consequence is that shared standards become impossible to define, let alone uphold.

This problem with the authority of standards and values taken as conventional, as evidenced by the ranters, may have inspired Hobbes's famous "state of nature." He too developed ranter insights and relativism, but he was horrified by the logic and consequences of rebellion. Hobbes can be seen as using the ranters (and the elder brothers) to construct a larger argument about conventions and language and the relationship between standards and actions. He makes the ranter case that meanings and definitions are arbitrary and subjective, that they disclose the truth not about the world but about human passions. To Hobbes, then, ranters reveal how everyone is really in a state of nature. As a political theorist, however, he also sees that the problem of conventions is social and systemic: conflicting interpretations of god, justice, and sin will proliferate among a socially divided and individualized people.

Hobbes responds to this situation by relying on logic and definition. Believing (at least intellectually) that conventions are arbitrary, his priority

is to establish definitions that are sovereign and to which all agree. An atomized people can be reunited by their consent to use words according to the fixed and indisputable definitions provided by the sovereign. Though this approach implies that any definitions will do as long as people consent to them, Hobbes also professes to offer a science whose definitions are in fact "apt" to the world. He grants that fixing and enforcing definitions is a technical solution to order and meaning, but he considers it the best response to a social disintegration that seems to defy substantive resolution or agreement on the basis of extant understandings. He also hopes, however, that people will be changed by speaking his new language so that they will be transformed into "a real unity of them all."

Thus, Hobbes goes in a direction opposite to that of the ranters. Rather than sacrifice the idea of standards to the claims of sovereign selves, he conflates conscience and desire, subordinating both to rules or standards defined as true and just by the sovereign. Because of the ranters, Winstanley agrees with Hobbes that conscience does not suffice to validate the truth of ideas, the legitimacy of standards, the justness of what is called justice. In contrast to Hobbes, however, Winstanley hopes to address the problem typified by the ranters without depriving people of the right to make judgments about public norms and rules.

By defining god as the reason within the self and in creation, Winstanley tries to provide a substantive criterion by which individuals and the community can distinguish between liberty and license, pure and corrupt speech, just and fleshly conventions, or true motions of the spirit and those motions mistakenly (or cynically) claimed to be such. But if reason is the criterion by which to judge what is godly, how does one discover what accords with it? Fundamentally, Winstanley believes we honor reason when we preserve creatures according "to the nature and necessity" of each. Of course, proposing a standard of "mutual preservation" does not settle the question of what accords with the nature and necessity of humans. Consequently, Winstanley's idea of reason involves uncertainty and conflict, which raises or leaves unresolved the Hobbesian problem of anarchy.

But Winstanley's point is not to hold people together according to whatever definitions are commonly agreed on, nor to impose the kind of community he calls "merely civil," in which there is no inward allegiance to norms. Rather, he seeks a dialogue about the criteria implicit in a community's extant values and practices. As a standard present in

people and already embodied in some of their activities, "mutual preservation" is a criterion that bridges the exercise of individual judgment and the ongoing endeavor to "knit together" with others.

Thus, mutual preservation appears in the traditional meaning of commons, and in the history and use of concepts such as magistrate, tyrant, and public . To some degree Winstanley transforms the common sense of a word's meaning, but to a large extent he recalls a meaning with which people are losing touch or for which they no longer take responsibility. This is to say he also affirms and protects the practices that made, or still could make, concepts meaningful. When Winstanley defines sin as the violation of mutual preservation and then says it is sinful to enclose land and hoard superfluous goods when others are starving, his definition makes sense of the experience of the poor, in whose lives it is rooted. He would reconcile common standards and a community of individual consciences, not through technical definitions divorced from daily life, but rather by taking seriously the substantive meanings regulating that life.

Perhaps Winstanley sees a substantive solution to the problem of values and anarchy because he knows by experience that community is not merely created, nor standards merely invented, that individuals are not separated entirely, and that language is not arbitrary because it is not disembodied from the life of those who speak it. Thus, he does not start from, or presume, an abstracted (and anarchic) state of nature in which conventions must be "invented." He tries to resolve conflict about conventions and definitions by beginning with actual people embedded in a particular history and culture.

In this way, one can address the question that began this discussion about standards and cynicism: how can Winstanley expect to shame and instruct ranters? For the same reason that Socrates was able to make Thrasymachus blush: ranters implicitly invoke and feel the standards they deny. They angrily attack the elder brothers precisely for the sinful violation of justice; only because of such standards do they feel righteously angry. That they will not honor or acknowledge those standards in their own action is the hypocrisy and fear in their cynicism.

Accordingly, Winstanley's response to the ranters also suggests an answer to the question of his relationship to Puritanism. In each chapter, I have argued that he works from Puritan premises, whether about pride and rebirth, work and autonomy, or political liberty through covenanting. But in each case he uses Puritan idioms to transform, or deepen and broaden, his Puritan antecedents. In contrast, ranters use many of the

same idioms, but they seek to explode the Puritan project by destroying the commitments and practices at its base. Unlike the ranters, therefore, Winstanley addresses, and potentially encompasses, the experience of those around him. Thus, he exemplifies the radical possibilities that can inhere in a reverence for the very idioms and traditions one transforms.

In practice, Winstanley illustrates the fact that conventions and language are neither arbitrary (and therefore invented and imposed) nor god-given (and therefore revealed and owned), but inherited, meant, and revised by humans within the bonds of a historical culture. But in part, he escapes the snare of cynicism because he believes that the values and practices appropriate to human nature and necessity are also given by a god who writes his law in each of our hearts. As an activist and writer, Winstanley tries to shame the ranters by bearing witness to the concepts and values they invoke in their attack on the Puritans. But he has faith in the "return" of these prodigal children specifically because he believes they will be shamed by the reason of the Father within. It speaks to all in the same voice and calls them back to a household in which reality is manifest, conjecture unnecessary, and speech pure.^[12]

The Shameful Residue and the Demon of Politics

If one were to jettison Winstanley's religious language, however, in an attempt to get at the secular core of his political practice, one would lose his understanding of precisely what reanimates a demoralized people. By calling the ranters back to the judgment of the Father within, Winstanley hopes to strengthen the Christ within them: in psychoanalytic terms, Winstanley's shaming is meant to strengthen the ego by strengthening a power of inward but conscious judgment that is akin to the superego. He does not impose the punitive, paternal superego of the Puritans, but neither is he wrong to believe that "owning" inward judgments is essential to moral autonomy and relationships of mutual preservation.

But his desire to invoke the Father within and shame the ranters also reveals the underside of Winstanley's political therapy. Ranters represent Winstanley's own lust and anger in immoderate (or unsublimated)

[12] To be sure, the ranters (and Hobbes) are more radical than Winstanley because of their cynical insight into conventionality. Perhaps Machiavelli represents a third way: one could argue that without denying conventionality, he tries to overcome the cynicism that splits bodily need from moral values. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).

form. They act out the beastliness Winstanley says is transformed by the Father who feeds and empowers him. It is as if they say to him: you have not transformed and cannot transform what you consider beastly in yourself and, thus, in us; as a result, although you speak of returning us to the Father within, we proclaim the return of what you can only repress; we preach to the nations what you in your shame try to hide. As if in response, they elicit from Winstanley not only the language of love and restoration but also the language of angry expulsion, which expresses his own shame about aspects of himself.

Thus, in speaking of the ranters, Winstanley mixes oral, sexual, and excremental imagery. The "lascivious feeder" is also a "lascivious breeder," in both regards an "unclean, doggish, filthy" beast, fertile with "filthy" and "abominable" children. He describes the ranters through excremental language in order to assert that their oral and sexual impulses are contaminated by rage, but his language also suggests his own rage. He directs that rage against impulses he deems shameful, which he believes obstruct true union with the god within (and with others). The ranters represent the lascivious feeder and breeder in himself, whom he believes he must cast out if he is to be righteous and legitimate, chaste and at peace. Just as he wants to purge his body of anger and anality so it can be the temple of god, so he would purge it of lust and orality.

Whereas Winstanley is making a principled case about the legitimate way to express sexuality, ranters proclaim that their god blesses their angry, lusty beastliness. He tries to instruct them about sublimation, but they unnervingly attest to the sanctity of what is being sublimated, about which he is ashamed or ambivalent. Thus, he tries to shame them, speaking to their denial of values and standards they feel but will not own, while they try to shame him, revealing his denial of the impulses for which he also seeks legitimate form. In this light, they both have something to teach, but neither is able to listen.

Accordingly, one need not endorse ranterism as a way of life to learn from the ranters several important lessons about Winstanley. Most obviously, Winstanley's desire for "true union" expresses and promotes a troubling ambivalence about sexuality. He is uncomfortable with the disruptive power of sexual desire and the dangerous temptation of sexual pleasure. Though he would integrate these into a moral relationship, he imagines a union somehow unperturbed by sex, as if sexual desire could and should be wholly domesticated. He does not want to split

love in its moral and physical senses, but he devalues passionate physical desire in his effort to make it legitimate and unthreatening. Because of his moral commitments and fears, he feels inclined to expel or purify what he must doubt he can integrate.

To return to Marx's argument in "On the Jewish Question," Winstanley does not fully embrace terrestrial desire, even as he acknowledges earthly need, and so he does not "confess his sins to be what they are." As a result, his effort to synthesize the spirit of love and the power of desire suggests the wish to redeem the sexual passion he otherwise must abhor. Like those Marx identifies as "Christian," Winstanley also imagines that he has the power to triumph over what he shamefully defines as dirty. One need not follow the ranters and abandon the Christian idea of mutual responsibility to affirm the validity of sexual desire, but neither must one follow Winstanley and moralize sexuality to affirm one's responsibility and power. There is a tension here, denied by Winstanley and the ranters but represented in their angry relationship. It instructs not only about the shame at work in Winstanley's moralizing impulse but also about his failure to explore the full sense in which humans are sexual creatures.

More deeply, perhaps, his early question, "And what more [than food, shelter, and clothing] can be desired on earth?" shows how his piety proscribes not only sexual passion but also desire, which he limits by nature to what one needs, arguing that desire beyond such a limit is illegitimate, inflamed by a covetous culture. After all, conjugal union, and food and clothing "gained freely by our labors," do not exhaust the human project, although they may provide what is basic to it, and do not represent complete human fulfillment, although they may suggest its essential constituents. Winstanley limits desire in this way, not just because he lives in a culture of scarcity, but also because of his inner religiosity. He fears that desire, when inflamed by imagination, leads people to violate the moral limits of what he deems is appropriate to them as creatures.

To be free within is a summum bonum of sorts. Based on a harmony between what we need and what we desire, this ideal requires a "chaste" imagination and limitations on our power. Since the ranters deny there is such an inner stasis, they feel entitled to break through moral boundaries and impiously claim god's sanction for their pursuit of the forbidden. They themselves consider it impossible to destroy inner harmony because it cannot exist; instead, they redefine needs, explore desires,

and play with the imagination. In this way, they subvert Winstanley's assertion of a "natural" and god-given limit, showing it to be in fact the voice of culture.

As a result, the ranters open up possibilities beyond the horizon of cultural convention and what Winstanley himself calls "slavish fear." One can agree with Winstanley about the motives and consequences of their "restless pursuit of desire after desire," as Hobbes calls it. Nonetheless, they witness the "stiff-necked" powers of desire and imagination, which Winstanley piously tries to circumscribe or even stifle. As his demonic parody, perhaps they testify in fact to the subversive power of his desire and imagination, which led him past conventional horizons—a blasphemy for which he claims god's sanction.

Thus, the ranters' irreverence teaches another lesson by clarifying the tension between the life of impulse and the forms of culture. Since there is no such thing as a "pure" impulse, and ranters' desires are inflamed by resentment and thus still shaped by culture, one cannot romanticize them as either noble or ignoble savages, emblems of "nature." In this sense, and against Hobbes, Winstanley is right to call them creatures of covetous culture and not its natural alternative. However, by revealing that he is not an agent of nature either, the ranters expose the truth about his cultural project. They instruct Winstanley about what is dangerous and illusory in his dream of a seamless weave of culture and nature, or form and impulse. Although he does not surrender to his anger at them for ripping that fabric, they elicit the pride in his piety and the elements of control in his perfect union. They embody what must be excluded or exorcized from his household and thus reveal the anxieties on which it is based and the costs it must exact from its members.

The refusal of the ranters to be integrated into his marriage of nature and culture, their theatrical glorification of the body's functions, and their comic defiance of his moralizing discourse provide a refreshing—if necessarily perverse and self-destructive—perspective on Winstanley's earnest piety. In spite of their irresponsibility, one can learn from, and even admire, their refusal to be "reformed" by him. As self-proclaimed Ishmaels, they do expose the shameful secrets of even a regenerate culture and "preach" of the presumption at work in even the best-intentioned and most democratic of reformers. As orphans and outsiders, they remind us that we are, and to some extent should be, prodigal children of our parent culture. Perhaps ranters deserve the last word because these "devils" would teach Winstanley the pride and limitations of Apollo's vocation.