INTRODUCTION

What is past is not dead;
it is not even past.
We cut ourselves off from it;
we pretend to be strangers.
—Christa Wolf

The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
—Milan Kundera

Gerrard Winstanley developed a remarkable theory of selfhood, society, and politics in his effort to change the course of the English Revolution. Between 1648 and 1649 he wrote an extraordinary series of pamphlets, in which he fashioned his Puritan legacy into an explosive theoretical synthesis of New Testament spirituality and Old Testament worldliness. By joining a diagnosis of the Puritans' inner life to a social analysis of their commitment to property, Winstanley tried to transform the propertied Puritan radicalism that was central to the Revolution and thereby promote another path for England's development. Believing that his words required the testimony of action, he also established a colony of "diggers" or "True Levellers" in the spring of 1649. These men and women tried to exemplify in their action an alternative to feudal social relations, the emerging market, and Puritan radicalism.

That alternative, embodying his theories, represented a rare attempt to bring together concerns that usually are divorced: a commitment to personal autonomy and a commitment to collective action. Of greater interest, perhaps, is the fact that Winstanley's effort to establish "a community of earth and spirit" led him to develop an explicitly political dimension to his radicalism. As a digger, Winstanley theorized and enacted a radical politics that fused the spiritual and psychological concerns of the saint, the social interests of the poor, and the vocabulary and commitments of the citizen.

The digger colony was defeated in the spring of 1650, a year after its inception. Winstanley's concerns, language, and alternatives were buried then and still are discredited by the institutions and discourse whose emergence he opposed. His radicalism therefore marks a direction that might have been chosen but was not, a road not taken. Since Winstanley was present at one of the major turning points in the movement toward modernity, his theory reveals the roots of ideas and institutions that now dominate our world. Even more important, the road not taken still exists, in certain dimensions, as a set of concerns and commitments that remain fugitive unless given voice, that remain haunting ghosts unless acknowledged.

I focus on Winstanley, first, because of his analysis of Puritan radicalism. In a way unrivaled by any commentator since, Winstanley diagnosed its psychological, social, and political character, unfolded the meaning of its spiritual, scriptural, and political language, and sought a way to heal the tragic flaws he had identified in its ideas and practices. My interpretation of Winstanley will follow the stages of his own development as he worked through, criticized, and transformed the key concepts of Puritan radicalism.

Winstanley's earliest pamphlets, written in the spring and fall of 1648, represent a psychological moment that is the concern of Part I. In an introspective effort to come to terms with his own suffering as a diligent Puritan, Winstanley analyzed the inner life reflected in Puritan religiosity. He deepened the Puritans' language about the pride and sin of "fallen Adam" in order to diagnose the core aspects of Puritanism that he found troubling: a punitive conscience and asceticism toward the body, the anxious accumulation of commodities in the market, doctrinal orthodoxy, and the willful refusal to grant religious liberty to poor men and women. The Puritan effort to link piety toward god to self-control and worldly effort, Winstanley argued, produced a self-defeating and punishing kind of autonomy and an exclusive and intolerant culture. By reworking Puritan ideas of rebirth and regeneration, however, he also developed an alternative. Intended as diagnosis and cure, Winstanley's initial theory represents a profound argument about the inner life, the fashioning of moral autonomy, and the creation of culture.

In the spring of 1649, after what he declared was a revelation, Winstanley suddenly enlarged his focus and began to criticize the Puritans'

exclusion of the poor not from god's grace but from the earth. Winstanley now linked his analysis of "the inner kingdom" to newly developed insights about property, wage labor, and the state. In this "social moment," the focus of Part II, Winstanley redefined the Puritans' language of "calling" as he criticized their view of self-determination in matters not only of spirit but also of labor and worldly power. At the moment King Charles was executed, Winstanley argued that Puritan rebels were merely acting out, in mystified and murderous ways, their psychological conflicts and propertied social interests. As a result, he contended, rebels were likely to betray their promises to establish a community that restored liberty and fulfilled Christ's gospel. Committed to those promises, Winstanley argued that piety and liberty required common property, shared production, and religious toleration.

Winstanley's integrated theories of what he called the "kingdom within" and the "kingdom without" became the basis for his "political moment," the concern of Part III. Late in the spring of 1649, shortly before Parliament declared England a republic, Winstanley joined with dispossessed poor people to establish communal production on commons land that had not been enclosed yet. By refusing to work for wages and by sharing the earth as "a common treasury of livelihood for all," Winstanley argued, poor people could retard the expansion of "cursed propriety of mine and thine" and thereby initiate "the beginnings of public freedom to the whole land."

As the diggers planted the first furrows of public freedom, however, they faced violent harassment. Winstanley responded with a stream of pamphlets that addressed all the key actors and groups of the time. He propounded a theory that radically reinterpreted the Exodus narrative of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament prophecy of Christ's Second Coming, which the Puritans had invoked to justify both their struggle for self-determination against church and king and their denial of rights and power to the poor and women. Since Winstanley's colony of diggers suffered that denial in a brutal way, he questioned the Puritans' commitment to the family and property, which excluded propertyless men and all women from public life, and he criticized their commitment to the vanguard politics of an "elect," which generated violence and precluded dialogue.

At the same time, by joining the Old Testament promise of an earthly inheritance to the land to the New Testament promise of a regenerated "kingdom within," he included the poor as agents in a redemptive history that authorized them to overthrow not only church and king but

also the emerging market, the social power of propertied Puritans, and the limited democracy defined by Puritan election. By the time the digger colony was crushed, Winstanley had articulated a radical republicanism that joined "freedom in the earth" to the activities of citizenship.

But we recover Winstanley for much more than the interconnections he articulated theoretically and enacted politically. That very accomplishment bespeaks the particular importance of two interrelated qualities central to his radicalism and my argument about it. One is linked to his religiosity, drawn from the Puritans he tried to instruct but given a character all his own. The other is his richly metaphoric language, which he created out of Puritan idioms in his effort to move beyond Puritan orthodoxy. Each quality provides reason enough to return to his landmark, for each signifies what is of enduring worth in his radicalism.

What made Winstanley radical, and his radicalism special, is a vision that roots human beings quite literally in the personal life of bodily experience and in the shared experience of life in a social body. Thus, his thought developed as an explication of how humans are creatures, shaped and parented by the experiences, relationships, and history they embody, carry, bear, and witness. Because of his radical grasp of the ways in which humans are rooted, needy, and limited creatures—what he called "created beings"—Winstanley reconceptualized how humans should conceive of their capacity for choice and change, assert their freedom, and realize their potential as creators .

At the heart of his vision of humans as creatures and creators is a critique of pride, which he believed was the source of what he called "inner and outer bondage," and a defense of a kind of piety we will call reverence, which he believed was the source of "inner and outer freedom." His radicalism and my argument hinge on his unfolding sense of the psychological, social, and political meaning of pride and the bondage it causes and his ongoing effort to define a reverence that frees.

At each of his "moments," Winstanley attacked what he called "the evil, masculine powers of pride," which he attributed to "the back part" or "the dunghill within" each person, and which he believed were leading Puritans to fashion identity, seek worldly autonomy, and reshape society in ways that oppressed others and enslaved themselves. Winstanley used gendered and excremental language to reveal his insights about the fantasies and impulses he analyzed through the concept of pride. To him, pride arises from inner conflicts about bodily limitation, need, and dependence; it is fueled by fantasies of willful or unconditioned action; and it is manifested as an impulse to dominate and control that does not

acknowledge limits of action, grounds of being, or bonds of interdependence. As pride makes a person inwardly divided, anxious about control, ascetic toward the body, and acquisitive of objects, so pride's worldly emblems are the power of fathers and aggression against nature, clerical rule and ideological language, property and the exploitation of labor, elitist politics and violence. Because Puritans created "inner bondage" to pride, he believed, their worldly endeavors yielded not freedom but the denials of mutuality that signify "bondage without."

In response, Winstanley developed a theory of "freedom within and without" that was linked to an idea of piety radically different from the Puritans'. Initially he argued that human freedom depends on establishing the right relation toward the inner authority he called god. This "Father within" offered each soul "breasts of love" that provided a "sincere milk" Winstanley described as "the spirit of reason and love." Inward receptivity or piety toward this nurturant part of the self, he contended, delivered the self from anxious acquisitiveness and the punitive conscience, generating instead self-respect, inner direction, and worldly independence.

This inner piety led Winstanley back to the world in a new way. He came to argue that human freedom also depends on abolishing property in order to establish the right relationship to the earth, "our Common Mother," with which humans necessarily must "subsist." As he had theorized that respect for "the Father within" each person encouraged moral autonomy and mutual respect, so he reasoned that respect for the common source of physical nourishment for all would generate recognition of the bodily need of each and, thereby, social relations of "mutual preservation" among men and women, whom he termed "fellow creatures."

Winstanley had retained the Puritans' commitment to the idea that piety is essential to freedom, but in order to fulfill their promises of self-determination and justice, he redefined their piety and thereby radicalized the entire Puritan project. Because he insisted that god's "spirit of love and reason" animated nature and each person, Winstanley developed a politics that was radical in its demand for the abolition of property and hierarchy, the inclusion of the poor and women, and attention to earthly needs and spiritual equality. Because he valued reciprocal social bonds, language rooted in "experienced speech," and individual choice based on "experimental knowledge," his politics repudiated violence and demanded a commitment to toleration and dialogue.

Thus, Winstanley defined need and understood freedom by articulating

a distinctive relationship to the soul and the body, to god and the earth, and to the needs and capacities of others. That relationship is characterized not by the alienation, distance, and denial he associated with pride but rather by the attitude of reconciliation and reciprocity he associated with true piety, or reverence. We use that word to connote deep respect, tinged with awe, and he manifested this attitude toward the spiritual and physical needs that define and bind created beings, toward the sources of nourishment on which he believed humans must depend, and toward the values and truths appropriate to "created beings" and therefore god's spirit in them.

Winstanley argued that creatures embedded in the body, nature, and history can achieve freedom only if they act in ways that "bear witness" to the needs and values that animate and limit them and to the sources of nourishment that parent and feed them. Thus, the word reverence describes Winstanley's radicalism not only because of the religiosity that was its premise but also because it suggests the way in which Winstanley theorized a conditioned and conditional freedom from which there is much to learn.

Central to Winstanley's idea of reverence is a second quality that also makes his radicalism special: his theoretical insights and political innovations depended on a seriousness about language rarely rivaled in the tradition of political thought. Only by way of a profound meditation on the meaning of common Puritan idioms could Winstanley have developed his own innovative and critical reading of pride and piety; only by taking seriously the meaning of Puritans' own metaphoric prose could Winstanley have created the bodily, sexual, parental, and gendered metaphors that literally embodied the connections he theorized between the inner life and worldly action. Through images of "the Father within," god's "breasts of love," "sincere milk," "teats of creatures," "the dunghill within," and "the back part," he exemplified in graphic terms the origin of pride and the meaning of reverence.

Whereas modern commentators often unmask or devalue language to reveal the class interests and unconscious motives underlying beliefs and practices, Winstanley used the meaning of common idioms both to disclose the capacity for free action in people and to identify the causes of their behavior in psychological and social forces. Therefore, he also could address others, speaking as one living creature and actor to another. In an irreducible and vividly authentic voice, he passionately and indignantly prodded his contemporaries to reexamine the meaning of

what they said, so they could act in a way that was faithful to their own words. In this sense his theory yielded a practice that was profoundly "political," for he analyzed power and engaged in dialogue about intentions and choices. As a result, his words made—and still make—visceral sense of what people feel, see, and know in their own lives. Indeed, Winstanley's vision of self-fashioning and collective action invites a reexamination of more modern conceptions of selfhood, social life, and radical politics.

In part, I will situate and assess the continuing significance of Winstanley's arguments by contrasting him with the Puritan radicalism that was his legacy and adversary. But a full appreciation of Winstanley's accomplishment as a theorist also depends on contrasting his reverent radicalism and the theory of Thomas Hobbes. It is a significant coincidence that after his defeat in 1650 Winstanley completed his last book in November 1651, the same month and year as Hobbes published his famous Leviathan . For it is not Winstanley but Hobbes who towers over that era in the modern imagination. Because he established a discourse still dominant in many ways, Hobbes has defined the modern view of Puritan politics and thus of critics like Winstanley who were twinned with it. As Winstanley helps us reexamine concerns and commitments buried by Hobbes's text and devalued by the world it foretold, however, so Hobbes helps us understand the troubling consequences of Winstanley's effort to avoid the sin of pride.

In part, Hobbes sharpens the significance of Winstanley because each criticized Puritan radicalism in contrasting terms and with opposed purposes. Both were concerned with the problem of pride, and each synthesized theories of the body and selfhood, the market and society, the state and history in efforts to articulate an alternative to Puritan radicalism. But Winstanley was bound to the Puritanism he criticized, taking seriously its core concepts, whereas Hobbes was an enemy, intent on subverting any aspect of Puritanism that fostered rebellion. Thus, Winstanley used the language of the Puritans to question their allegiance to the market and paternal power in order to extend the Revolution they began. In contrast, Hobbes introduced the language of science into the study of politics to depoliticize Puritan rebels and thereby to provide a more secure basis for the market and patriarchy. By discrediting the Puritan idea of god and the rebellion it spawned, Hobbes exposed

the anxieties and interests Winstanley had tried to transform, and thereby undermined the Puritans' effort to restore the king's power to the body of society.

Such radically diverging arguments arose from a fundamental difference. Winstanley posited a "Father within," a god whose reason ordered nature and whose inner authority sanctioned worldly rebellion; therefore, Winstanley criticized the Puritans for not being radical enough. In contrast, Hobbes deprived nature and the body of spirit, and on this basis he theorized the transition from kingship to a state sovereignty that enjoined only obedience. Winstanley's god sponsored rebellion and cultural heterodoxy; Hobbes's "mortal god" subverted politics by generating cultural conformity and confining human action to private life.

As this analysis suggests, Hobbes is a valuable foil to Winstanley because he is the first and perhaps greatest "modernizer." He justified the emerging market, but more important, he defended the process of state building regardless of social relations and in conjunction with a new faith in science. In this effort Hobbes developed a view of human conventionality that was extraordinarily prescient in its understanding of the estrangement that has seemed to attend all modern forms of collective action and state building, whether liberal, nationalist, or Leninist.

Puritans used the idea of redemptive history to attack the church and the monarchy: Attributing "bondage" to prideful invention, they tried to define and establish a contrasting self-determination based on piety toward god and justified by the claim to know and fulfill his purposes. The flaws and limitations of their struggle led Winstanley beyond their orthodoxy. He sought a politics untainted by pride, and therefore he rebelled. In contrast, Hobbes exposed pride in order to prevent rebellion. By showing how the idea of redemptive history dissimulated the Puritans' pride and inventiveness, he tried to teach men that they are, and must be, the prideful creators of the authority they live by. In this way, however, he argued that men become humbled creatures who must, and will, piously submit to their own prideful invention. Thus, Winstanley's significance emerges by contrast with the politics Hobbes aptly foreshadowed in the myth of Prometheus and the image of Leviathan.

In 1642, at the outset of the Civil War, Hobbes used the myth of Prometheus in De Cive to argue that Puritan language about God had masked the full conventionality, and thus the radical inventiveness, of the Puritan effort at collective self-fashioning. Hobbes depicted the Puritans not as pious saints and instruments of god but as rebels without

sanction, predicting that parricide would create fratricide as their revolt generated anxiety and anarchy.^[1]

When Leviathan appeared in 1651, however, the monarchy was already in ashes, and not surprisingly, Hobbes's description of Prometheus had changed. Anxiety and anarchy became the natural basis of all society at all times, as if there never had been fathers, kings, god—and rebels. Human problems appear to result not from prideful revolt but from the natural character of desire and imagination and from the natural absence of binding authority. Thus, Prometheus the rebel was replaced by a new Prometheus, one who anxiously suffers not as a punishment for rebellion, but by his very nature.^[2]

Politically, the problem had become not preventing rebellion against a still-extant authority but creating an authority that prevented any further rebellion. Thus, Hobbes had become much more sophisticated theoretically, for sovereignty appeared as an abstraction and invention necessary for any effective form of order, of which kingship was merely one, albeit preferable, version. While Prometheus in De Cive signified invention in a pejorative sense, Hobbes now had recognized the saving power of the right sort of invention, while still condemning the inventions of "private men."

[1] In De Cive Hobbes contended:

It seems that the ancients, who made the fable of Prometheus, pointed at this. They say that Prometheus, having stolen fire from the sun, formed a man out of clay, and for this deed he was tortured by Jupiter with a perpetual gnawing at his liver. Which is, that by human invention, which is signified by Prometheus, laws and justice were by imitation taken from monarchy; by virtue thereof, as by fire removed from its orb, the multitude, as the dirt and dregs of men, was as it were quickened and formed into a civil person, which is termed aristocracy or democracy. But the author and abhetor being found, who might have securely and quietly lived under the natural jurisdiction of kings, do thus smart for it; that being exposed still to alterations, they are tormented with perpetual cares, suspicions, and dissensions. (Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, in Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1972], p. 224)

[2] As Hobbes said in Leviathan :

For being assured that there be causes of all things that have hitherto arrived, or shall arrive hereafter; it is impossible for a man, who continually endeavoreth to secure himself against the evil he fears and procure the good he desireth, not to be in a perpetual state of solicitude of the time to come; so that every man, especially those that are overprovident, are in a state like that of Prometheus. For as Prometheus, which interpreted is the prudent man, was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where an eagle feeding on his liver devoureth in the day as much as was repaired at night; so that man, which looks too far before him in care of future time, hath his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity, and has not repose nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep. (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott [New York: Collier, 1962], pp. 87–88)

Thus, as Hobbes himself became the teacher of the new science, he tacitly replaced the rebellious Prometheus. For now he had stolen fire from the gods on behalf of mankind, whom his science would teach to invent precisely the "civil person" or "artificial man" whose creation he once condemned as a dangerous act of pride. The solution to the problem of naturally orphaned creatures was to invent a god who would throw them on the rock if they ever rebelled. Prudent Promethean men must create a sovereign to which they transfer their right to define, judge, and act; only obedience to an invented sovereign power can save them from the unfortunate consequences of their natural temptation to be political actors, while providing them with the secure property and abundance and the peace and moral certainty they really need.

Hobbes moved from a history of rebellion to a concept of nature in order to expose the Puritans' pride and bury their radicalism; then by moving from nature to sovereignty, Hobbes used pride to build a state on the grave of Puritan rebellion, which now appeared as the emblem of uncontrolled nature. As he changed the significance of Prometheus, Hobbes did not rescue people from nature but rather used the state of nature and the science "apt" to it to rescue people from politics, represented by Puritan radicalism. As Hobbes shifted from condemning the Prometheus who signifies invention to inventing a sovereign that saves the Prometheus who signifies prudence, we see the burial of Puritan radicalism and the birth of modern politics. Behind Prometheus the creator lies Prometheus the defeated rebel.

Deeply ambivalent about the pride he had exposed in the religious claims of Puritan rebels, Hobbes conceived of a science and a state that would transform the pride rebels had disowned into the creator's pious regard for his own creation. Hobbes used Prometheus to signify the insight into conventionality provided by his science, to suggest the benefits of that science, and to endorse the pride that is always essential to creating civilization. Yet the book is titled Leviathan because, as only a Promethean would, Hobbes had taken on god's challenge to Job and with "his own right arm" pridefully created a man-made Leviathan to "humble the children of pride."

By linking the pride that worships only what is humanly invented to the estranging power of those inventions, Hobbes originates the question that modern politics has forced many later theorists to ask: can people shape themselves in ways that neither require them to act as gods nor compel them to become the submissive creatures of their creations? It is this question that animated each "moment" in Winstanley's thought and action as he tried to articulate an alternative to Puritan radicalism.

Accordingly, Winstanley appears as a ghost from the grave of the Puritanism Hobbes buried, as one of its orphaned progeny, but therefore also as a founding voice in a countertradition that has been opposed to the forms of thought and action that Hobbes typified.^[3]

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What was at stake in Winstanley's and Hobbes's time to a great extent is also at stake now. For this reason I also will explore how Winstanley's reverence addressed dilemmas that still animate the psychoanalytic language of self-understanding, Marxist arguments about social relations and collective action, and the republican vision of citizenship. To be sure, Winstanley's religiosity differs considerably from these later, secular traditions. But in the context of parallel concerns, these differences are especially instructive. Thus, my argument traces the stages of Winstanley's development, at each moment rooting his thought and action in the Puritanism he transformed, situating his radicalism in relation to Hobbes, and directing his perspective toward more modern traditions of theorizing.

Part IV concludes this study with Winstanley's defeat, his final book, and his subsequent respectability in the very county of his rebellion. These disclose what was problematic in his radicalism all along and illustrate in a poignant way how Hobbes would foreshadow the road taken; for Winstanley's disavowal of pride—including his own—distorted his radicalism, contaminated his last book, and finally drove him into the arms of worldly authority.

Unlike Hobbes's Prometheus, this dutiful rebel emulated Christ, acting not in the name of what he self-consciously imagined and invented but for the sake of overthrowing precisely such prideful "ways and works." Thus, Winstanley disowned the aspects of himself he associated with pride, with humans as creators. He disavowed the very rebelliousness that was inextricable from his reverence, portraying himself as the wholly innocent lamb of god. In this way, his very claim to reverence was his own form of pride, an ideal of an unreal purity by which he devalued, and sought to purify, the imagination and anger, the invention and willfulness, that he found in the Puritans but insisted were not intrinsically part of "created being."

While he claimed that his reverence authorized him "to turn the

[3] For a full argument about Hobbes, see George Shulman, "Hobbes, Puritans, and Promethean Politics," Political Theory 16, no. 3 (August 1988): 426–44, and "Metaphor and Modernization in the Political Thought of Thomas Hobbes," Political Theory, forthcoming.

world upside down" and obligated him to engage in a politics of revolt, we also see how the denial of his own rebelliousness was the central premise of his rebellion. As he claimed complicity in the victory over Charles, reckoned with the conventionality of his ideas, and took responsibility for the suffering of the diggers, his political action implicated him precisely in what he meant to purify from the world and himself. But Winstanley could not grant that the transgression he abhorred was central to the reverence he idealized. As he suffered on this cross, so his defeat at the hands of a far superior force reflected his own inner pressure toward an act of expiating self-sacrifice. Still seeking to deny his pride and find an authority to revere, he then created an imaginary orthodoxy in Law of Freedom, and finally he submitted to the real authorities he once attacked.

Winstanley was not defeated because he had tried to avoid the sin of pride; nor does his defeat prove Hobbes "right" about life and politics. But the issue of pride is Hobbes's way into the politics of his time. Pride is the truth that Hobbes always will remind us of, so that the issue becomes one of facing pride without becoming a victim of Hobbes's logic. Hence, Winstanley is not a hero to be resurrected or emulated literally. Rather, the specific story he told about Puritanism and revolution yields a parable about being a rebel and a creator: he appears as a character shaped by the very narrative he dramatized and subject to the very dilemmas and prideful creativity he diagnosed in others. Attending to the tale and not only to the teller suggests what is problematic about Winstanley's reverence: his refusal, in spite of his revolutionary project, to "own" his pride and see himself as other than god's obedient son. In this way, Winstanley reveals an important cautionary tale, inextricable from what he explicitly tried to teach about reverently shaping the self and world.

Thus, this study is not strictly a historical inquiry or intellectual history but rather an effort to build bridges between, on the one hand, Winstanley's language, theory, and action and, on the other, issues that still are troubling and controversial. It is constructed as a conversation across time in an effort to clarify what Winstanley, defeated by history, offers a modern reader.^[4]

[4] Accordingly, this study does not situate Winstanley's thought in all the various traditions on which it draws, and is not, except in footnotes, situated in the academic literature about him. It focuses on the significance of his thought, not on its derivation or originality, and the validity of my interpretation rests on his language, not on arguments with other commentators.