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Winstanley did not call for mass insurrection or the seizure of the lands of the rich. He was always opposed to violence, although he was not an absolute pacifist and advocated an extreme form of direct action. He estimated that between half and two-thirds of the country were wastelands which the poor could work together. He was prepared to eat his bread with the sweat of his brow and helped organize the mass squat on George’s Hill. Out of the experience he wrote his famous The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored (1652) which offered a plan to reorganize English society on the basis of a system of common ownership.
The work has been called by Christopher Hill ‘a draft constitution for a communist commonwealth’ but it appears more like a blueprint for a communist State.
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact there are two clear phases to Winstanley’s thought. In his early work, he depicted an anarchist society, but after the experience of the Diggers’ colony at George’s Hill he began to revise his views about the immediate possibility of a free society.
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In The Law of Freedom in a Platform, he thus offered a new and authoritarian version of communist society. His fundamental premisses were the same. He held firm to his belief in God as the principle of motion and interdependence in nature, and in the efficacy of love, reason and justice in human affairs. He continued to assert with his doctrine of inner light that human beings act rationally and in accordance with natural law. He saw the natural state of humanity to be a co-operative and united society held together by common preservation. Above all, he still celebrated freedom as the free development of every individual and saw it only possible where there was economic security: ‘True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth’.
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But the experience of the Diggers’ colony on George’s Hill, especially of the Ranters within and the hostile freeholders without, made him have second thoughts about human nature. Man might be sociable and reasonable by nature, but in existing society he often appeared unruly and confused. Digger covetousness suggested to Winstanley the need for some form of external social control. Thus because ‘transgression doth and may arise from ignorance and rude fancy in man’, he now felt that law and government would be necessary in a commonwealth to regulate society.
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During the struggle to keep the colony on George’s Hill together, Winstanley had already begun to argue that the Diggers were opposed to the government which locks up ‘the treasures of the earth from the poor’ and not against ‘righteous government’ as such.
(#litres_trial_promo) Now he went so far as to assert ‘Government is a wise and free ordering of the earth and the manners of mankind by observation of particular laws and rules, so that all the inhabitants may live peacefully in plenty and freedom in the land where they are born and bred.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He further defended the need for law as ‘a rule whereby man and other creatures are governed in their actions, for the preservation of the common peace’. An army, in the form of a popular militia would be needed to enforce the laws, to protect the community against the ‘rudeness of the people’ and ‘to resist and destroy all who endeavour to keep up or bring in kingly bondage again’.
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Winstanley now proposed an annual parliament as the supreme governing body in the land and drew up a rigidly artificial code of laws. The subtitle of The Law of Freedom was ‘True Magistrary Restored’ and was dedicated to the arch-statist and general Oliver Cromwell because ‘the power of the land [is] in your hand’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He suggested that magistrates should be elected annually. All citizens had to work by law and only those who contributed to the common stock could benefit from it The laws were based on the principle of revenge—‘an eye for eye’—although they were intended to be corrective rather than punitive. Sanctions would include whipping, forced labour and loss of civil rights. The death penalty was rehabilitated for murder, buying and selling, rape or following the trade of lawyer or parson. He upheld the authority of the father in the family and advocated ‘overseers‘(planners) to direct the economy and enforce the laws, and ‘taskmasters’ to reform criminals. While allowing complete freedom of religious belief and opinion, he called for compulsory and general education. Winstanley had come to believe that the people were not ready to be free and a long process of education and preparation was first necessary before they were capable of governing themselves.
At his lowest ebb, he now defines freedom in the narrow economic sense of a ‘freeman’ enjoying the fruits of his labours, being capable of choosing or being a representative, and having young men or maids to be his servants in his family. Liberty was no longer universal. Clearly, Winstanley’s libertarian genius had left him after his exhausting experience of practical communism. If The New Law of Righteousness is one of the first great anarchist texts, The Law of Freedom for all its rugged language reads like a proto-Manxist tract Hill has suggested that it was a ‘possibilist’ document dedicated to Cromwell in the hope that he would implement its suggestions, but it seems unlikely that Winstanley could seriously believe that Cromwell would be converted to the cause of the true Levellers.
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Winstanley wrote nothing more after his communist Utopia disintegrated, and he disappeared into obscurity; he seems to have become a prosperous farmer and possibly a Quaker. The Ranter Lawrence Clarkson accused him later of misusing his Reason to hold sway over others and to win personal fame: ‘There was self-love and vainglory in his heart.’ Clark-son also lamented Winstanley’s ‘most shameful retreat from George’s-hill with a spirit of pretended universality, to become a mere tithe-gatherer of prosperity’.
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The libertarian communism of Winstanley and the Diggers was lost on the early anarchist and socialist movement William Godwin, whose rationalist scheme of philosophical anarchism so closely resembles Winstanley’s, dismissed the doctrines of Winstanley and the Diggers as ‘scarcely indeed worthy to be recorded’ in his mammoth History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–8).
(#litres_trial_promo) It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that socialists rediscovered him, and only this century that the Diggers have been acknowledged as ‘the earliest recognizably anarchistic movement’.
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It was the Ranters, whom Winstanley despised, who proved the most consistent libertarians and the true heirs of the Heresy of the Free Spirit. They are the most anarchistic individuals to emerge in the English Revolution. As antinomians, they sought total emancipation from all laws and rules, and advocated free love. They attacked private property and called for its abolition, and rejected all forms of government, whether ecclesiastical or civil. They hoped humanity would be returned to its original state where there would be no private property, class distinctions or human authority.
Because of their persecution from all sides, many Ranters adopted a private language and carried on a clandestine propaganda. They formed part of the ‘lunatic fringe’ in the English Revolution, and were quite happy to play out their radical madness in the darkness of Cromwellian sanity. They emerged after the defeat of the Levellers at Burford in 1649 which put an end to the most serious threat to Cromwell’s rule from the Left. The most famous amongst the Ranters were Abiezer Coppe and Lawrence Clarkson, although Joseph Salmon and Jacob Bauthumely or Bottomley also left some writings.
The Ranters were often confused with the Quakers, and many may have crossed over from one group to the other. Both discarded outward forms of worship and believed that true religion was to be found in the ‘indwelling spirit’ or ‘inner light’ in the individual soul, and that the power of love would be enough to bring about a new era of peace and freedom. A contemporary, Thomas Collier, asserted that the doctrines of the Ranters and the Quakers were identical: ‘no Christ but within; no Scripture to be a rule; no ordinances, no law but their lusts, not heven nor glory but here, no sin but what men fancied to be so.’
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Like the adepts of the Free Spirit, the Ranters adopted a kind of materialistic pantheism: God is essentially in every creature; all created things are united; there is neither heaven nor hell except in the human breast. A person with God could therefore commit no evil. Joseph Salmon, a former army officer, records how in a brief period of exaltation:
I saw heaven opened unto me and the new Jerusalem (in its divine brightness and corruscent beauty) greeting my Soule by its humble and gentle discensions … I appeared to my selfe as one confounded into the abyss of eternitie, nonentitized into the being of beings; my Soule split, and emptied into the fountaine and ocean of divine fulness: expired into the aspires of pure life.
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Most Quakers and Diggers, however, thought they were far too extreme and turbulent. It was probably his experience of Ranters in the George’s Hill colony that led Winstanley to believe that some laws and rules were necessary in his ideal commonwealth to deal with the idle and the ‘self-ended spirits’.
(#litres_trial_promo) After meeting some of them in prison, the Quaker leader George Fox complained that they claimed they were God and would ‘rant, and vapour, and blaspheme’. At one of his meetings, he found that they were ‘very rude, and sung, and whistled, and danced’.
(#litres_trial_promo) William Penn further asserted that the Ranter wing among the Quakers ‘would have had every man independent, that as he had the principle in himself, he should only stand and fall to that, and nobody else’.
(#litres_trial_promo) If the mainstream Quakers were shocked then it is no wonder that the upright Dissenting divine Richard Baxter should condemn their ‘Cursed Doctrine of Libertinism’ which led them to assert that ‘to the Pure all things are Pure, (even things forbidden)’.
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It was their total amoralism which most shocked their contemporaries. Lawrence Clarkson in his Ranter period believed that since all acts are from God, there can be no sinful act before God. He affirmed ‘there was no sin, but as man esteemed it sin, and therefore none can be free from sin till in purity it be acted as no sin, for I judged that pure to me, which to a dark understanding was impure, for to the pure all things, yea all acts, are pure.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He recalled how he believed that ‘God had made all things good, so nothing evil but as man judged it; for I apprehended there was no such thing as theft, cheat, or a lie, but as made it so: for if the creature had brought this world into no propriety, as Mine and Thine, there had been no such tide as theft, cheat or a lie, for the prevention thereof Everard and Gerrard Winstanley did dig up the Common.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He argued moreover that there was no evil in swearing, drunkenness, adultery and theft: ‘sin hath its conception only in the imagination’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He advocated absolute self-exaltation:
Behold, the King of glory is come
T’ reduce God, and Devil to their Doom;
For both of them are servants unto Me
That lives, and rules in perfect Majesty…
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Clarkson joined a Ranter group called ‘My one flesh’ who were the most uncompromisingly antinomian sect, practising free love and revelling in bouts of drinking and feasting.
The same anarcho-communistic attitudes found in the Free Spirit continue amongst the Ranters. They felt the earth was a treasury for all to enjoy and that they should have one purse. Abiezer Coppe declared: ‘All things which God created are common!’
(#litres_trial_promo) This extended not only to property but also to women. In Samuel Sheppard’s The Joviall Crew, or, The Devill turn’d Ranter (1651), his intended satire has an authentic ring when he describes their communism:
… our women are all in common.
We drink quite drunk together, share our Oaths,
If one man’s cloak be rent, all tear their Cloaths.
and their rebellious spirit:
No hell we dread when we are dead
No Gorgon nor no Fury:
And while we live, wee’l drink and ****
In spight of judge and jury.
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The Ranters in fact went beyond the Puritan sexual revolution which sought to replace property marriage by a monogamous partnership. Coppe declared ‘give over thy stinking family duties’, argued that fornication and adultery were no sin, and advocated a community of women.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Ranters asserted the right of the natural man to behave naturally.
Without birth control, this call for freedom tended to be for men only. Nevertheless, many women, who had formed an important part of the Heresy of the Free Spirit, were quick to accept the arguments of the radicals who maintained that the soul knows no difference of sex. The Quaker George Fox asked: ‘May not the spirit of Christ speak in the female as well as in the male?’
(#litres_trial_promo) Winstanley had insisted that ‘Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The Ranters however advocated and practised free love and refused to be possessive; they were notorious for their celebration of wine, women and song. Coppe felt that sex had a divine power: ‘by wanton kisses, kissing hath been confounded; and external kisses, have been made the fiery chariots, to mount me swiftly into the bosom of him whom the soul loves, [his excellent Majesty, the King of glory].’
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The Ranters offered a unique opportunity for women to become independent and voluntary beings with a right to sensual pleasure. Not surprisingly, the Ranter teaching which seemed to offer such a lively and joyful affirmation of life and freedom attracted many women. A description of a female Ranter in the hostile tract The Routing of the Ranters (1650) conjures up wonderfully their Dionysian exuberance:
she speaks highly in commendation of those husbands that give liberty to their wives, and will freely give consent that she should associate her self with any other of her fellow creatures, which she shall make choice of; she commends the Organ, Viol, Symbal and Tonges in Charterhouse-Lane to be heavenly musick[;] she tosseth her glasses freely, and concludeth there is no heaven but the pleasures she injoyeth on earth, she is very familiar at the first sight, and danceth the Canaries at the sound of a hornpipe.
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The most celebrated Ranter was Abiezer Coppe who was born in Warwick in 1619. He left university at the outbreak of the Civil War and became an Anabaptist preacher in the Warwick area. He felt he was at one with humanity, especially the wretched and the poor. He recounts how he once met a strange, deformed man on the road, and his conscience – the ‘wel-favoured harlot’—tempted him to give this man all he had, take off his hat and bow seven times to the beggar. Coppe was no elitist, and felt the greatest privilege was to be able to give and to share.
His first important work Some Sweet Sips of Some Spirituall Wine (1649) was extremely critical of formal Christianity. But it was A Fiery Flying Roll (bound together with, A Second Fiery Flying Route), dated 1649 but published in 1650, within a year of the execution of the king, which brought him notoriety. Subtitled ‘A Word from the Lord to all the Great Ones of the Earth’, in it Coppe not only attacked organized religion but presented a vision of a purged society in which property was to be held in common. Where the Levellers had excluded servants and others from their notion of equality, Coppe extended it to embrace all men and women. Like the Diggers, he also advocated a form of voluntary communism which echoes the early Apostolic Church and the visions of John Ball: ‘give, give, give, give up your houses, horses, goods, gold, Lands, give up, account nothing your own, have ALL THINGS common’.
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Like most Ranters, Coppe was a pacifist, rejecting ‘sword levelling, or digging-levelling’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He insists that he never drew a sword or shed one drop of blood: ‘we (holily) scorne to fight for any thing, we had as live be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’th market place, and account these as good actions as taking the poor abused, enslived plough-mans money from him.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, he warned the wealthy and powerful: ‘Kings, Princes, Lords, great ones, must bow to the poorest Peasants; rich men must stoop to poor rogues, or else they’l rue for it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was adamant that it was necessary to chop at one blow ‘the neck of horrid pride, murder, malice and tyranny, &c.’ so that ‘parity, equality, community’ might bring about on earth ‘universall love, universal] peace, and perfect freedome’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Coppe joined a group of Ranters who believed that all humanity was one and that we should recognize our brotherhood and sisterhood. He joyously declared the death of sin and called for a life beyond good and evil: ‘Be no longer so horridly, hellishly, impudently, arrogantly wicked, as to judge what is sinne, what not … sinne and trangression is finisht, its a meere riddle.’
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Coppe was not content to preach merely but turned himself into a surrealistic work of art. He became a master of happenings. In London, he would charge at carriages of the great, gnashing his teeth and proclaiming the day of the Lord had come. He wanted to make his listeners’ ears ‘tingle’. But it was always with a subversive aim: ‘ I am confounding, plaguing, tormenting nice, demure, barren Mical with Davids unseemly carriage, by skipping, leaping, dancing like one of the fools; vile, base fellowes, shamelessely, basely, and uncovered too, before handmaids.’
(#litres_trial_promo) His supreme confidence was based on his conviction that his message came from ‘My most Excellent Majesty [in me] who is universall love, and whose service is perfect freedorne’.
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It was all too much for the government and the Protestant Establishment. It was not enough merely to dismiss Coppe as mad; he and his fellow Ranters posed a real threat to Cromwell’s rule. The publication of the Fiery Flying Rolls prompted the government to pass an Act of Parliament against ‘Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions’. They were condemned by Parliament to be publicly burned. Coppe was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate prison. When brought before the Committees of Examination, he apparently feigned madness, talking to himself, and ‘throwing nut-shells and other things about the room’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Obliged to recant he issued in 1651 A Remonstrance of the sincere and zealous Protestation and Copps Return to the wayes of Truth. Written in his best ranting manner, Coppe replied to his accusations, although he remained true to his social message.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Wings of the Fiery Flying Roll were not entirely clipped. While denying the belief that there is no sin, he declares that all men are equally sinful in the eyes of God. Again, he reasserts that he will call nothing he has his own: ‘As for community, I own none but that Apostolical, saint-like Community, spoken of in the Scriptures … I own none other, long for none other, but the glorious (Rom. 8) liberty of the Sons of God. Which God will hasten in its time.’
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For all their enthusiasm and originality, the Ranters never developed into a coherent or organized movement They mainly formed loose associations or affinity groups, probably with a dozen or score of people. They drew support mainly from the lower strata of the urban poor who shared the aspirations of John Ball. The Ranters became quite numerous for a time, especially in London, and at their height there was no part of England which did not feel their influence. But their leaders were picked off in 1650 and 1651; five years later they were in serious decline. But their influence lingered on and was still strong enough in 1676 for the respectable Quaker Robert Barclay to publish an attack on The Anarchy of the Ranters and other Libertines. Fox also reported that Ranters were at work in New England in 1668.
The exact nature and influence of the Ranters is still open to dispute. The term ‘Ranter’ like anarchist today was often used in a pejorative way to describe anyone with extreme or dangerous opinions; Ranterism came to represent ‘any anti-social manifestations of the light within’.
(#litres_trial_promo) To a large extent, the image of the Ranter as an immoral rascal was developed by sensationalist pamphleteers working on behalf of established Protestantism who wanted to suppress its ‘lunatic fringe’. In a similar vein, the Marxist historian A. L. Morton called them ‘confused mystical anarchists’ who drew support from ‘the defeated and declassed’ groups after Cromwell had crushed the Levellers.
(#litres_trial_promo) But men like Coppe and Clarkson were far from despairing and for a time after the execution of the king it seemed possible in England that true levelling could lead to a genuine commonwealth of free and equal individuals. In the event, as in so many later revolutions, the military dictator Cromwell crushed the extreme left which had helped to bring him to power.
For all their mystical language, the Ranters expressed a wonderful sense of exuberant irreverence and earthy nonconformity. They are not only a link in the chain that runs between Joachim of Fiore and William Blake, but from peasant communism to modern anarcho-communism. They looked back to the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit of the Middle Ages and anticipated the counter-culture of this century.
9 The French Renaissance and Enlightenment (#ulink_8737221d-bea2-5022-aeb1-ab5c3db6b68f)
ONE OF THE CONSEQUENCES of the Renaissance, with its interest in antiquity, and the Reformation, with its stress on the right to private judgement, was a revival of anti-authoritarian tendencies in secular matters. Of all the countries in Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, it was France that produced the most powerful libertarian thinkers. This was doubtless a response to the centralizing tendencies of the French monarchy and the growth of a strong Nation-State.
François Rabelais
The most colourful and rumbustious French libertarian was the incomparable Francois Rabelais. An ex-Franciscan and Benedictine monk who practised and taught medicine, Rabelais came to hate monks and scholasticism. In his masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64) he delighted in satirizing the religious, political, legal and social institutions and practices of sixteenth-century France. The work contains a wonderful mixture of bawdy humour, sharp satire and zest for life.
At the same time, there is a serious side to Rabelais. He adopted a form of naturalistic optimism which led him to anarchist conclusions. He believed that human nature is fundamentally good and only corrupted by our education and environment. He therefore called for the full development of our faculties ‘because free people, well-born and well-educated, keeping good company, have by nature an instinct and incentive which always encourage them to virtuous acts, and hold them back from vice.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It follows that if people are left to themselves their ‘honour’ or moral sense is sufficient to govern their behaviour without the need for any external rules or laws.
Rabelais gave flesh and blood to these abstract principles in Book I of Gargantua and Pantagntel (1534) where he describes the founding of the abbey of Thélème. Gargantua gives the abbey to Friar John (Frère Jean des Entommeures: Friar John of the Hearty Eaters) for his help in the war against the power-mad despot Picrochole, who has a ‘bitter bile’ (the meaning of his name in Greek). Friar John has all the faults of monks but none of their vices. He is ignorant, dirty and gluttonous, but also brave, frank and lusty. His abbey is built like a magnificent and luxurious country house without walls, the very opposite of a convent or monastery. Its name Thélème in Greek means ‘will’ or ‘pleasure’. The gifted and well-bred members are free to leave whenever they choose. There is no chastity, poverty and obedience: they can marry, be rich, and live in perfect freedom. They have no need for laws and lawyers, politics, kings and princes, religion, preachers and monks, money and usurers. All their life is spent ‘not in laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure’. The only rule is ‘fais ce que voudras!’ (Do what you will!).
Rabelais’s ideal commonwealth anticipates the exuberant licence of Fourier’s phalansteries in which the satisfaction of all desire is considered positive and healthy. But it is primarily a Utopia for the new aristocrats of the Renaissance like Rabelais himself who looked to a society based on intelligence and knowledge rather than on power and wealth. His rebellion remains an individual and imaginative one and does not translate itself into action against the structure of society. While he opposed tyranny in all its forms, in the real world Rabelais hoped for nothing more than a peaceful and benevolent monarchy. He might have called for the freedom of noble men and women in his chivalric Utopia, but it was not until the eighteenth century that philosophes asserted the natural nobility of all free men and women. Nevertheless, Rabelais, for his exuberant and joyful celebration of freedom, deserves an honourable mention in any history of libertarian thought.
Etienne de la Boétie
Unknown to Rabelais, there was another writer in France at the same time asking why free-born people should so readily accept their servitude. His name was Etienne de la Boétie, and he was born in 1530, the son of a judge with powerful connections in Church and State. He went on to study law and became a counsellor in the Bordeaux parliament (assembly of lawyers) where he called for religious toleration for the persecuted Protestant Huguenots. A poet and classical scholar, he also was a friend of the great humanist Montaigne. In his short life, la Boétie appeared a devout member of the Catholic Church and a loyal subject to the king but as young man he wrote sometime between 1552 and 1553 a Discours de la servitude volontaire, one of the great libertarian classics. He undoubtedly admired all his life those classical writers who had defended liberty in ancient Greece and Rome. After his death in 1563, Montaigne, who was his literary executor, was too prudent and timid to publish the manuscript, although he admitted it was written ‘in honour of liberty against tyrants’. He dismissed it as a youthful folly, a mere literary exercise, yet he admitted that la Boétie had believed in every word of it and would have preferred to be born in the liberty of Venice than in France.
The first full version of the essay appeared in Holland in 1576 and was used as propaganda by the Huguenots against the Catholic regime. It went largely unnoticed until the eighteenth century when it was read by Rousseau and reprinted at the beginning of the French Revolution. Since then it has been recognized as a minor classic of political theory for asking the fundamental question of political obligation: why should people submit to political authority or government?
La Boéne’s answer contains not only a powerful defence of freedom but his bold reasoning led him to conclude that there is no need for government at all. It is only necessary for humanity to wish that government would disappear in order for them to find themselves free and happy once again. People however choose to be voluntary slaves: ‘liberty alone men do not want, not for any other reason, it seems, except that if they wanted it, they would have it. It is as if they refuse to have this fine acquisition, only because it is too easy to obtain.’
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Although the style is rhetorical and repetitive, it is possible to discern three stages in la Boétie’s argument. In the first part he argues that government exists because people let themselves be governed, and dissolves when obedience ends. In the next part he asserts that liberty is a natural instinct and a goal, and slavery is not a law of nature but merely a force of habit. Finally, it is shown that government is maintained by those who have an interest in its rule.
La Boétie bases his case on natural right theory. He believes that ‘if we lived with the rights that nature has given us and with the lessons it teaches us, we would naturally obey our parents, be subjects to reason, and serfs of nobody’.
