PART IV
THE MEANING OF DEFEAT

When I speak to you
Coldly and impersonally
Using the driest words
(I seemingly fail to recognize you
In your particular nature and difficulty)
I speak to you merely
Like reality itself
(Sober, not to be bribed by your particular nature
Tired of your difficulty)
Which in my view you seem not to recognize.
—Brecht

When these clay bodies are in the grave, And children stand in place.
This shows we stood for truth and peace and freedom in our days
And true-born sons we shall appear of England that's our Mother.
—epigraph to Winstanley's New Year's Gift

Defeat

In January 1650 Winstanley's New Year's Gift to Parliament and Army recounted the December harassment of diggers, which army troops permitted and watched. Affirming the diggers' continuing resolve, he declared, "Those diggers that remain have made little hutches to lie in, like calf-cribs, and are cheerful; taking the spoiling of their goods patiently, and rejoicing that they are counted worthy to suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness" (393). They were not merely passive, however. He told his readers they "have planted diverse acres of wheat and rye … and resolve to preserve it by all the diligence they can." The only obstacle is external: "poverty is their greatest burden, and if anything do break them from the work, it will be that" (393).

In March Winstanley collected into one book his earliest pamphlets, including The New Law of Righteousness , to which he added a new preface. He also published Fire in the Bush , perhaps his most poetic and intensely spiritual work, directed specifically at the churches and ministers. Against those who think that Winstanley had become "secular" in some simple sense, both books testify to the fact that he still sought a synthesis between the kingdom within and the kingdom without. But Fire in the Bush did not mention digging and lacked an explicitly political argument about rights and title, conquest and contract: the book's passionate interior gaze lit up a worldly endeavor whose failure seemed likely.

As if the diggers were blessed by God, however, eleven acres were ready to harvest by early April. In a letter to raise food and money, dated April 4, Winstanley pleaded, "If the hearts of any be stirred up to cast anything into this treasury, to buy victuals to keep men alive, and to buy corn to cast into the ground, it will keep alive the beginning of public freedom to the whole land, which is otherwise ready to die again for want of help" (439). While trying to solicit material support, Winstanley also made a last effort to engage Platt in debate. "Friday of Easter week," he lamented in his last pamphlet, "he came and brought his answer," in the form of a cataclysmic, and to all appearances final, raid (433).

Winstanley's response, however, was unrepentant. At Easter time he reminded his enemies that just as "the Scribes and Pharisees of old" had rejoiced when "they put Jesus Christ to death," so too "these English Pharisees, because they have acted the power of the Beast, and seem to stand uppermost for a time, they say they have routed the diggers" (436). But diggers have been routed neither "by scriptures" nor "by law," and surely "not by dispute, for your impatient, covetous, and proud-swelling heart would not suffer you to plead rationally" (436). He grants that "the power of self-loving pride bath for the present trod down our weak flesh," but "the strength of our inward man hath overcome them" (437).

Like Christ, diggers "bath tried Priests and professors of religion, and hath ripped up the bottom of their religion, and proved it mere witchcraft and cosonage, for self-love and covetousness is their god or ruling power" (437). Even as he acknowledged temporal defeat, Winstanley found solace in the reaffirmation of his commitments:

Though this work of digging upon the Commons have many enemies, yet I am assured of the righteousness of the work. And it shall take root in one

place or other before many years pass over Englands head. I can set no time, but I wait for the consolation of Israel to rise up and break forth in others, as I have a taste of him in myself. (432)

In looking back, one tends to fix history and imagine that events could not have occurred otherwise than they did. Winstanley, living at the time, was enraged and crushed by what he rightly saw as the choices of the elder brothers:

If you do not run in the right channel of freedom, you must, nay you will, as you do, face about and turn back again to Egyptian Monarchy; and so your names in the days of posterity shall stink and be blasted with abhorred infamy for your unfaithfulness to common freedom; and the evil effects will be sharp upon the backs of posterity. (535)

His understanding of the Lamb's defeat as an act of crucifixion, his dreams of vengeance, and his insistence that the elder brothers will be shamed did not express merely personal feelings but carried a political import. For the crucifixion of Christ was the defeat of an alternative to "the powers of the Dragon," which will bring even the elder brothers into torment and bondage. This is not a curse Winstanley or god will impose on them, but the poisoned fruit of their own choices: their own works will turn against them.^[1]

The Meaning of Defeat

The issue in Part IV, however, is not the meaning of the Dragon's victory or what actually happens to the elder brothers on the road they chose to take; rather, it is what defeat means to Winstanley and how he responds to it.

Borrowing terms Max Weber articulated in "Politics as a Vocation,"

[1] Winstanley knew that his enemies could not permit him to dig because of their inner covetousness and worldly interests, but he also knew that the elder brothers could have permitted digging if they had understood more fully the freedom and sainthood they professed to honor. Therefore, he believed the elder brothers made choices for which they were responsible. Indeed, it was Winstanley's sense that they had betrayed promises they themselves took seriously and thereby had betrayed themselves. And the consequences of that betrayal, he argued, would be the loss of their own political freedom, sacrificed to a restored "Egyptian Monarchy."

As Marx was to argue in The Eighteenth Brumaire , Winstanley argued that the propertied had turned against the poor and the commitments entailed by their own political poetry of liberty in order to protect their social power and property. They consented to Parliament's subordination to the executive power. It is this development to which Hobbes gives logical form in his argument for a Leviathan. (For Marx's comparison of Cromwell and Bonaparte, see Marx, Surveys from Exile: Political Writings , vol. 2, p. 232.)

one can say that Winstanley began to dig as the good son of "the god of love," who is in irreconcilable tension with "the demon of politics." Weber, I take it, had in mind that politics involves the demonic manifestations of tragedy: the discrepancy between intentions and consequences; the violence arising from insurmountable differences; the responsibility for maintaining (often by force) conventions made fragile by human depravity; and the terror of creating a world amidst the uncertainties and contingencies of historical time. Winstanley regarded these realities as consequences of pride and therefore as fugitive shadows of a life that is passing away. And he insisted that good sons and daughters will not be implicated in the nightmare they seek to exorcize. He need not "grow old with the devil," as Weber put it, because Christ rising will "swallow up in love" these demons within and without.

As Winstanley faced irreconcilable differences, however, he developed a new understanding of plurality; as he confronted violence, he addressed the problem of transgression and of how to expiate it; as he debated the ranters, he attended to the recalcitrance of desire and the fragility of convention. He developed a citizen politics that expanded what we have called his horizon of reverence. To be sure, he continued to insist that he was wholly unlike Cain, untainted by particularity, imagination, and prideful invention. But pressing circumstances and Winstanley's own innovative responses tended not only to highlight but also to subvert the radical distinction on which he premised his legitimacy. Indeed, the theoretical fruitfulness of his year as an activist arose from this ever-deepening tension between the good son's commitment to the god of love and the citizen's encounter with the demon of politics, which also constituted the cross he bore.

Winstanley's defeat, however, destroyed the narrative of Christ rising and reversed the identifications on which he had based his legitimacy. It is Winstanley who is cast out like Ishmael, as if he were the tainted fruit of an illegitimate marriage. It is he who is punished and exiled like Cain, as if he had transgressed the family relations and worldly authority blessed by god. It is he who loses the blessing like Esau, as if he had "despised" the birthright of his father. Thus, Winstanley's defeat drives him into what should be considered a fourth wilderness condition.

Winstanley is no longer the instrument of a god whose purposes he knows and embodies in action. The spirit that was the basis of his identity and rebellion is now absent from the world; the earth that was to nourish and free all her children has become passive and even helpless, the victim of enclosure; the poor, that human earth he hoped would

put forth blessed seed, are now barren of possibility. Winstanley no longer can believe in or enact the reconciliation of the self with history, flesh with spirit, and sons and daughters with God, the earth, and each other.

His defeat signifies that Christ has been crucified (in and as the poor), again "trod under foot," so that the power of darkness, or covetousness, is the undisputed ruler of actual existence and thus of the consciousness of most people. As the spirit is divorced from society and history and withdraws into interior spaces, the external world is drained of meaning (as Luther had found it), and Winstanley himself, cut off from history, ceases to join in his own action the inner and outer worlds. Unable to enact his testimony in the world, he is thrown back on himself. In such circumstances, what does it mean, and what is required, to go on living?

A year and a half after his defeat, in November 1651, the publication date of Hobbes's Leviathan , Winstanley completes The Law of Freedom in a Platform; or, True Magistracy Restored , a proposal for reform he hopes Cromwell will implement. Declaring in the preface that he had been "stirred up" to give his talent and words what he calls a "resurrection," Winstanley tells Cromwell, "I must speak plain to you, lest [my spirit] tell me another day, if thou had spoken plain, things might have been amended" (502–3). He gives Cromwell a "method" by which to resurrect "commonwealth's government, though [it] had been buried under clods of kingly covetousness and oppression a long time" (515).

Accordingly, The Law of Freedom does not testify that Christ is rising in the body and society to lift inner and outer bondage. Rather, it calls on Cromwell to become an "outer savior" who will construct a state and social institutions that will make the earth a common treasury and England a righteous commonwealth. Thus, Winstanley now theorizes as a political creator in a world without the historical promise of redemption: he never blames god for his defeat, but in his imagination he calls on humans to do the dirty work he once left to god. Having confronted his own "Machiavellian Moment," Winstanley puts his earlier insights into a different, perhaps more realistic or secular, form and takes full responsibility for creating and enforcing standards and practices he treats as conventional.

At the same time, however, Winstanley's sojourn in the wilderness has exacted an enormous price. He is overwhelmed by the powerlessness that leads him to write to Cromwell. No longer "holding a torch" to "the present state of the world that is burning up like parchment in the fire" (252), he has become a "watchman in the nighttime of the

world" (255), only able to offer Cromwell a book he calls "a candle." As if his despair about the prospect of making a worldly difference overcomes his effort at resurrection, he ends the book with a poem in which he longs for death:

Truth appears in light, Falsehood rules in power;
To see these things to be is cause of grief each hour.
Knowledge why didst thou come, to wound and not to cure?
I sent not for thee, thou didst me inlure.
Where knowledge does increase, there sorrows multiply
To see the great deceit in which the world doth lie.
Man saying one thing now, unsaying it anon
Breaking all's engagements, when deeds for him are done.
Oh power where art thou, that must mend things amiss?
Come change the heart of man and make him truth to kiss.
O death where art thou? Wilt thou not tidings send?
I fear thee not, thou art my loving friend.
Come take this body and scatter it to the Four
That I may dwell in One and rest in peace once more.

Lacking the power to "mend" the split of inner and outer worlds, Winstanley's knowledge is impotent and therefore sorrowful. Despite the voice that says "thou shalt not bury thy talent in the earth" (510) Winstanley also must feel that his attempted resurrection of digger principles cannot bring to life a world that is deadened by the withdrawal of spirit. Thus, his defeat as an actor enables him to become a creator, at least in imagination, but his despair makes him into a certain sort of creator. Absent from his text as actor, he therefore authors a proposal for others to implement, but those proposals are poisoned by the defeat that signifies the absence of god's spirit and his own agency. As a result, he jeopardizes the freedom he means to promote.

Therefore, the relationship between the death of spirit and Winstanley's birth as a creator is central to the analysis of what is innovative and troubling in The Law of Freedom . Until recently, this discussion would have ended a narrative about Winstanley because virtually nothing was known about the remaining twenty-five years of his life. There was a certain poetic aptness in this disappearance, as if his political defeat and wish for death led to a meaningful silence and his absence from public life. How he lived those years, however, has been documented.

Little is known about Winstanley from 1651 until 1657, when his father-in-law gave him and his wife Susan property near Cobham. But she must have died, for in early 1665 local records show that a Gerrard Winstanley recently married to Elizabeth Stanley, had established residence

in a London suburb. By way of the estate he gained through his first wife's father, Winstanley apparently reestablished himself in Cobham as a landowner, and his second marriage was to the daughter of prominent Cobham gentry. Moreover, the Cobham parish register notes the baptism of two children, a daughter in 1667 and a son in 1670. More significantly, the documents reveal that Winstanley served as waywarden of Cobham parish in 1659 and 1666, overseer of the poor in 1660, churchwarden in 1667 and 1668, and chief constable in 1671. He died in 1676 as a Quaker.

Although The Law of Freedom may have failed as resurrection, it seems to have succeeded as an act of closure, and thus as a new beginning. As the documents suggest, the disinherited younger brother becomes a respected man of property, a father in his own right, and an officeholder in the very institutions he had criticized so powerfully. As a consequence, the following discussion about his imagined transformation of the Puritan household must become a halfway house to a final chapter about an unexpected rebirth, in which he literally returns as a father to the house of the fathers. The task of that chapter is to make sense of the astonishment J. D. Alsop expressed at his remarkable discoveries about Winstanley:

It is difficult enough to credit that the millenarian who denounced trade in the 1640s as unjust and often dishonest eventually reentered London commerce as a Quaker. It would appear incredible that the outspoken heretical critic of established religion became a churchwarden, and the Digger agitator who disrupted society held office as a chief constable—particularly when these activities took place at Cobham, the scene of his radicalism. Yet the evidence is straightforward.^[2]

The interpretation, of course, is not.

[2] J.D. Alsop, "Gerrard Winstanley: Religion and Respectability," The Historical Journal 28, no. 3 (1985): 705–9.

Chapter VIII
Remaking the Fathers' House

It is a fearsome thing to kill.
But it is not granted to us not to kill.
—Brecht

Is it any wonder if, filled with the "political drive" as he himself says he was, [Plato] attempted three times to … do for all Greeks what Mohamed later did for his Arabs: to determine customs in things great and small and especially to regulate everyone's day-to-day mode of life. His ideas were as surely practical as those of Mohamed were practical: after all, far more incredible ideas, those of Christianity, have proved practical! A couple of accidents here and a couple of other accidents fewer—and the world would have seen the Platonization of the European South…. But success eluded him: and he was thus left with the reputation of being a fanaticist and utopian—the more opprobrious epithets perished with Athens.
—Nietzsche

The Law of Freedom is the fruit, mature and bitter, realistic and fantastical, of Winstanley's defeat. In what senses has he, as Weber urged, "grown old with the devil?" Has he, as Marx argued, admitted "his sins to be what they are" and thus "struggled" against "his internal priest, his own priestly nature"? The Law of Freedom surely is intended to "resurrect" his talent and common freedom, but any resurrection presumes a death, and the question is how that death shapes his learning and his last book.

Consider, first, how Hobbes and the Puritans interpreted the defeat of the theodicy that had justified political rebellion. Hobbes premised his science of conventionality on the assertion that theodicy, the idea

that history has a redemptive purpose, was a vainglorious and dangerous error. In part, he called his great book Leviathan to invoke the Book of Job, for he "humbled the children of pride" by discrediting the idea that god had authored a purpose in history and human action to fulfill it. In this way, Hobbes revealed the conventionality of authority and thereby both the problem of disorder and the human invention that could provide salvation from it. He believed that once the idea of redemptive history was exposed as a dangerous fantasy, rebels would fear their pride and therefore submit reverently to a state of their own creation. In this way, he envisioned Promethean invention arising from the grave of redemptive history and radical politics.

Not coincidentally, Puritan sermons during the interregnum shifted in focus from the Book of Revelation, which foretells the resurrection of Christ and the creation of god's kingdom on earth, to the Book of Job, which defeats such dreams. Identifying themselves with Job, Puritans apparently felt unsure of god's purposes and justice; indeed, they had become fearful of the chaos caused by what they now deemed the prideful claim to god's sanction. As Puritans even used Hobbes's arguments, they abandoned a politics justified by the unfolding of god's spirit in history and expressed through the language of grace and liberty. Their crisis of faith and fear of disorder led them toward the de facto authority that assured order and property.

Winstanley's last book speaks to this political crisis experienced partly in spiritual terms. Never having believed in a transcendent god, Winstanley could find no solace when god withdrew from the world. Unlike Luther or the Puritans, Winstanley could not find life in a spirit that was merely internal, and thus, he could not find spirit in a life that was merely private. For this reason, his own crisis must have been far more profound than that faced by his elder brothers. As a result, however, he resists their political response and Hobbes's teaching. Winstanley's contention that England is returning to "Egyptian Monarchy" suggests not only his fear of political regression but also its relation to spiritual deadening, just as the image of pyramids suggests slave labor and the construction of a death-in-life, the absence of political self-determination and the burial of spirit. Thus, whereas the Puritans and Hobbes sever piety from collective action, Winstanley believes both are in jeopardy.

As Hobbes's arguments suggest, however, Winstanley's ability consciously to create conventions arises precisely from the defeat of redemptive history. But he still relates inward autonomy to "freedom in the earth" and collective action, and therefore he still tries to "resurrect"

the radical politics that Hobbes hopes to bury along with redemptive faith. Thus, Winstanley moves beyond the horizon of his earlier reverence, but in order to "resurrect" a "commonwealth's government" that empowers the poor. In The Law of Freedom Winstanley no longer bears witness to the history god authors and he enacts, but rather he becomes the author of the narrative by which the poor can reach the Promised Land. This change not only suggests his despair about redemptive history and his powerlessness politically, but also shows their innovative fruits. Crucified as an activist, he is reborn as a theorist who tries to reform a world deprived of god's empowering spirit, as well as an artist who creates an imagined world in which falsehood does not rule in power."

Yet Winstanley becomes a certain kind of creator because the spirit in people has been crucified: he tries to reconstruct, rather than supplant, the house of the Puritan fathers. He returns to his Puritan antecedents, imagining an extensive disciplinary apparatus, endorsing the pervasive exercise of paternal power, and excluding women from any role in public life. What appear from one point of view as secular expedients, however, appear from another as integral to a commonwealth intended to guarantee the reverence, nourishment, and unity he once deemed the fruit of "God's work." Thus, a platform of human invention shaped by realistic expedients and by a continuing dream of reverence is also a dream of solace.

Winstanley still rejects propertied Puritanism, and he does not build Leviathan. But the impact of his defeat, reflected by his view of paternal authority, fraternal citizenship, and the role of women, will demonstrate how and why his final book fails as politics and art.^[1]

The Preface: A Political Theorist Speaks Truth To Power

The body of the text of The Law of Freedom is sandwiched between a preface written to Cromwell, in which Winstanley speaks of his powerlessness and tries to prepare Cromwell for what is to follow, and a final poem longing for death. Winstanley's awareness that his only hope

[1] This chapter provides an alternative to the views of two commentators on Winstanley. On the one hand, Christopher Hill basically reads The Law of Freedom as a welcome secularization of Winstanley's thought, an advance theoretically and politically. In contrast, in Utopia and the Ideal Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), J.C. Davis mistakenly and intemperately argues that Winstanley's utopia is totalitarian. The truth is not located in between these views but is of a totally different cast.

(however dim) lies in his enemy poignantly sets the tone for the book. His handling of this painful relationship reveals him speaking in the classic voice of a political theorist and suggests an instructive parallel with Thomas More in Book I of Utopia .

Like More, Winstanley now addresses the problems of power and counsel. Declaring his powerlessness to remedy directly "the confusion and thick darkness that hath overspread our brethren," he offers a "candle" to Cromwell but feels helpless to assure whether Cromwell will live by its light (510). Indeed, Winstanley knows that he and his ideas are likely to be dismissed. As he said before, "freedom comes clothed in clownish garments," but now he specifically plays the jester to a king: like More, he ironically casts himself as the fool. He warns Cromwell not to be put off by appearances: "Take off the clownish language, for under that you may see great beauty" (510). The problem of his marginality and the prejudice of others, evoked by the clothing metaphor, requires that The Law of Freedom be a teaching device that instructs Cromwell in a new way of seeing the world.

As Winstanley once warned that god's truths appear strange to those who are strangers to god, now he describes a "house" that appears strange: "Though thou understand it not at first sight, yet open the door and look into the house, for thou mayest see that which will satisfy thy heart" (515). As a house, The Law of Freedom is like the island in Utopia: both are transformative places because they estrange the reader from the familiar. To enter the house Winstanley has imagined is to see the world in a new way so that one can act differently. A fictional construction of a house, therefore, could teach Cromwell how to learn the right "method" of building an actual commonwealth. Thus, The Law of Freedom is not only a teaching device, a work of heuristic fiction, and an imaginary house but also the foundation for a real house, a platform for a practical program that is based on existing conditions and designed according to digger principles.

In both regards, Winstanley speaks to Cromwell as a potential Moses:

God hath honored you with the highest honor of any man since Moses' time, to be Head of a People who have cast out an oppressing Pharaoh…. And God hath made you a successful instrument to cast out that Conqueror and to recover our land and liberties. (501)

Originally, Winstanley spoke Moses' words and insisted that they were authored by god; he had written from within the exodus narrative, which he insisted was being "materially fulfilled" by god and his own action. Now the exodus narrative has become a metaphor by which

Winstanley flatters Cromwell and teaches him what it means to be a Moses in his time.^[2]

That teaching recapitulates Winstanley's earlier arguments, derived from "natural experience" and the "grievances and burdens of the poor" and illustrated by Scripture. Not surprisingly, Winstanley reminds Cromwell that the Hebrews treated Canaan "as a common treasury of livelihood to the whole commonwealth of Israel. They made provision for every tribe and for every family in every tribe, nay, for every particular man in a family." Only in this way was "Israel, in all his families and tribes made a free commonwealth in power as well as in name" (524–25).^[3]

Winstanley's specific instructions to Cromwell suggest other parallels with More. To be a Moses, Cromwell must abolish clergy, tithes, and churches, lawyers and kingly law, and landlords and property. He also must institute a commonwealth in which communal production is distributed through "storehouses" according to need, and in which political power is based on yearly elections in parishes, counties, and the nation. Winstanley summarizes the platform to follow:

Every family shall live apart as now they do; every man shall enjoy his own wife and every woman her own husband, as now they do; every trade shall be improved to more excellency than it now is; all children shall be educated and be trained up in subjection to parents and elder people more than now they are. The earth shall be planted and the fruits reaped and carried into storehouses by common assistance of every family; the riches of the storehouses shall be the common stock to every family: there shall be no idle person nor beggar in the land. And because offenses may arise from the spirit of unreasonable ignorance, therefore the law was added. (515)

Like More's character Hythlodaeus, Winstanley anticipates Cromwell's fears:

Some hearing of this Common Freedom, think there must be a community of all the fruits of the earth whether they work or no, [and] therefore strive to live idle on other mens labors. Others, through the same unreasonable

[2] Winstanley is in the position of other radicals facing a hostile regime once opposition has failed. For example, Proudhon made a similar appeal to Bonaparte after the coup of 1851. Moreover, it is tactically the case that the dependence of the propertied on Cromwell could have given Cromwell room for independent action.

[3] Offering what will be his final definition of freedom, Winstanley says, "Freedom lies where a man receives nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the Earth: for as man is compounded of the four materials of the creation, fire, water, earth, and air, so is he preserved by the compounded bodies of these four, which are the fruits of the earth [without which] he cannot live" (519). Since "a man had better to have no body than to have no food for it," he continues, "this restraining of the earth from brethren by brethren is oppression and bondage, but the free enjoyment thereof is true freedom" (520).

beastly ignorance, think there must be a community of all men and women for copulation, and so strive to live a bestial life. Others think there will be no law, but that everything will run into confusion for want of government…. Therefore, because transgression doth and may arise from ignorant and rude fancy in man, is the law added. (526)

The fears of the propertied, no longer groundless, suggest the necessity of law and punishment:

If any say this will nurse idleness, I answer: … idle persons and beggars will be made to work. If any say this will make some men to take goods from others by violence and call it theirs, because the earth and fruits are a common stock, I answer: though storehouses and public shops be commonly furnished by every family's assistance and for every family's use … if any man endeavor to take away [another's] house, furniture, food, wife, children … such a one is a transgressor, and shall suffer punishment. If any man do force or abuse women in folly, pleading community, the following laws do punish such ignorant and unrational practice, for the laws of the commonwealth are laws of moderate diligence and purity of manners. (527)

Located between the Puritans who fear idleness, anarchy, and promiscuity and the ranters who endorse such behavior, Winstanley promises to respond to both, but through a commonwealth that shares the earth and political power.^[4]

Like Book I of More's Utopia, Winstanley's preface introduces the practical goals of reform while beginning to reorder deeper perceptions about what is necessary and possible. Unlike More, however, Winstanley has resigned himself to the role of counsel only after the failure of the redemptive history that he believed would abolish kings and thereby counselors.

Consider, then, the changes that have led Winstanley to turn toward Cromwell and sound like More. As he says toward the end of The Law

[4] Like the character Morus in More's Utopia, the fictional Cromwell offers principled objections: he argues that tithes and property are the fruit of a "righteous" law of mine and thine, so that Winstanley's proposals rob men of their just due. Like Hytholodaeus, Winstanley inverts these claims. On the one hand, he argues that tithes and wealth are "stolen goods" and that a property system enshrines "theft, violence, and continual cheating." Moreover, since clergy, lawyers, and landlords "live at ease, feeding and clothing themselves by the labors of other men, not their own," their rank "is their shame not their nobility." On the other hand, he argues that a true commonwealth would make it possible to fulfill the Christian morality that Cromwell professes to honor (512–16).

Winstanley also means to answer Cromwell's practical objections, which parallel those of Morus: sharing the earth will create poverty, idleness, anarchy, and—here he differs from Morus—promiscuity and "community of women." In response, Winstanley promises to enforce a common obligation to work, and to create a private sphere that other individuals cannot invade: "The commonwealths laws are to preserve a mans peace in his person and his private dwelling, against the rudeness and ignorance … in mankind" (527).

of Freedom, "seeing the child is come to birth, now let it appear … whether you will receive Christ, who is the spreading spirit of freedom … or whether you will return to monarchy, to embrace Egyptian Bondage" (585). Winstanley still is committed to a moral community that honors the Golden Rule, but the "child" that is born is variously described as the "name" of commonwealth or a "law" of righteousness or freedom. Whereas Christ was once a power in the heart that would enable men and women to refashion their government (from below), now Christ is simply a standard, powerless in itself, that becomes powerful only if enacted into law by government (from above). Whether the helpless child actually will grow up and knit people together depends now on Cromwell and government, not god.

These changes entail other crucial changes in Winstanley's premises. First, he no longer presumes the inner regeneration of sons and daughters. The failure of Christ to rise automatically and universally means that fallen men must be taken as they are. For the first time in Winstanley's writings, order is a necessity as essential as sincere milk and food. Secondly, since history and nature no longer automatically produce righteousness in each person, people must use their own hands and minds to fashion the righteous laws that address the problem of covetousness and the necessity of order. Christ's spirit does not disappear, but it can reappear only by way of the Mosaic government that was its antithesis.

Thirdly, punishment thus has become essential to the common preservation Winstanley still seeks. His willingness to punish reflects his awareness that god's withdrawal requires precisely the acts his piety once forbade: freed from the need to be god's loving servant, he no longer denies his anger or disavows punishment. As always, however, his concern is to meet necessities in a way that makes people free: the necessity of order requires law; law requires punishment; and only if people make law and take on punishment in the right sort of way can they protect their freedom without jeopardizing it.

These changes create dilemmas that the preface does not address but that are suggested by Marx's response to the defeat of 1851 and made explicit by Lenin. Marx and Winstanley initially premised political action on a faith that people's direct experience would disclose the truth about their world. Believing that "Christ rising" and class consciousness emerged as it were automatically from experience, each theorist imagined that philosophy, political education, and political leadership would be rendered superfluous. For each, the defeat of this dream led to valuable innovations, but ones fraught with danger.

After The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx saw that direct experience deceived people, so that theory and political education became necessary. He withdrew from politics to seek truth through theory: he wrote Capital . Since history no longer could be relied on to provide truth and thus to supply workers with a consciousness appropriate to making a revolution, Marx made theory the locus of a truth not manifest to the senses. Correspondingly, he built a party that, by becoming the source of workers' consciousness and action, could replace existence and history as the motor of class struggle. As thought and action no longer were united in the workers, there developed a split between a conscious party and workers submerged in a mystified social life.^[5]

After 1905 Lenin exemplified these tensions implicit in Marx's work. Most important, he manifested an ambiguity about the workers, for his advocacy of theory and the party was premised on a profound mistrust of their "spontaneity." Indeed, in the effort to wean workers from bourgeois ideology, Lenin's vanguard appeared like the god who refuses to pity or indulge the creature's weakness and suffering because redemption is at stake. The dangers here are obvious: the vanguard (and theorist) may disown the consciousness of its subject, so that theory and political education become a means of domination, if the elect creates an orthodoxy they protect from the popular thought and action they consider contaminating.

Just as Marx and his heirs resurrected philosophy and invented a party after history failed to generate class consciousness, so Winstanley had to provide theory and create leadership once Christ no longer was rising in sons and daughters. To be sure, defeat led Winstanley to accept the human invention that Marx and Lenin were to embrace from the beginning. Marx and Lenin, however, reveal the crucial issues and problematic responses engendered by the failure of Winstanley's initial historical vision.^[6]

After all, in The Law of Freedom Winstanley implicitly plays god to

[5] For the arguments about Marx that have shaped my reading of Winstanley's final changes, see Jerrold Seigel, Marx's Fate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) and Harold Rosenberg, "The Pathos of the Proletariat," in Act and Actor (New York: World Publishing, 1970).

[6] By revealing the spirit in matter, Winstanley's conversion brought him into politics to "own" it in action. That an inner conversion should animate the world and create a political connection to it—should join inner and outer kingdoms—might seem paradoxical to Marx, who understood "spirit" only as evidence of an interior split off and alienated from the world. For Marx, the world is not alive, but politics and human action can animate it, bring it to life. This is the position toward which Winstanley is propelled by his defeat; but since he moves there under the pressure of believing that the world has been deadened by god's withdrawal, he does not really believe he can bring it to life.

Cromwell's Moses and explicitly calls on Cromwell to be a "man-savior" to the people. In addition, Winstanley's turn to a human creator is premised on a doubt about the piety or spirit he intends to promote, and it is not clear in the preface whether the "head of power" simply rules a social body without spirit or brings that spirit to life. Has Winstanley written a script in which Cromwell imposes orthodoxy, or founds freedom?

Winstanley initially worked out the relationship between creature and creator internally and psychologically so that his inner religiosity was shaped by the tensions between reverence and freedom, submission and empowerment, purification and transformation. Now these tensions are suggested by the relationship between Cromwell and the poor. In what ways are the poor empowered as creators to define, feed, and discipline themselves as creatures? In what ways do they remain merely creatures, passively taking the form given them by their human creator?

Setting the Reformation in Motion

Now that social change does not originate with the direct action of the poor authorized by god, it must originate in Moses, who is the "head" of the "body of the people." After the preface, however, Cromwell is never mentioned. As the exodus story shows Moses authorizing each tribe to appoint elders, who later become the rulers of Israel, so Winstanley imagines Cromwell initiating a process of self-governance and rendering himself superfluous. At the moment, Cromwell is the "head" of the people, but his role requires that he create another and different head, one more closely linked to the body: "Therefore, seeing England declared a free commonwealth, and the name thereof established in law, surely then the greatest work is now to be done … that the power and the name may agree together" (535).

Cromwell is to initiate the transition Winstanley still believes is the heart of reformation: turning a kingdom into a commonwealth. The text makes clear that Parliament (and not Cromwell) is to become the real "father of the land": "For as a father's tender care is to remove all grievances from the oppressed children, not respecting one before another, so a Parliament is to remove all burdens from the people of a land." And like a father, its "eye and care must be principally to relieve the oppressed ones" (536). Parliament can be "tender hearted," however, only if Cromwell restores "successive Parliaments" and reforms the franchise. Once Parliament is a legitimate head of power, the social body, or root of power," can be reformed.

Winstanley argues that "all those interested in monarchical power and government ought neither to choose nor be chosen officers to manage the commonwealth's affairs, for those cannot be friends to common freedom" (542). The criteria for exclusion are lending money to the king's army, fighting in that army, or buying and selling crown and church lands. Since these men are "members of the covetous generation of self-seekers" who "take away other mens rights," and "lest that ignorant spirit of revenge break out in them to interrupt the common peace," they are "for the present … unfit to be chosen officers or to choose" (542–43). Winstanley addresses the Machiavellian problem of what to do with the enemies of innovation by undermining the political power of "monarchy men" and preventing them from extending their enclosure of the earth. Exclusion is not permanent, however, and Winstanley's motives are not vindictive:

I do not say that they should be made servants, as the conquered usually are … for they are our Brothers and what they did, no doubt, they did in conscienable zeal, though in ignorance. And seeing but few of the Parliaments friends understand their common freedom, though they own the name commonwealth, thereby they … ought to bear with the ignorance of the Kings party … though for the present they be excluded. (542)

Though he characterizes the people as "charmed, fooled, and besotted" by ignorance and indoctrination, he does not call them covetous, and he believes they have an interest in freedom and therefore considers them eligible to vote. Accordingly, he recommends the criteria they should use for choosing leaders from among themselves. In general, "unfit to be chosen" are

all uncivil livers, as drunkards, quarrelers, fearful ignorant men who dare not speak the truth lest they anger other men; likewise all who are wholly given to pleasure and sports, or men who are full of talk. All these are empty of substance, and cannot be experienced men. (542)

Though not "fit," such people are not legally precluded from being chosen, and they still "have a voice in choosing." They become the foil by which he defines those who are "fit to be chosen." First, he advises, "Choose such as have a long time given testimony by their actions to be promoters of common freedom" regardless of their religious views or church membership. Second, "Choose such as have suffered under kingly oppression," even if they weren't active supporters of Parliament, because "they will be fellow feelers of others bondages." Third, "Choose officers out of … those men who are forty years of age, for these are most likely to be experienced men." In general, he concludes,

all these are likely to be "men of courage, truly dealing, and hating covetousness" (542).

Winstanley's presumption appears to be that a righteous vanguard will be created because the poor at least can recognize their own necessities and those who would meet them faithfully:

For indeed, the necessity of the people choose a Parliament to help them in their weakness, and where it sees a danger like to impoverish or enslave one part of the people to another, [it is] to give warning and so prevent that danger, for [it is] the eyes of the land. And surely those are blind eyes that lead the people into bogs, to be entangled in the mud again, after they are pulled out.

Winstanley now believes that people must admit their "weakness and necessity" and rely on the eyes of men who are courageous, experienced, and less subject to "the slavish fear of men." Nonetheless, the people do more than choose their officers but are totally involved in the process of lifting bondage. They constantly deliberate in the parishes about their grievances, and after discussion, they ratify or block Parliament's proposed responses. "Because people must all be subject to the law, under pain of punishment," Winstanley insists, "therefore it is reason they should know it before it be enacted, that if there be anything of … oppression in it, it may be discovered and amended" (558).

As this advice suggests, Winstanley does not put blind faith in rulers: representatives all too easily become corrupt. He insists on frequent elections because "the heart of man is so subject to be overspread with the clouds of covetousness, pride, and vainglory" that "public officers" long in office "will degenerate from the bounds of humility, honesty and tender care of brethren" (540). He also argues "that whereas many have their portions to obey, so many have their turns to rule" in order to encourage all men "to advance righteousness and good manners in the hopes of honor," to develop "able and experienced men, fit to govern," and to enhance "the health of our nation and the education of our children" (540–41).

But the political framework of republican government, local participation, and rotation in office does not comprise a sufficient response to covetousness and ignorance. Like More, Winstanley links the political and social project of eliminating outer bondage to the social and psychological project of counteracting pride. The issue, then, is not what a founder imposes on the people but the horizon of reverence citizens themselves create and obey: in the absence of god's spirit, how do they try to nurture and free themselves?

Family and Society: Creating a New Household

Winstanley exemplifies a moment in history when the individuating aspects of modernity had not yet fully dissolved the corporate sensibility of feudalism. Therefore, his social platform democratizes the corporate body of the feudal order and rejects the feudal idea of treating the individual only in terms of an ascribed place in a fixed hierarchy. Winstanley gives each individual one vote and equality in production, yet he rejects individualism and retains the feudal idea of membership in a social body.

The true commonwealth is functionally differentiated into various types of agriculture and manufacturing, which operate without the mediation of the market. In contrast to the Puritans and Hobbes, Winstanley proposes that farms, storehouses, and guilds be organized communally and directed by locally elected officials. As he democratizes the economy, so too he proposes that people elect political officials at the parish, county, and national levels. By covenanting to establish "foundation freedoms," he says, the English can establish a society in which

Every freeman shall have a freedom in the earth, to plant or build, to fetch from the storehouses anything he wants, and shall enjoy the fruits of his labors without restraints from any. He shall not pay rent to any landlord and he shall be capable of being chosen any officer if he be above forty years of age, and he shall have a voice to choose officers though he be under forty. (597)

Winstanley no longer believes, however, that these freedoms suffice to address the problem of order. Repeating his earlier rhetorical question, he asks, "Having food and rayment, lodging and the comfortable society of his own kind, what more can a man desire in the days of his travel?" But now he responds, "Indeed, covetous, proud, beastly minded men desire more." He returns to his Puritan antecedents: he no longer rejects paternal authority, social discipline, law, or punishment. One should keep in mind, though, that in crucial ways Winstanley always was Puritan in his temperament and premises. Indeed, because of his seriousness about the Puritan commitment to self-determination, he tries to fashion a worldly authority that is genuinely democratic and whose discipline will empower. He therefore becomes a creator very different from Hobbes, but the despair about the spirit that makes his innovations necessary and possible also renders them problematic.

Like most feudal, early modern, and Puritan theorists, Winstanley begins in the family household, which he takes as the basic unit of life

and the model for society: "The original root of magistracy is common preservation, and it rose up first in the family" (536). In contrast to Hobbes, who insists on parental willfulness or "paternal despotism," Winstanley subjects paternal authority to democratic and moral limitations. "A father in a family is a commonwealths officer," but like all other officers, he "is to be a chosen one, by them who are in necessity, and who judge him fit for that work" (538). Thus, the legitimacy of authority depends both on consent and on its faithfulness in "meeting the childrens necessities." These include love, education, and discipline, as well as the physical protection that Hobbes emphasizes. Winstanley writes:

A father is to cherish his children til they grow wise and strong, and then as a master he is to instruct them in reading, in learning languages, arts, and sciences, and to bring them up to labor … in some trade, or cause them to be instructed therein…. He is to command them in their work … and not suffer them to live idle. He is either to reprove by words or whip those who offend, for the rod is prepared to bring the unreasonable ones to experience and moderation. That so children may not quarrel like beasts but live in peace like rational men. (545)

Though the father is granted a right to discipline children, he does not rule unilaterally in the home. Upon complaints from children, other citizens, apprentices, or elected "overseers" of production, he can be reproved or, if necessary, relieved of responsibility. The father is bound by the rules of an observant community, and his children have a right to oppose him by invoking those rules.

Winstanley's account of the family proceeds, however, as if women had no part in parental authority. When he says that the family's privacy is assured if the father fulfills his duty, and that children should be taken from a delinquent father, it is as if the mother did not exist. Indeed, Winstanley only addresses women explicitly when he declares their legal right to a husband of their choice and their legal obligation to nurse their own children.

The absence of women, the pronounced emphasis on paternal discipline, and the concern about the legitimacy of authority extend to the "bigger family, called a parish." Because "the body of the people are confused and disordered," says Winstanley, "offenses do arise." Therefore, every year the parish chooses officers to be "overseers." In part, they monitor social life and use persuasion to settle conflicts, without resort to legal adjudication; in part, overseers monitor economic life and supervise the work in households, shops, and storehouses. Through

rotation in office, people in the parish are to share in production of life's necessities and self-government, thereby learning virtue.

Winstanley's account of this parish life emphasizes discipline:

Mankind in the days of his youth is like a young colt, wanton and foolish, til he be broke by education and correction, and the neglect of his care or the want of wisdom in the performance of it, hath been and is the cause of much division and trouble in the world. (576)

But his goal is that children be "brought up like men, and not like beasts, that so the commonwealth may be planted with laborious and wise men, and not with idle fools" (576). Discipline is meant to provide the basis of education and ultimately freedom.

Once weaned, says Winstanley, a child should go to school "to learn to read the laws of the commonwealth, to ripen his wits … and so to proceed in his learning, til he be acquainted with all arts and languages." Then "they may be better able to govern themselves like rational men" (576). School is only one aspect of education, however, and is limited in duration:

One sort of children shall not be trained up only to book learning and not other employment, called scholars as they are in the government of monarchy.For then … they spend their time finding out policies to advance themselves to be lords and masters over their laboring brethren. (577)

To prevent the social division of mental and manual labor and its political consequences, Winstanley requires that schooling be followed by work in "such trades, arts, and sciences as their bodies and wits are capable of" (577), which continues until the age of forty.^[7]

Winstanley endorses a division of labor and power between the sexes. He proposes a different kind of education for each sex: "And as boys are to be trained up in learning and trades, so all maids shall be trained up in reading, sewing, knitting, spinning of wool or linen, music and all other neat easy works, either to furnish the storehouses with linen and woolen cloth, or for the ornament of particular houses" (579). Correspondingly, Winstanley is anxious that young men become good heads of household: "No man shall be suffered to keep house and have

[7] Winstanley's animus against "scholars" is not anti-intellectual. Indeed, he believes that removing property and eliminating poverty will generate an explosion in learning. "If men are sure of food and rayment," he imagines, "their reason will be ripe and ready to dive into the secrets of creation, that they may learn to see and know God in all his works" (580). As in More's Utopia , those over forty are entitled to devote themselves to learning as well as ruling, and the entire populace enjoys a "seventh day" set aside for parish discussions of "the arts and sciences."

servants under him til he hath served seven years under the command of a master himself. The reason is this, that a man may be of age, and of rational carriage, before he be a governor of a family" (600). By extension, only male heads of household will become citizens entitled to vote, and only elders (males over forty years of age) are entitled to be chosen as lawmakers.

Women are not rendered entirely powerless. Though envisioned as domestic, deferential, and passive, they are not without rights: girls get the same broad education as boys; young women work and are entitled to marry whom they choose; wives and mothers are not servants or slaves, for they explicitly retain their freedom if the husband is punished for any "offenses" (597). Nonetheless, women are excluded from public life and from Winstanley's language. His specific references to women, however, suggest the reason for their exclusion and the meaning of their absence: their position is not merely unfortunate, but it reveals what is troubling in his way of conceiving the political relationship between fathers and sons.

Winstanley's demand that mothers nurse their own children would protect poor women from the common and exploitive practice of nursing the children of the wealthy, but it also suggests his renewed anxiety about assuring nourishment. Likewise, he proposes the death penalty for rape, which would protect women's "bodily freedom"; but by stipulating also that the partner of a woman who begets a child must marry her, Winstanley shows his anxiety about her autonomy. Perhaps it seems to him that women's public role outside the family makes them available and tempting to men and frees them to consent to the desire they elicit.

But their role as dutiful sources of milk and love suggests a good deal more. Most obviously, just as the earth now appears as the passive and powerless source of nurturance requiring the protection provided by fathers and law, so, too, women become the protected and therefore captive providers of nourishment within a family ruled by a father. In both regards the authority of the actual fathers is meant to guarantee nourishment for all the children. But in the name of protection, women are made powerless and private by men anxious to control their bodies, love, and milk. As Winstanley once taught, anxiety about real food and literal milk discloses far deeper problems.

The sincere milk of god, I have argued, was an internal source of nourishment that made possible Winstanley's visceral connection to nature and the body, his sense of the beneficence of life itself, and, not

least, his acknowledgment of the autonomy of women. No longer able to trust that god will nourish and protect him, Winstanley perhaps has turned back toward real women as if to control them, who are the source of life. The absence of spirit in the world, which he experiences as his separation from the Father's breasts within, appears as the separation of women from the world. What he once embodied personally is now embodied by women, whose confinement makes trust possible once again. Thus, Winstanley's absence as an actor empowered by god is signified by the absence of women from public life, and hence their powerlessness signifies his own.

But in the absence of god's spirit, and therefore in the shadow of absent women, Winstanley becomes a builder: his platform proposes that fathers and sons become the birthing partners in the creation of culture. By way of a humanly invented reverence, he now fashions a world in which sons can be assured of what he once experienced internally and considered the natural inheritance of every human being. Indeed, he says he will not "meddle" with the interior drama of redemption, by which men and women who were the captives of culture had allied with nature and been empowered by the spirit animating it.^[8]

Now rebirth becomes an exclusively male art, as fraternal citizens and paternal authorities create a culture that uses education and punishment to stand against unregenerate nature as well as covetous culture. Once authentic piety and loving nature no longer provide an alternative to culture, Winstanley tries through his art to supplant nature and implant piety, which could be called the dream of culture. This dream appears as the externalization of Winstanley's religiosity. Instead of the androgynous god whose breasts provided the love and reasoned discipline that fed the soul and engendered Christ rising, one sees disciplinarian fathers and loving mothers who enable men under forty to become "song of freedom." Through his own imaginary invention Winstanley seeks to secure for other sons the autonomy, earth, and power that he failed to gain from a real father or as the good son of god and the earth. Thus, Winstanley is the son who creates a paternal authority that substitutes for the god within, but he also is the powerful and devoted father,

[8] Winstanley says in the preface:

I speak now in relation between oppressors and oppressed: the inward bondage I meddle not with in this place, though I am sure that if it be searched into, the inward bondage of the mind, as covetousness, pride, envy, hypocrisy, sorrows, fears, desperation, and madness are all occasioned by the outward bondage that one sort of people lay on another. (520)

legitimated by the necessities and consent of the sons. In both regards, as we will see, Winstanley imagines how men can create the grounds and limits of their worldly freedom. But since god cannot be trusted to nurture the soul of each, and the soul cannot be trusted to submit reverently to god, it then appears that fathers and sons replicate the domestication of women.

The State and the Sword

Winstanley now establishes freedom through a politics in which citizens voluntarily enact and enforce law. They must build a government that is "a wise and free ordering of the earth, and of the manners of mankind, by observation of particular laws or rules that all the inhabitants may live peaceably in plenty and freedom" (528). Indeed, Winstanley's reliance on law is intensified by his fear of disorder: "There must be suitable laws for every occasion, for almost every action that men do, for one law cannot serve all seasons, but every season and action have their particular laws attending thereunto for the preservation of right order" (528).

That law is a necessity, and necessarily extensive, however, makes Winstanley even more anxious about its legitimacy. Laws are legitimate only when fashioned by an annually elected Parliament, consented to by people in the parish, and appropriate to the nature, necessity, and grievances of every person. Winstanley says that when fathers make laws in this way, they act as servants of "the great lawgiver in the commonwealth, [which is] the spirit of universal righteousness." Then the people "are engaged by love and faithfulness to cleave close to" the fathers and the law (554). Fathers and sons should bind themselves to the law they choose, manifesting the reverence Winstanley once accorded to the god within.

Whereas Puritans and republicans build covenanted government on customary freehold and limited suffrage, Winstanley establishes political participation on a different basis. His "foundation-freedom" in the earth performs the same function as freehold and household, but for a different class. It frees the poor from personal subjection and thereby liberates them for public action and civic virtue. Therefore, he does not, like Puritans and republicans, feel compelled to exclude the poor from politics.

Like Puritanism and republicanism, however, Winstanley rearms the

political vocation he once tried to disarm. In the face of usurpation or conquest, he declares:

The necessity of common preservation, by reason of foreign invasion or inbred oppression, [does] move the people to arise in the army, to cut and tear to pieces either degenerated officers or rude people, who seek their own interest and not common freedom, … to enslave both the land and the people to their particular wills and lusts. (572)

With specific relevance to his present, citizens are obliged to fight only for a government that "rules well," and they legitimately may rebel against one that is corrupt. Like Machiavelli, Winstanley now believes that virtue requires people willing to fight and die for their liberties and earth, to act literally as soldiers.

The "necessity of common peace" also requires citizens to form a "ruling army," to "cause the unruly ones, for whom only the law was added, to be subject to it" (539):

And here all officers, from the father in a family to the Parliament in a land are but the heads and leaders of an army, and all the people arising to protect and assist their officers in defense of a right-ordered government are but the body of an army. (572)

Even though Winstanley maintains that only some will be "unruly ones for whom only the law was added," a few selections from the list of laws, offenses, and punishments reveal his underlying anxiety about disorder and his new willingness to punish, even with death. Sounding like Hobbes, Winstanley says: "If there were no power in the hands of officers, the spirit of rudeness would not be obedient to any law or government but its own will" (552). Although Winstanley insists that "no man shall be troubled for his judgment or practice in the things of his god, so long as he lives quiet in the land" (591), he no longer advocates the evangel message of not returning evil for evil: "He who strikes a neighbor shall be struck himself by the executioner blow for blow, and shall lose eye for eye, tooth for tooth, limb for limb, and life for life; and the reason is that many may be tender of one anothers bodies, doing as they would be done by" (591). He goes so far as to punish those who speak "reviling or provoking words" or "stir up contention," but his criteria reflect his longstanding concerns.

Whereas those who call "the earth his and not his brothers" shall be shamed publicly and "made a servant," those who actually "do buy and sell the earth or the fruits thereof" or "administer justice for money"

shall be executed "as traitors to the peace of the commonwealth" (595). Whoever preaches for money, rather than engaging in free discourse among peers, "shall be put to death for a witch and a cheater" (597). And not surprisingly, Winstanley anticipates transgressions that concern sexual relations: "If any man lie with a maid and beget a child, he shall marry her. If a man forcibly lie with a woman and she cry out and give no consent … he shall be put to death and the woman let go free; for it is robbery of a woman's bodily freedom" (599). Certain kinds of crimes jeopardize the foundation-freedoms of everyone. Buying and selling, preaching, and rape (acts committed by Winstanley's most threatening enemies) challenge the deepest values of the commonwealth. They also violate what is most sacred to people as creatures: their earth, their minds, and their bodies. To these acts he will not turn the other cheek.

Despite his willingness to punish, however, there are no grounds to argue that government imposes its inventions on an unwilling populace: no autonomous state power or standing army coerces people into a community of one heart and one mind. Like Hobbes, Winstanley is now acutely aware of the fragility of order, and yet unlike Hobbes, he unmistakably insists that people exercise power in unmediated and public ways. Thus, Hobbes arms the state, whereas Winstanley arms the people directly as a citizen militia. As a result, Winstanley declares hopefully, "If Parliament were not the representative of the people, who indeed is the body of all power, the army would not obey its orders" (562). Winstanley's realism consists in the insight that choice and consent are the only basis of a durable order: it is this insight he invariably emphasizes when he contrasts kingdoms and commonwealths.^[9]

Thus, the goal of the fathers' discipline is the freedom to make and keep covenants, which is achieved when the law citizens give themselves becomes what is most sacred to them. At the same time, citizens learn that the principle of "mutual preservation" must animate those laws and covenants if all are to be fed and empowered. With the right to consent to law, however, comes not only the duty to subject oneself to it but

[9] Because kingly power is not founded and reaffirmed continually by popular consent and action, "if it had not a club law to support it," says Winstanley, "there would be no order at all" (529). Thus, he insists to Cromwell:

I do not say, nor desire, that everyone shall be compelled to practice this commonwealths government; for the spirits of some will be enemies at first, though afterwards will prove most cordial and true friends thereunto. Yet I desire that … the ancient commons and waste lands and the lands newly got in by the armies victories … may be set free to all that have lent assistance … and to all that are willing to come into the practice of this Government…. And for others who are not willing, let them stay in the way of buying and selling … til they be willing. (513)

also the duty to punish transgressions in others. Just as Winstanley once argued that suffering the consequences of transgression taught Adam the reverence for limits that engendered freedom, so The Law of Freedom requires citizens to use punishment to instruct each other in the meaning of responsibility and mutuality. This is the sobering but fullest expression of membership in a "free commonwealth."

Since citizens consensually create and enforce a horizon of reverence, the problem in the text is not political tyranny. The issue is not the absence of consent, but what it is to which people consent, why they consent, and with what consequences; not the presence of worldly authority, but its character; not punishment, but its motives. That is, the problem lies in Winstanley's conceptions of authority, reverence, and righteousness, for even as he tries to constitute them democratically, he drains his platform of the spirit of rebellion to which he once testified.

Reverence and Freedom

Unlike women, sons literally constitute the authority to which they consent. In an ongoing way, they are entitled to criticize and replace officers, participate in deliberation, change laws by withholding consent, and object when a law is administered improperly. In extreme circumstances, Winstanley reserves to them the right to rebel. And of course, they can expect to become fathers themselves, who are eligible for office. Nonetheless, his metaphors and the example of women indicate what is troubling in the voluntary subjection of sons and fathers.

Winstanley's metaphors suggest that men are to replicate the "knitting together" that god once fostered and that women do literally, but only in private. "King's law," says Winstanley, "is the soldier who cuts Christ's garment into pieces, which was to have remained uncut and without seam," so that covetousness "moves people to fight against one another for those pieces, viz, for the several enclosures of the earth, who shall possess the earth and who shall rule over others." In contrast, a righteous government "unites Gentile and Jew into one brotherhood and rejects none; this makes Christs garment whole again and makes the kingdoms of the world to become commonwealths" (589).

Like women, too, sons are enjoined "upon pain of punishment" to "cleave" to the legitimate authority of the fathers:

All these officers are links in a chain; they arise from one and same root, which is the necessity of common peace, and all their works tend to preserve common peace. Therefore they are to assist each other, and all others are to

assist them, as need requires, upon pain of punishment…. And the rule of right government, being thus observed, may make a whole land, nay, the whole fabric of the earth, to become one family of mankind and one well-governed commonwealth, as Israel was one house … though it consisted of many tribes, nations, and families. (544)

Like women, sons willingly serve and sacrifice in obedience to the fathers; but whereas women are enjoined to nurture, sons are enjoined to discipline and punish. Plurality is knit together by mutual preservation, but this political art now requires punishing the transgressions that rip the fabric of reverence and threaten the commonwealth family.

Thus, Winstanley's inner struggle to submit to god by purifying himself now takes on a more punitive outer form: the law god once wrote and burned into the heart to cast out covetousness is created now by citizens and inscribed by them on each others' bodies. As a result, Winstanley's acceptance of violence is not brazen like Machiavelli's, or compulsively logical like Hobbes's, but stern and moralistic. Like the Puritan fathers whose inner need to punish he once diagnosed, Winstanley calls on good citizens to punish the particularity he still associates with Cain and Ishmael.

Part of what is troubling in The Law of Freedom appears here, for he has become a creator in the absence of god's inner authority and therefore in the presence of a deep fear about nature and self-control. As a result, Winstanley's newfound capacity to invent is put in male terms and turned against the life, desire, uncertainty, bodily knowledge, and power signified by the women these inventors protect and control. Partly, then, the book squelches the spirit that animated his own rebellion because he does not rely on, and indeed tries to control, what he believes is no longer being nurtured—and ordered—by god. Fathers and sons mutually tyrannize the kingdom within, whose motions no longer can be trusted to provide "inward understanding," and themselves as a social body, for they no longer can trust that inner piety will enable them to nourish themselves righteously. Thus, the willingness to punish and be punished suggests that fathers and sons anxiously and self-righteously build a "family" in order to wall in their own dangerous desires, just as they confine women. In this sense, The Law of Freedom does not so much betray Winstanley's radicalism as disclose that his sense of betrayal has cut the heart, and thus the women, out of it.

But fear of disorder does not suffice to explain what is troubling about the way Winstanley externalizes god's authority. Winstanley manifests the inner need to justify violence unequivocally and moralistically:

the necessity of violence intensifies his anxious insistence that it is surely righteousness his sword defends. Indeed, he dreams of constructing a morally perfect, ethically rational universe in which men know what is evil and only the evil suffer.

This dream requires at its foundation a certainty about righteousness, which becomes the basis on which fathers and sons cast out covetousness so as to knit together. As the necessity of order raises the problem of punishment, so the need to punish raises the problem of legitimacy; as the need to be legitimate raises the problem of establishing a common ground or justification, so the need for a common ground raises the problem of agreement. In the face of ongoing covetousness Winstanley tries to establish agreement about righteousness so that transgressions can be known and punished with moral certainty. Given covetousness and plurality, however, how can Winstanley imagine agreement about righteousness? Like Hobbes, he is aware of the problem, but he asserts:

You will say … men will differ so in their judgments that we shall never agree. I answer: there is but bondage and freedom, particular interest and common interest; and he who leads particular interest into a free commonwealth will presently be seen and cast out. (559)

The point is not so much that this is an unrealistic and unwarranted assertion, but rather that precisely this assumption liberates Winstanley to create, while it shapes that creation in troubling ways.^[10]

Winstanley can take on the judgment and vengeance of god and become a builder only by presuming the certain moral grounds god once provided him. With this faith he mobilizes impulses he once hoped to purify altogether: anger, invention, contention, accusation, and even the desire for honor are welcome and legitimate if directed against "particular interest" and channeled to serve "common preservation." Thus, fathers and sons engage in a purification process, on the presumption that what they punish in themselves and others is really "covetous" and that what they serve is truly righteous. As Winstanley continues to

[10] Taken as such, the effort to find a ground for his legitimacy as a builder is perfectly reasonable. And in part, his definition of common is also reasonable. Winstanley wants to say, All should agree that what is common is to be sought; that what is common includes "every particular body," at least for what is important. Moreover, he appears to believe that certain basic conflicts can be eliminated if men acknowledge that certain needs are common, or conversely, apply to needs the principle of the Golden Rule. That all require access to the earth and that guaranteed access depends, in turn, on sharing it, is still linked to his idea of god: "I cannot believe that our righteous creator should be so partial in his dispensation of the earth, seeing our bodies cannot live upon the earth without the use of [it]" (569).

split off, and now punish, the pride he associates with Cain, so he embodies his own will to purity in his vision of a transformed household. In this sense, he does not so much betray his radicalism as disclose the pastoral dream that always was troubling about it.

Holding to this dream after his defeat, however, represents for Winstanley a massive denial of his experience. When he lost the providential support of his historical narrative, he might have faced the pride in his claim to righteousness; unable to believe that he was the wholly reverent son of god, he might have granted that righteousness is not a matter of certain knowledge and that he lacked a guaranteed moral sanction. With this humility, he might have devised a politics in which what people revere, or the limits by which they define legitimacy, would emerge only through the moral risk and conflict that he precludes.

If reverence were not innately and introspectively recognized, but the uncertain and changing gift of conflict, then those who act could not presume certain moral warrant when they profess to defend justice or attack corrupt power in its name. Indeed, all actors would be at great risk themselves of transgressing because it may turn out that they are neither defending what is righteous nor punishing the guilty. Righteousness and reverence could not be separated so simply from the risk of transgression; reverence and rebellion could not be divorced from each other. Citizens then could not demonize those they punish for transgressions. Indeed, awareness that those they punish could embody an unappreciated good, a valid point of view, an essential value or interest, would give proper political form to the injunction "Love thine enemy."

But when Winstanley lost god's sanction, he continued to believe that he was a good son who had not transgressed god's truths. One can share his sense that he had not done wrong, yet one sees his continuing need to deny his own pride. After all, he had transgressed human law in the name of a divine law he could not prove; he proudly had insisted that the universe conformed to his conceptions of righteousness; by way of his god, he resentfully had raised himself above brothers he judged; he had endorsed bloodshed he could not redeem and had been responsible for suffering he could not expiate. An actual blood crime had enabled Cain to know the nature of his transgression, so that his exile deepened him, but Winstanley's certainty about the righteousness of sharing the earth prevents him from seeing the ways he is nonetheless bound to Cain as well as Ishmael and Esau.

For this reason, Winstanley's last book does not reflect the tragic self-recognition of Cain, who acknowledged his complicity in his plight and

perhaps built a city accordingly. Nor does it represent the tragic viewpoint of the Book of Job, in which there is unavoidable, valid, and valuable conflict between the perspectives of god and man, or authority and its subjects. Instead, Winstanley manifests the combination of anxiety, piety, and vengeance that he analyzed in the Puritans. Because of his fear of disorder and his dream of a righteousness immaculately conceived and piously defended, one therefore expects a city awash in blood. But Winstanley repeatedly asserts that punishment is only a last resort, and only for the obviously covetous few. In fact, his disciplinary system is extraordinarily restrained in severity, even if extensive.^[11]

Precisely in these regards, however, one finds what may be most troubling about The Law of Freedom . Winstanley believes that punishment is only for the few because he hopes to shape people who not only agree to a common standard but also conform to such an extent that transgression is radically reduced and punishment rendered virtually unnecessary. The romance behind the realism of Winstanley's household extends, then, from faith in a morally certain standard to the idea of constructing a morally perfect world, the project of fashioning people who internalize its standards in a way that preempts the need for coercion.

It is in this regard, too, that parallels with Thomas More are so striking. Like More, Winstanley links the elimination of private property to social institutions that will undermine the internal basis of covetousness in pride and, thus, in particularity. By narrowing the scope of the ego and the avenues of its possible aggrandizement, and by depriving the family and parish of functions that would promote exclusive kinds of identification, both theorists reduce radically the ways a person could constitute himself or herself as a being distinct from, and opposed to, others. Rather than privatize men, proscribe politics, and confront a liberated egoism with an awesome state, as does Hobbes, More and

[11] The system is based on a graduated series of responses to "offenders," who are "admonished" in private discussions and then, if there is a repetition of the offense, in public remonstrance. A third offense indicates that persuasion and shame have failed, and official judicial proceedings are initiated. In the meantime, the offender is not imprisoned: Winstanley says he wants to prevent the "cruelty" of prisons, and hopes that while awaiting trial, an offender "may remember himself and amend his ways." Even if found guilty, the offender is not imprisoned but set to work at hard labor. Even repeated offenses of most crimes result in hard labor, despite Winstanley's reference to "an eye for an eye." The death penalty is applied only for those crimes that threaten "foundation-freedoms." Surely this violates Winstanley's own ethical canon, for he could have imposed the punishment of servitude. Nonetheless, Winstanley's discipline is unbelievably mild compared to the brutality of the penal system at that time.

Winstanley proscribe egoism and politicize daily life so that social power can be exercised communally.

Thus, More and Winstanley rely on shame as the inner basis of "knitting together." In The Law of Freedom social life proceeds wholly in the eyes of others, and exposure to public gaze is central to the text: the family is like a fishbowl; the key to discipline is public remonstrances; the key to the usual punishment of hard labor is not pain but the shame of wearing different clothing and doing the most degrading work. In a passage startlingly reminiscent of More, Winstanley declares:

All those who have lost their freedom shall be clothed in woolen cloth, that they may be distinguished from the others. They shall be under the government of a taskmaster who shall apppoint them to be porters or laborers, to do any work that any freeman wants done. (597)

"To what end is this," he asks rhetorically, "but to kill their pride and unreasonableness, that they may become useful men in the commonwealth?" (597).

Winstanley does seek inner recognition of the reasons for law. He does intend to create "courageous men" undeterred by "slavish fear" and therefore able to defend new truths and challenge unjust authority. But there is a tension between his reliance on inwardness and his reliance on the censure of others. Perhaps guilt is now problematic to him: it can promote conflict, or at least a sense of one's separateness; it is manifested in the "conscienable zeal" of those who follow what they mistakenly believe is their inner light. As a result, he appears to rely on shame more than guilt, and it may be that he leaves the conscience unregulated precisely because it is not crucial to knitting people together.

Accordingly, one fears that the pressure of the social voice could overwhelm the otherness of the inner voice. Living in the scrutinizing glare of others' watchful eyes may restrict damaging forms of self-expression, but it does so by effacing particularity altogether. If one follows the argument of Marx's "On the Jewish Question," the materialism of "the Jew" might be the route to an emancipation that abolishes external forms of property; but that emancipation abolishes the "Jewish" sense of particularity, the self-possessed ego, which is rooted in the separateness of the body, as in the separateness of a people who stand apart.

That Winstanley proposes the mutual tyrannizing of shameful censure in the name of reason and love should be taken seriously. For behind his hostility to "reviling words," hypocrisy, selfishness, vanity, and

irresponsibility is the underlying "reason" that these violate the ideal of neighbor love. Especially after his defeat by these and other, less petty vices, Winstanley wishes for no one to be wrongfully hurt, to suffer as he did. Just as the anger in the text is released in the name of preventing harm, so the mutual surveillance of citizens arises out of love, but as the obsessive, stifling, and ultimately killing desire to protect one another from harm.

Finally, however, their desire to be their brethren's keeper is not the strongest motive compelling allegiance and conformity to law. What really obviates punishment and motivates conformity is not fear of physical punishment, love for the fathers, or love of others but rather the desire to be loved by one's neighbors and a corresponding fear of exile. Thus, whereas Parliament is the "father to the land," there is also a mother—though actual mothers are confined to the household, and the earth is not a loving presence. The mother of the commonwealth is the sons themselves, the "body of power," the fraternity that, as Norman O. Brown rightly says, is always a mother. As the confinement of women also suggests, the author of The Law of Freedom , defeated and spurned, disinherited by men and abandoned by god, might feel the need to be loved in particularly acute way.

Thus, the platform jeopardizes autonomy not just because the soul in each man, like the women, must be domesticated, and not just because Winstanley tries to resurrect his certainty about righteousness. In addition, the need for love, no longer satisfied internally, encourages a worldly submission that does not engender freedom. But this suggests how the authority of the brethren operates on the same terms as the god within. As his god never affirmed rebellion but fed only the submissive, feminine, and childlike soul, promising nurturance only to creatures who were internally submissive, so Winstanley felt ashamed of the ways in which he was a "being for himself," which he associated with rebellion. In other words, the need to be loved precluded any contention or even distance between himself and god.

Whereas god's love and Winstanley's own submission in fact encouraged his rebellion, his platform does not. Since he continues to disown his rebelliousness when he constructs a world in the absence of god, he premises nurturance and legitimacy on submission but without affirming rebellion and particularity. Because he still disavows the pride that was central to his piety, he theorizes a reverence toward worldly authority that promotes only obedience. In this sense, one can say that Winstanley does betray his radicalism, since he becomes a creator who

subverts the very inwardness and particularity, the risk and rebellion, that once made his own radicalism possible.

Winstanley's need for love and certainty suggest that his platform fails to sponsor freedom for the same reason that it fails to include women. Their absence and his final poem attest to the withdrawal of the spirit that animated the rebellion witnessed by his earlier texts. That spirit was not only reverent but also necessarily rebellious. Although he always denied his rebelliousness, it was the tension between his reverent declarations and subversive intent that brought his texts to life. Now that he is no longer a rebel, his reverence appears only in the guise of worldly authority; his spirit of righteousness appears without the rebellion that animated it. One sees the resurrection of reverence, but without the rebellion it authorized. Indeed, that resurrection presumes the death and burial of rebellion: as a result, Winstanley builds not a temple for the spirit but a tomb.

The text of The Law of Freedom fails artistically for the same reason the commonwealth fails politically: the lack of playfulness and rebellion in the commonwealth, as brethren anxiously watch over each other, be-speaks the lack of playfulness in the author himself, as if he were prescribing a strict regimen of truth and neighbor love to sickly souls. Here is the key difference between More, or Plato, and Winstanley. Like them, he intends to induce a perspective shift in his readers, by illustrating a "house" and "foundation." Like them, his desire to make this fiction real, to make corporeal a work of the imagination, leads to a specificity of detail that can create the impression of a deadening still life. (Indeed, readers tend to see these fictions as blueprints.) However, More and Plato create utopias that, like good still lifes, enhance or intensify our sense of life and choice. Their fictions stop time, but in order to take us deeper into our own time; their fictions seem inanimate, but heighten our awareness of the fictions that animate (and deaden) our lives. Winstanley's text does not accomplish this.

In part, the liveliness of Winstanley's text is undermined by its utopian form and detail. But the text also is deadened by his own confusion about its status as blueprint or fiction: his effort to create a house in the imagination is a desperate effort literally to resurrect the program that was defeated in the world. Whether as blueprint or work of the imagination, however, the text is also deadened by his despair, which leads him to fix life in a death-like dream. But one must say that More and Plato knew of the hopelessness of their political positions, and this awareness did not drain life from their texts. Indeed, one could say that their hopelessness

and alienation allowed them, even liberated them, to invest their life in a truth they consciously depicted as fiction.

Winstanley cannot do this. He still locates meaning only in lived action and hence cannot invest meaning in a text. Always insistent on the radical difference between god's truth and human fiction, how could he embody his truth in something he knew, or feared, was "merely" imaginary? He lacked the temperament or understanding, finally, to embody truth in a fiction he could take as such. As a result, he is no more playful with a text than he is with the commonwealth, or than citizens are with their own conventions, which they cannot take as fictions.^[12]

Thus, the text is of a piece politically and artistically: unable to see that reverence emerges by way of rebellion and that righteousness emerges only by risking transgression, Winstanley also cannot see that truths emerge by way of fictions. Just as the commonwealth fails politically because he disavows the rebellion to which it could have testified, so the text fails artistically because he disavows the imagination to which it actually does testify. Perhaps one could say, then, that the text fails not so much because of Winstanley's emptiness as because he never took his own full measure.

[12] The parallels to More are striking, although there is no evidence that Winstanley ever read Utopia . By far the most brilliant analysis of More is by Stephen Greenblatt in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Greenblatt sees More pushing to an extreme the connection between eliminating private property and effacing the deeply inward, guilty, self-conscious ego. The paradox for More, however, is that this self-effacement is enacted as the ultimate self-conscious act, canceled in its turn by the book itself as a monument to his genius. It is unlikely that Winstanley intentionally effaced his own inwardness or the particularity that made him a rebel; it is more likely that The Law of Freedom reflects his despair about the spirit. But even if he had not been defeated, he would never have appreciated the imagination, and therefore he never could have achieved as self-consciously playful, artful, and subversive a book as Utopia .

Chapter IX
From the Lamb to the Dragon

When does the butterfly in flight read what is written on its wings?
—Pablo Neruda

We should be able also to stand above morality—and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment, but also to float above it and play . How then could we possibly dispense with art—and with the fool? … And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us.
—Nietzsche

Later Life

After his defeat as a digger, Winstanley was disinherited in a double sense: exiled from the household of the fathers, he had lost as well the household of the true parents and regenerated children. Still believing that he was the good son who had honored and not transgressed god's truths, he built a city in his imagination, to create in his text a household from which he would not be exiled. His final poem, however, suggests his despair about a life he only could dream of transforming. Overcome by the impotence of his sorrowful knowledge, Winstanley longed for death: he did not know what it meant to live once forsaken by his god.

But Winstanley was not a Christ; he did not die. Nor was he an Abel, who died by Cain's hand. From one point of view he was more like Cain, who survived his rebellion to lead another life. From a different point of view, however, he ends up more like Isaac than he ever could have imagined in 1651, for he was not sacrificed, and he gained the inheritance and blessing of the fathers. What, then, is the relationship between his radicalism and his later life?

To James Alsop, quoted in the introduction to Part IV, it seemed that

Winstanley chose the way he led his later life and therefore wilfully and irrevocably broke with his earlier radicalism. Indeed, Alsop believes that Winstanley's radicalism was a momentary aberration in a life otherwise characterized by conformity. What he means is suggested by his uncritical textual use of ranter Clarkson's denunciation of Winstanley:

I made it appear to Gerrard Winstanley there was a self-love and vain-glory nursed in his heart, that if possible, by digging to have gained people to him, by which his name might be great among the Commonality of the Nation, as afterwards appeared in him a most shameful retreat from Georges-Hill, with a spirit of pretended universality, to become a real Tithe-gatherer of propriety.^[1]

By way of Clarkson, who had his personal reasons to hate Winstanley, Alsop implies that Winstanley always wanted an inheritance and the esteem of others. Thus, the motives that radicalized Winstanley also led him back to conformity: once he realized he could not gain the applause of the poor, but discovered that he had an inheritance and could earn the esteem of the propertied, this opportunist abandoned radical politics. In a concluding sentence that sounds triumphant, if not spiteful, Alsop declares: "The foremost radical of the English Revolution had become respectable."^[2] One suspects that Alsop takes satisfaction in this fact; but certainly he believes that Winstanley's later life sheds a sobering and disenchanting light on his radical period, if not on all radicals.

Whereas Clarkson's self-righteous scream of betrayal and hypocrisy suggests one stereotypical response to the later life, Alsop himself represents a second: smug "reality teachers" have always reduced radicalism to personal resentment and expected the inevitable return of prodigal children. A third stereotypical response is represented by Christopher Hill and T. Wilson Hayes: to detach Winstanley's radicalism from his later life, they depict him as a defeated victim who chooses silence. Like Alsop, they seek consistency—he by devaluing radicalism, they by imagining Winstanley as inwardly unrepentant and alienated.^[3]

[1] Alsop, "Gerrard Winstanley," p. 708.

[2] Alsop, "Gerrard Winstanley," p. 709.

[3] Hayes argues that Winstanley could not accept the "tyrannical alternatives" represented by the "champions of propertied society" or the "fanatical Fifth Monarchists." Therefore, he concludes, Winstanley soberly gave up public life: "He had spoken; he had acted. No more could be expected of him" (Winstanley the digger , p. 219). Although Hayes is right that Winstanley's silence might have been an act of wisdom, he himself wisely stays silent about Winstanley'sapparent conformity to "the champion of propertied society" and the fanatical state church. Christopher Hill simply says "Where else could he go after it became clear thatChrist was not going to rise in Charles II's England?" But Hill makes an argument Quakers that he chooses not to apply to Winstanley, even though Winstanley end a Quaker. Hill argues that defeat changed people's inner orientation so that they chose withdrawal, quietism, and life in the market (The World Turned Upside Down , pp. 299–306). To Hayes, Alsop rightly responds:

"The question is not what posterity expected of Winstanley, but what did he expect of himself?" And Alsop rightly concludes that Hill avoids the problems posed by the actual choices he made.

G. E. Aylmer offers a less self-serving point of view, arguing quite simply that there is a contradiction between Winstanley's earlier radicalism and his later life and that one should evaluate the validity of Winstanley's ideas and actions on their own terms.^[4] Surely this is the soundest approach, and I shall return to it shortly, but it leaves unasked the really interesting and important question: is there a connection between his earlier radicalism and his later life? Although inferences about Winstanley seem to disclose more about his interpreters than about him, there is evidence for a different inference about how his radicalism shaped his later choices. In retrospect, at least, The Law of Freedom seems like a halfway house: it suggests the inner connection between Winstanley's radicalism and his respectability.

In a truly uncanny way, the book foreshadows Winstanley's rebirth, the new life he begins to live. As it presumes the death of spirit and enjoins the absence of women, so it is followed by the death of his first wife. As it represents the death of his rebellion and turns against the piety that once animated him, so it is followed by a life characterized by outward conformity to the institutions he once criticized. As it signals the reassertion of family, private life and paternal power, so it is followed by remarriage, progeny, and an apparent focus on domesticity. As it describes the legitimate grounds for worldly authority, so it is followed by his accession to public offices in the very parish that had been the scene of his rebellion. As it is animated by his desire to belong and be esteemed by his peers, so it is followed by a life in which he gains respectability. As it reflects heightened anxiety about earthly nourishment and the misery of deprivation, so it is followed by a life in which he secures an independent source of nourishment and perhaps lifts the shame and inner sorrows he associates with poverty and wage labor.

In general, then, as The Law of Freedom represents Winstanley's dream of a reconstituted household in which he is a legitimate father add worldly authority, so it is followed by his literal return to the father's house, and as a father in his own right. He surely could not anticipate how his later life would parallel, and even fulfill, the deeper impulses that his last book manifests, but we can use the book to help us understand that life.

[4] G. E. Aylmer, "The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley," in Radical Religion in the English Revolution , ed. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 116.

Did Winstanley perhaps recognize the element of pride in his dream of salvation in historical time? And did perhaps the failure of the poor to transcend their own history lead him to see that he could not transcend his own? Forced to relinquish the idea of salvation, he might have reconceived his responsibilities and his reverence for god within a social order it is not god's will to change. Accordingly, he authentically might have changed his sense of what god required and permitted.

There is every reason to think that he might have continued to define himself as the dutiful son and therefore as a reverent father (and office-holder). Indeed, his need to serve and revere might have led him back to conformity with authorities he once attacked. At the same time, that conformity could reflect his acknowledgment of what he always had wanted for himself, since he could not gain it for others. Stripped of his prophetic mantle, he might have felt he had permission to affirm what he once felt pressured to disavow—paternity, domesticity, and power in his unreformed world. A reduction in the scope of his calling might be considered a betrayal from one point of view but could as easily be read as a sign that he has integrated what he once had denied.

To be sure, just as The Law of Freedom manifested a split between worldly reform and the spirit within, so his later life, like Quaker inwardness, presumes the disjunction between spirit and flesh, god's truths and historical circumstance, human dreams and social reality. This lack of reconciliation is precisely the truth taught by his defeat, which he must address if he is to go on living at all. Hence there is no reason to assume he was entirely at peace, however modestly he prospered. Of course, no one can know. But a simple view of the prodigal's return and inner peace, like the simple view that he remained silently alienated, makes too neat what only could have been messy. I offer a more complicated view if only to suggest that his later choices should be considered in a way more sensitive to the history of his concerns and the meaning of his defeat. But even a more complex view lacks the proof of his own words to testify to his own understanding. So where are we left?

Memory and Laughter

As Aylmer rightly insists, "Setting aside both his earlier and later career in business, Winstanley's ideas should surely stand and fall in their own right."^[5] What is the value of those ideas?

[5] Aylmer, "The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley," p. 94.

Most obviously, Winstanley is enormously instructive because of what he explicitly intended to teach. His is the best analysis I have found of propertied Puritan radicalism, of its psychological, social, and political nature. He understood the causes, flaws, and limitations of its character, but he also took seriously its language and developed his critique from inside its idiom. Moreover, he understood the ways in which its successes and failures would lead to a certain kind of future: personal anxiety and social division not only created an ascetic and punitive, mystified and limited radicalism but also, when that radicalism failed, warranted and promoted the market and strong state defended by Hobbes. Finally, he lived through and worked out an alternative radicalism, which truly reached the roots of the problems he identified so acutely.

His ideas and actions, however, are not merely of historical value, which is why merely textual or contextual approaches are insufficient. One loses too much by "trodding under foot" the losers in the battles of history or by "preserving" them as if one were a taxidermist. The road not taken still exists in a certain dimension. Therefore, one can return to Winstanley's landmark to recover possibilities, not nostalgically to mourn losses.

Thus, I have suggested parallels with modern theorists specifically to emphasize what is special and unusual about Winstanley. Precisely because he was present at the origins of modern politics and was not himself fully "modern," he exemplifies a different voice , from which modern readers can learn particular lessons. What made it possible for him to synthesize psychological and social arguments and to criticize "kingly," Puritan, and protoliberal politics was precisely the rare character of his language, which was related to the extraordinary sensibility I have called "reverence."

To begin with, Winstanley's metaphoric language enabled him to find and express the connections between the inner life and worldly action. His excremental, oral, and parental metaphors literally embodied the connections he sought to disclose and diagnose. He found those connections in the idioms of his time, in the speech of his contemporaries, so that his works demonstrate how language can be a medium of revelation and not only concealment. Because he was so sensitive to the meaning of words, Winstanley became a witness to the necessities and realities, as well as the capacity for choice, that are disclosed by language. Thus, even as he rooted thought and action in psychological and social reality, in the necessities of the body and in social interests, he also took seriously people's intentionality and freedom. In this effort, he fused his

bodily metaphors with the scriptural language of his time, defining a human project located in the personal struggle for self-determination and in the social struggle to overcome estrangement, and embedding these in Biblical history. In turn, that history was about the ongoing struggle over the discourse and covenant that defined identity and membership, inheritance and title. Thus, Winstanley became a great political theorist specifically because he integrated an analysis of underlying causes and history with an analysis of, and commitment to, speech and choice. As he "testified" to the necessities, conflicts, and possibilities revealed by language and history, he also exemplified what it means to be a citizen. In the name of a covenant that recognized the needs and rights of all, he fashioned a politics based on dialogue and directed toward the problem of power and the pressure of necessity.

Winstanley's ingenious reinterpretations of common idioms yielded a remarkable political theory and practice, which achievement in turn demonstrates a larger point. The Revolution occurred in England not only because people were discontented or had interests they wished to pursue, but specifically because evocative and even poetic language articulated desire and grievance into dreams, principles, and causes. Winstanley's commitment to the power of the word verged on the alchemical, but his speech, like the language of his time, did transmute the "base" matter of necessity into the revolutionary act of turning the world upside down. The discovery that one can give voice to one's experience is itself the fundamentally empowering insight behind a popular politics. Thus, the power and poetry of his speech also reveals what is lost when men and women become "modern" in their disenchanted or cynical view of political speech and in their enchanted pursuit of a language uncontaminated by human subjectivity.

Winstanley's bodily metaphors and Biblical idiom enabled him to do what no political theorist, perhaps, has accomplished so well: to join a theory of personal autonomy and a radical, yet dialogic, form of collective action. But language does not suffice to explain how Winstanley made these connections in theory or exemplified them in practice. His "experienced speech" did embody how humans are creatures who live simultaneously in the kingdoms within and without; but this achievement also was possible because of his primordial perception of the ways in which humans are embedded creatures, not only in a body that must "subsist" with nature and others, but also in a history and a language.

As he located the self in the body and nature, history and culture, and found god's spirit in these, Winstanley could argue about the ways in

which humans are grounded and yet animated, rooted but also parented, moved as well as called by their needs, capacities, and social forms. In relation to such "givens," which humans themselves have not invented, Winstanley developed the insights about freedom that characterize each "moment" in his development. For him, freedom only emerges as people learn to digest and claim, own and honor, and witness and exemplify what defines them as creatures. Hence humans learn freedom only through the transgressions that disclose the needs and bonds they come to recognize as authoritative limits and truths.

In turn, as people serve or uphold what defines and binds them, they learn to establish a healthy kind of autonomy and a form of collective action that is neither murderous nor self-destructive. Winstanley represents a "road not taken" especially because this idea of conditioned freedom is an alternative to the liberal and radical models of collective self-fashioning. As a voice and sensibility that opposed and still illuminates the Promethean shaping of self and society, he provides an important counterpoint in the tradition of political thought and deserves a more respected place among its members.^[6]

Even as I have emphasized the value of Winstanley's reverence, however, I also have resisted as a weakness and flaw the idea of god that Winstanley surely considered its basis. But how can I urge the importance of his contribution to political theory when it is inseparable from an idea of god I have questioned so seriously? In part, the earthly and this-worldly character of Winstanley's "spiritual" premises invites their translation into secular terms. More to the point perhaps, the argument for a reverent radicalism in his final book makes that translation and no longer hinges on Christ rising for its justification and enactment.

And yet that book is seriously flawed and even poisoned by the absence of god, or at least by Winstanley's despair about spirit in the

[6] Winstanley speaks to concerns that now animate current critics of the modernization process pursued since Winstanley's time. The insights expressed in his idea of reverence evoke the recent theoretical efforts of psychoanalysts to ground the ego in mutuality and love, of ecologists to ground culture in reverence for nature, and of feminists to restore to politics what has been called an ethic of care. Similarly, Winstanley's model of activism exemplifies the efforts of those trying to resurrect a "populist" politics of localism, based on lived tradition and experienced speech; a "Gandhian" commitment to nonviolence, based on the power of exemplary action; and a commitment to direct democracy, based on the political competence of those who are not experts and technicians. The current challenge to a top-down, elite model of political and social change recapitulates the arguments and concerns Winstanley developed against the Puritan radicalism that Walzer rightly considers the prototype of vanguard politics.

world. Does The Law of Freedom actually caution against relating his reverence to more modern and secular concerns? In this regard, finally, Winstanley's tale may be most instructive. The value of his ideas resides not only in what he meant to teach: we can learn from the tale as well as from the teller.

Central to Winstanley's idea of god was the belief that this spirit of reason and love feeds only the soul that is submissive. This idea is at the core of his insights and difficulties. Because he accepted what he called his feminine and created being, his passive and sentient self, and desired union with the maternal aspects of inner authority, he avoided the vicissitudes of modern attitudes about autonomy, creativity, will, and power. He found that what is passive and receptive as well as needy and hungry is not to be controlled, but is to be fed and loved. By discovering that a loving inner authority could empower him, he realized that (his own need for) love was not a snare but the essential ground of his development.

As a result, his theory did not split love and need from freedom but instead disclosed their relationship. Consequently, he accepted the equality of women and developed a politics that tried to "knit together" autonomy and connectedness with nature, others, and history. That is why Winstanley's synthesis of Old and New testaments is so important: just as he found the basis of autonomy in the soul's submission to god, so he found the seed of freedom in precisely what rooted people in the earth and tradition. In each case, he generated the unprecedented out of reverence for what he believed was defining and nurturing body, soul, and community.

Yet Winstanley's understanding of reverence also entailed a troubling kind of submission. He felt he could be legitimate only if he acted exclusively in terms of what he revered, wholly as an instrument of the tradition and spirit that parented his agency. By his reckoning, if he were the creator of the ideas, values, and practices for which he rebelled, then he would be merely another fallen Adam, another Cain, rather than a good son. Thus, his reverence imposed the extraordinary—and prideful—demand that he "cast out" ambition, imaginative invention, and anger.

Inwardly, these signs of particularity contaminated the passivity or union that he believed was the condition for being loved, fed, and empowered. Politically, conflict and the creation of conventions appeared only as a pride destructive to the reverence he associated with freedom. He explored the relationship between dependence and autonomy, reverence and freedom, but he himself radically dissociated freedom from the

pride that is indeed essential to it. Thus, Winstanley's guilt and ambivalence, his self-deception, self-denial, and finally self-sacrifice, were also the fruits of his reverence.

Accordingly, Winstanley's idea of reverence is especially instructive about the dilemmas of being a creator. Those theorists who willfully embrace the artistry of human creation often deny that humans do and must act (to some extent) in terms of what is given to them, which they cannot create. When thinkers and activists seek a reverent politics, however, they can become like Winstanley, both driven and led to certain contrasting devaluations of the aspects of themselves and nature that appear to jeopardize their piety or challenge the authority, limits, and ideals they construe as the horizon of their action.

In the context of this split between creator and creature, which is represented in styles of radicalism, Winstanley's story, as opposed to his explicit teaching, is most compelling. In his political life he had to confront the tension between his commitment to humans as creatures and the impulses, demands, and capacities that are represented by humans as creators. As he came to extend his sense of human necessity, and thus of what constituted legitimate action, one can witness his developing effort to integrate creature and creator in himself, his theory, and his politics. By the end of the digging experiment, the tension between creator and creature had intensified and therefore become most fruitful; but the bent bow snapped in The Law of Freedom , partly because Winstanley felt abandoned by god and partly because he felt he could not rely on the submissive spirit in men and women to gain god's love. As he became a creator who no longer could trust god or the creature in man, he sought to supplant god and control the creature from without.

What is the lesson here? The problems in The Law of Freedom do arise because Winstanley tried as a human creator to replace god as a source of sincere milk and social order. Yet those problems result not from the inevitable failure of a secularizing translation of his religiosity but rather from the particular character of his ideas of god and reverence. Still not accepting the rebelliousness in himself (and in others) and still believing that only dutiful receptivity is the basis of righteousness, Winstanley created a worldly authority opposed to the same aspects of self and existence he once stigmatized in the name of god: The Law of Freedom fails to the extent it does because of the same religiosity that led to his earlier self-denials.

Rather than substantiate the assertion that a reverent politics requires something like Winstanley's idea of god, the ongoing self-denial

in his radicalism and the flaws in his final book suggest the need to salvage his radicalism from his religiosity (even while understanding their connection). In hindsight one sees that the impulses, transgressions, and risks he always tried to deny were indeed inextricably part of the reverence he so powerfully defended. Thus, his transition from radical activism to The Law of Freedom does provide a cautionary tale, but one about the relationship between reverence and learning, and thus about reverence and laughter.

Winstanley's theory manifests the ongoing tension between his assertion that there are timeless truths given by god, toward which we must be reverent if we are to be free, and his contrasting assertion that our lives are constituted by our learning, which is to say by error and change—what Winstanley called "the experimental knowledge of Christ." The theodicy that was Winstanley's Puritan legacy enabled him to understand the human capacity for blindness and error, and thus for recognition and change. Because of his theodicy he could address, and even invite the elder brother to confront, the contradictions and self-righteousness he associated with covetousness. But like his god, Winstanley could forgive error, covetousness, and pride only by treating them as the means to a final and stable reverence for an unassailable and unchanging truth.

In Winstanley's life, however, each development in his thought and action was made possible by partial truth and error, not final truth. For he changed his understanding of reverence as he learned more about human necessities. But he never became self-conscious of his own learning process: it was fostered by a theodicy that bound him to an idea of a fixed truth that ultimately devalued error and interpretation. He could not make conscious the fact that error and interpretation actually were constitutive of what he took as truth.

Thus, Winstanley became a political creator who, like his god, could not be playful about, let alone affirm, the ongoing ways that life defies moral reasoning and righteousness. Externalizing his faith in an utterly rational god who could be known by reason and who promised to shape creatures wholly in accord with it, he dreamed of a community that did not wink at frailty, welcome contradiction, or praise contention. When he imagined building a world on the basis of god's truths, he therefore enshrined an orthodoxy. The truths in The Law of Freedom were in fact "experimental," but they would be taught as doctrine to sons and daughters who could not discover them through the risk and change he himself experienced.

Winstanley could not see or affirm what startles us in his story: reverence

is learned only by way of error and transgression. If from the outside the story of his reverence appears as a history of errors, then one is forced toward the idea that reverence must presume a provisional and changing idea of truth and therefore must affirm the experiment and risk that engender and transform it. Accordingly, one should be cautious in condemning his later life, for then one would make Winstanley's own mistake about truth. What Nietzsche says "in favor of criticism" applies as well to Winstanley's life:

Now something that you formerly loved as truth … strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person—you are always a different person—as are all your present "truths," being a skin as it were, that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not yet permitted to see. What killed that opinion for you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it , and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm—something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet.^[7]

Since error is inextricable from learning, so is laughter. When Milan Kundera described the wisdom of the novel, he referred to a Jewish proverb, "Man thinks, God laughs":

But why does God laugh at the sight of man thinking? Because man thinks and truth escapes him. Because the more men think the more one man's thought diverges from another's. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is.^[8]

Kundera refers to Rabelais, who invented the word ageliste to describe men who do not laugh: "Never having heard God's laughter, the agelistes are convinced that truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are." Winstanley depicted elder brothers who were agelistes ; but Winstanley of course could not see himself in this way, and indeed he dreamed of a world in which error, disagreement, and deception—including self-deception—would be cast out. Accordingly, Winstanley and the elder brothers are twinned because, in the name of certainty and

[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science , trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 246.

[8] Milan Kundera, "Man Thinks; God Laughs," New York Review of Books , July 13, 1985.

in self-righteous tones, they turned against the irreverence of those who laugh.

Thus, the issue of laughter is not simply temperamental, for freedom itself is at stake. After all, it was Winstanley's irreverence toward the orthodoxy of the elder brothers that made him autonomous, and it was his refusal to play the ageliste that enabled him, until The Law of Freedom , to accept the irreverence of others. But his rebellion and his tolerance were based on a theodicy that promised to end the irreverence, alienation, and contradiction that had brought him into print and politics. Winstanley's reverence was subversive of authority but was itself an authority defended against subversion. To be sure, any revolt presumes an authority or horizon that requires defense, but any defense of an authority might recall—and value—its origins in revolt and transgression.

Perhaps it is unfair to expect so profoundly a religious man to cultivate irony or humor. Perhaps these are secular versions of grace, or forms of solace for the disenchanted, available only to those who know they live in a history without redemptive purpose. But the issue is not Winstanley's religiosity. Indeed, when the defeat of digging shattered his theodicy, Winstanley acquired neither the ironic sense that god had set him up in what was a cruel joke nor the tragic sense that human and divine purposes were irreconcilable. Rather, his anger was unleashed in the dream of a commonwealth that punished irreverence.

Thus, the absence of laughter may link Winstanley's earlier radicalism to what is substantively troubling in The Law of Freedom and also may disclose the inner connection between Winstanley's radicalism and his later life. It seems unlikely that Winstanley merely changed the god he self-righteously served while continuing to punish whatever contradicted his reverence. But it does seem likely that he became a conformist because his inner demand for pious service, certainty, and wholehearted reverence, when deprived of a ground in god's certainties, apparently found another ground—in the very authorities he once criticized.

Given that Winstanley's genius and radicalism are inseparable from his earnest effort to be righteous, and given the logic of Puritan sensibility, the reality of civil war and violence, and the fact that no one can step outside of one's time, my point is neither to fault him nor to argue that radicals must "lighten up." But it is important to identify the problematic underside of a politics based on reverence, whether articulated in explicitly religious or in secular terms. A politics neither animated nor tempered by laughter, neither chastened nor softened by irony, will be at war with the awareness that truth might not be unitary, that men

might never agree, and that those who act might not be who they think they are.

To make this point is only to take seriously Winstanley's own warnings about the danger of becoming like one's enemy. In the context of his own effort in this regard, one needs to address the poignant fact of his final closeness to the Puritans, and to Hobbes. The issue, then, is to identify what bound Winstanley to his enemies, which has taken us from the lessons of learning to the meaning of laughter, and which now returns us to the problem of pride.

Forgetting and Power: Winstanley and Hobbes

I have argued that Winstanley's theory represents an alternative to Hobbes's and thus a road not taken in our history. But Winstanley's last book and later life appear to collapse this distinction. Indeed, they seem to exemplify the narrative in Hobbes's argument. In The Law of Freedom Winstanley did not build a mortal god, but he did create an imaginary orthodoxy to which he imagined citizens reverently conforming. In addition, one can begin down the road taken by following Winstanley's choices in his later life: his embracing of the patriarchal family, his absorption in the market, his outward conformity (and perhaps inner allegiance) to a state church and sovereign power are tokens of Winstanley's defeat and constituents of life in the belly of Hobbes's whale.

In Hobbes's argument, this narrative hinges on the loss of faith in the redemptive history that sanctioned revolt, which leads men to submit consciously to conventional authority. From this point of view, the search for an authority to revere was the constant that inspired Winstanley's rebellion and then conformity. But more deeply, the power of Hobbes's argument arises from his insights into pride and the consequences of denying or avoiding it.

It was the problem of pride that shaped Puritan politics and Winstanley's antinomian critique; it was the exposure of the pride the Puritans continued to deny that justified Hobbes's mortal god. Complicity in the sin of pride always will give Hobbes a theoretical opening; the denial of pride always makes rebels vulnerable to Hobbes's critique; and fear of pride always can transform rebellion into obedience. Winstanley was not defeated in history because he tried to avoid the sin of pride, but the reverence that denied it did shape his rebellion and, once defeated, led

him in Hobbes's direction, toward a political creation that devalued rebellion and, ultimately, toward actual conformity.

Winstanley's last book and his later life, however, do not prove Hobbes "right" about life and politics. Rather, the criticisms I have made of Winstanley's reverent religiosity are even more apt to Hobbes's Promethean science and sovereign invention. After all, Hobbes attacked theodicy not out of a spirit that welcomed the ambiguity and freedom brought by the absence of a supreme arbitrator but because theodicy failed to secure "peace and truth." Enacting a faith in truth no less religious than Winstanley's, Hobbes revered a science that was no less at war with life, and no more open to ambiguity, than Winstanley's spirit. Thus, Hobbes's unsmiling rebelliousness and anxious acts of creation no more affirmed transgression than did Winstanley's dutiful radicalism and earnest love.

As a result, Hobbes's mortal god, like Winstanley's Father, was an authority at war with the irreverent rebelliousness that in fact animated him. Their fear of pride generated strangely symmetrical dreams of what can and must be accomplished by reverence for authority, however differently they constructed it. Therefore, the problems I have identified in Winstanley's reverence are not confined to a religious sensibility; indeed, they profoundly shape one of its greatest critics.

Accordingly, Hobbes's theory reveals not only a truth about the pride humans deny at their o wn risk but also the dangerous logic in any effort to simply "humble" or overcome it. Hobbes will always be a powerful theorist because he always will remind people of their pride. But his project is not a necessary conclusion to the confrontation with pride, and indeed it is a prideful fantasy that never can be carried out fully. Humans are not machines: although sociological creatures, they are also agents and creators; they continue to use language and political judgement—even if not often enough in public—in ways that he ruled out.

It is for this reason that Winstanley's difference from Hobbes matters so much. Winstanley sought an authority to revere, but always because he sought a reverence that would free; therefore, even in The Law of Freedom , he addressed and tried to strengthen the human capacity to judge, criticize, and rebel. Accordingly, he can help illuminate the desire for wholeness, the capacity for experienced speech, and the need for meaningful commitment that a Hobbesian world can neither squelch nor satisfy. What Hobbes tried to sacrifice and bury is still available: there is always a road not taken.

Of course, any political path, especially one informed by a theoretical spirit, will provide abundant ironies for the traveler. Winstanley's life compels us toward an ironic, but not cynical, view of the gap between moral claims and natural impulses, political dreams and historical reality, self-definitions and actual motives, abiding commitments and actual choices, our need for meaning and the ways of an inscrutable god. We have witnessed the inevitable defeat not of hope or rebellion but of the effort to justify a life by continually defining its calling. This warrants neither vain despair nor smug satisfaction, but rather the saving laughter of self-recognition.