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.