September 20, 2009
The Tories and the Levellers: Explanations and Significance
Over at Though Cowards Flinch there’s a really first-rate post by Dave Semple exploding Tory MP Douglas Carswell’s claims that the Conservative Party are the heirs to the tradition of the Levellers, Diggers, and radical pamphleteer Tom Paine.
(If you don’t know who the Levellers, Diggers and (later) Paine were, then this serves as a useful introduction as well as giving you some ways to think about rights. The standard text on the subject of 17th Century post-Civil War English social revolutionaries is The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill, especially if you enjoy a Marxist historical analysis. The Bickerstaffe Record has a highly amusing and satirical take on the Tory appropriation).
To understand this blog, you need to read the original article at Though Cowards Flinch (first link, above). The following is drawn from an exchange in the comment thread of that piece, but aims to streamline the thoughts expressed there and extrapolate further conclusions. Consequently, it owes a lot to Dave Semple and Paul C (of Bickerstaffe Record). So thanks to them.
–
To those with even a relatively basic knowledge of history and politics, the idea of the Conservative Party – which stands for gradual change, the defence of established property rights, and the enforced maintenance of social and political hierarchies – being intellectual and ideological heirs to groups which sought to ‘turn the world upside down’ by equalising social relations and in many cases radically redistributing property in the process of overturning established privilege is obviously absurd.
Yet in spite of this absurdity, this attempted appropriation of the radical English tradition by the Tories is in many ways very astute. As Dave Semple points out:
“Pretty large swathes of the literature of the Levellers could seem quite conservative to the modern eye, bearing in mind we’ve achieved a lot of what they set out to. Indeed there are quite a few Levellers who openly defend property rights, though mostly this is in the context of a State which was locking people up for attacking such rights.”
Of course, the key is context. If you understand the context of the Levellers in particular – coming to the fore in a post-Civil War England, where the King himself had been deposed and social relations teetered on the brink of being radically re-aligned* – then they look a whole lot less conservative. Of course, if you don’t know this context, a seemless path from Levellers to Tories looks (prima facie) plausible.
Indeed, it would appear that such a lack of contextual understanding could actually play in Tory favour. The Diggers and Levellers have received a fair amount of popular attention, as has Tom Paine, but as Dave Semple again points out:
“I imagine that most of the Comment is Free articles are written by people with no more knowledge of history than I have of Quantum Mechanics – and thus stuff like this, also the “Red Toryism” stuff, is likely to fly with them. And while most voters are only passingly interested in historical analogy (in my experience), to the commentariat – which fancies itself as a home of the liberal arts – this sort of thing is bound to touch of all sort of tangential articles and commentary – some of which may find its way to the Press, reinforcing memes the Tories are trying to propagate.”
And here things get interesting – for what are the memes the Tories are trying to propagate?
Two are predominantly important. The first is the idea of “compassionate conservatism”, which is self-explanatory in its intended image, but is increasingly a hard sell after the bad example of the Bush administration, and in times of economic hardship when people generally demand more concrete commitments than cuddly fuzz-words and alliteration. Step forward, “progressive Conservatism”. In recent months this has been Cameron’s big push to de-Thatcherise the “nasty party” in the eyes of the electorate (despite the best efforts of Dan “60 Year Mistake” Hannan to the contrary): a claim that the Tories can do a better job than Labour of achieving progressive ends.
Online, these Tory claims of a commitment to progressivity have been subjected to harsh scrutiny (see also many articles by Stuart White at Next Left), and generally found wanting by those on the left. I find it unlikely that the blogosphere is shaping wider electoral preferences, but what is interesting to note is that the Tory re-branding mission doesn’t appear to be working.
For while the Conservatives are certainly ahead in the polls, this appears to be predominantly due to a wide dissatisfaction with Labour (and specifically Brown), rather than any great love for the Tories (or Cameron). Indeed, many Conservatives remain unconvinced about their own party leadership. This is why Cameron has repeatedly uttered the nauseating cliche that he hasn’t “sealed the deal” with the electorate: the Tories aren’t loved, but Labour are hated – and Cameron knows that in an election year, unforseen but volatile events could shatter his poll lead.
Indeed, that fear appears to be very real for the Tories: why else did they offer an olive branch to the Lib Dems, unless they are genuinely concerned about the possibility of a hung parliament denying them an outright majority?
Yet here we come back to the attempted Leveller-appropriation. Now, I doubt very much that anybody at Tory HQ sat down and declared “we need to claim we are the heirs of English radicalism – somebody cite the Levellers!” Much more likely is that the semi-unspoken yet highly apparent need within the Tory Party to “seal the deal” with the electorate gently guided Douglas Carswell into claiming the Levellers and Tom Paine, without anyone specifically telling him to.
After all, it makes a lot of sense. Not only are such figures and movements broadly associated with “progressivism” and promoting social justice (thus ticking the “compassionate” box too), but in appealing to the “commentariat” and the so-called “liberal intelligentsia”, the Tories make a sound electoral move, too.**
What the Tories really need, and want, is not just to recapture the remaining heartland seats lost to Blair in 1997 and retained in 2005, but to reverse the process and eat into core Labour and Lib Dem support. If this is achieved successfully, it could mean the difference not so much between a hung Parliament (which, given present polls, is still pretty unlikely despite apparent Tory fears) but a decent Parliamentary majority and a thumping one. If Cameron can do what Blair did and turn the core vote, the Tories could be in power for a generation.
Given that what’s still driving the polls is a loathing for Brown rather than a love for the Conservatives, this hasn’t yet happened. But it could happen. Appeals to Guardian- and Independent-reading middle-class floating voters who have so far leaned towards Labour or the Lib Dems but are essentially amenable to a “progressive” and “compassionate” Tory ticket are shrewd and wise. Name-dropping the Levellers and Tom Paine is directly in line with such an approach.
Clearly, just appealing to these historical figures and movements won’t achieve anything by itself. But that’s not the point. The appeals must be viewed as part of the wider Tory project to rebrand itself as “progressive”, “compassionate” and not Thatcherite.
And this is dangerous for the left. The appropriation of the English radical tradition is of course synthetic and skin-deep – but so are the Tory’s attempts to present their core membership as cuddly progressives. To the extent that tactics of the former kind make the latter increasingly successful, the left is in danger. Not just of a Tory party with hardline rightists at its core (many of them using the internet – Iain Dale, ConservativeHome – to help dictate policy and sow anti-moderate dissent), but of such a Tory party securing a generation-defining Parliamentary majority next year. Appropriation of the Levellers is just one small part of a much wider, more important game.
–
* See, for example, the Putney Debates when ordinary rank and file members of Cromwell’s New Model Army were allowed to debate and argue with officers for the first – and last – time in English military history.
** And who knows, maybe Carswell even believes his own rhetoric. In any case, he’s caught up in the “ignorant, stupid or dishonest” trilemma. A bit like Chris Grayling.
Dan said,
September 21, 2009 at 12:39 am
I’m sorry but I guess I really don’t get your justification for trying to deny people like Carswell the right to appeal to the tradition of the Levellers and English Radicalism. The part of Semple’s post you quoted (“Indeed there are quite a few Levellers who openly defend property rights…”) looks to me to show that the claim is more than simply “astute,” but also correct. It seems like you want to appropriate the whole tradition for yourself as though they were all leftists at heart, but having read a bit of G.A. Cohen you should well know that there is an absolute chasm between the kind of left-libertarianism that people like Tom Paine espoused and the kind of egalitarianism you’re after. In short, the difference is self-ownership; it is no coincidence that the Leveller Richard Overton was one of the first on record to talk about it (“To every individual in nature, is given an individual propriety by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any … for every one as he is himself hath a self-propriety, else could not be himself, and on this no second may presume without consent” – sounds pretty libertarian to me.) So contra the implication that had they all been around today their radicalism would have led them to egalitarianism, there is in fact a perfectly natural and sensible place for them to demur: the point where equality impinges on self-ownership (and again, from Cohen, we know that this point is reached pretty early on in the egalitarian’s list of demands.) To be sure, they might well (as Tom Paine did) advocate some kind of single-tax on land, but I still think this puts them far more squarely in the camp of folk like Carswell than folk like you and Semple. (I also think you do Carswell a disservice by lumping him in with the rest of the Tories – from what I know about the man, and from the one time I have met him, he seems to be a consistently principled classical liberal. Alas, not all Tories are.)
Paul said,
September 21, 2009 at 9:14 am
Dan,
1. check my post again, but I don’t think you’ll find that I personally tried to claim the levellers et al for my sort of liberal egalitarianism, or for Dave Semple’s sort of revolutionary marxism. I just pointed out that they are not rightly appropriable by the modern Tory party.
2. Look how complicated your response is; appeals to high-level theory about self ownership, and a claim that they many of them would have been libertarians. Which is all fine in itself – there’s lots of good things to be said about that – but it’s a long way from the game the Tory party are playing, isn’t it?
3. Carswell may himself be a committed, well-read libertarian who like you sees many parallels and connections between the levellers/diggers and libertarianism. OK, on that score maybe I did him a diservice. But note that he didn’t say that the UK Libertarian Party need to complete the English Revolution, he said that the Tories can and should. As you say “alas, not all Tories are [classical liberals]“. That seems like something of a major understatement to me. Indeed, you yourself have many times lamented the hypocrisy of the Tories as a supposedly small-state party that in fact is in bed with big business and expanding the size of the state in the process.
Maybe the Levellers are far more in the camp with Carswell than with me or Dave Semple. Maybe. But they are certainly *not* in the camp with the Tory party, taken as a whole. Which, if you’ll care to reflect, was what the original point of the post was (though upon reflection, the final footnote trilemma should probably be struck on grounds of what you’ve said above).
Dave Semple said,
September 21, 2009 at 11:30 am
It would be facile and ahistorical to line the Levellers up on *any* particular side on the basis of what they said for two reasons. First, the Levellers were a diverse bunch, second Leveller speech-act and Leveller practice often amounted to two different things.
It can be inferred from the speech-acts of men like Overton that the Levellers were limited in the demands they placed on the State and private property – but this is to ignore the revolutionary appropriations going on in the countryside, the revolutionary martial praxis established by men like Joyce and culminating in the election of the Agitators and fact that (even for us Marxists) men like Lilburne and Overton would have been considered part of the Left- or Democratic-Bourgeoisie (depending on whether you prefer the idiom of Lenin or Marx).
Now, mavericks within the Tory Party may claim this mantle for themselves – but as I see it, there is a key manner by which to distinguish the two (relatively similar, if we accept Dan’s argument, which we can do for arguments sake) speech-acts: those of the Levellers and those of maverick Tories. To whit, the Leveller leaders were in some sense accountable to the radical democracy of the New Model; the Grandees were not. Indeed the interests of the Grandees clearly lay with the property-owning against the appropriations and demands of the propertyless – however radical or conservative they may read today.
We have no easy analogy today, but the self-actuating praxis of the New Model seems an awful lot like that of the trades unions and socialist movement – with the Leveller leaders and the early 1900s Labour leadership occupying a similar relationship to their supporters, of being caught in the middle. Similarly the Tories are the key defenders of the right to dispose of one’s private property as one will, against the attempted impositions of the other side.
This is a brief outline of underlying structural conditions – it is not intended as the definitive analogy. Nor does it take into account Dan’s (rather selective) quotations: the Putney Debates and various other publications from the same milieu in which the Levellers (if not always their leaders) moved are considerably more radical than merely demanding the right for everyone to own what they own and accumulate what they can.
I would also say that the distinction Dan draws between “left-libertarianism” and “egalitarianism”, resting on “self-ownership” in his own words, is seriously deficient in two ways: one, that it lacks a structural critique of “self-ownership” and the context in which it occurs; two, that it displays a clear lack of awareness of the Marxist critique of the individual under capitalism and promotion of a ‘real’ individuality in a different structural context. Agree or disagree with Marx etc, the argument presented above is a straw-man.
At any rate, I don’t much feel like engaging further with someone who is surnaming me; I am not an academic source nor a public figure – I am a blogger like yourself, with a forename. Please use it.
Paul said,
September 21, 2009 at 11:54 am
Cheers Dave,
I’m doing an Intellectual History MA this year (starts next week). Getting more clued-up on the Levellers et al is one of my aims for what I get out of the course. In the meantime, your abundantly greater knowledge of this subject is much welcomed.
Dan,
Also, I should have added:
Carswell – you may claim – is simply trying to re-align (or align) the Tory party with classical liberal values, and may sincerely believe that this means – or is constitutive of – being in line with radical English traditions.
Let’s say that’s true.
But if he’s a consistent classical liberal (i.e. a libertarian) then he probably holds similar opinions to, say, Dan Hannan. So in the interests of consistency, will he now be advising the Tory Party to adopt an open door immigration policy and to dismantle the NHS?
If not, this indicates that his pushing the levellers – however intellectually consistent it may be for him – is in line with rehumanising the Tories as “progressive” and “compassionate”, as my OP argued. Saying “let’s scrap the NHS” doesn’t fit that mould, and “open door immigration” is way too tetchy a subject for the Tory core vote to do anything but cry blue murder about.
So sure, Carswell may be more intellectually credible than I originally gave him credit for, and may indeed want to enact a genuine shift in the Tory party along his own intellectual classical liberal lines – but his choise of the levellers et al is astute because it fits very well with Tory head office dictum: appear cuddly, look human, don’t mention Thatcher.
Dan said,
September 21, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Paul,
I agree that the Tories leave a lot to be desired, but my point was that you really need to distinguish between “the Tories” and Douglas Carswell. Even within the party he is seen as a maverick, which is why it puzzles me slightly that you seem to think he is trying to appropriate the Levellers/Tom Paine for *the Tories*. He is not; what he *is* trying to do is appropriate them for his particular agenda of radical localism – probably in order to convince people inside the Tory party just as much as those outside of it.
As for the point you make in your last post, this kind of accusation (“Well, if you believe X, you should also believe Y. And if you believe Y, why aren’t you pushing for Y as strongly as you are pushing for X?”) is thrown around a lot in political discourse and I think political discourse is worse off for it. I’m sure he does agree with Hannan re: the NHS (Googling ‘Carswell NHS’ confirms this), but there is such a thing as picking your battles carefully; if he has made the calculation that at this moment in time, the electorate and other political constraints being as they are, it is wiser to invest political capital in, say, advocating for localism rather than for massive reform of the NHS, then I think he has a point. Doesn’t mean that he is somehow vacillating or uncommitted, just that time and opportunities to persuade are scarce.
Dan said,
September 21, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Dave,
To say that the Levellers would have been on the left is probably true; but then again, so were classical liberals (Frederick Bastiat, the radical classical liberal, for instance, sat on the left-wing of the French Assembly). The point is that just because the Levellers were in favour of revolutionary appropriation of land, it does not follow that they were doing it for the kind of egalitarian reasons that the trades unions and the socialist movement (who you liken them to) are and were. There is, in fact, an impeccably libertarian case in favour of revolutionary appropriation of land in the context of a feudal society, so I definitely question the inference that this means they were somehow proto-socialists.
As for self-ownership, it’s not that I have a “clear lack of awareness” of the Marxist critique of the individual under capitalism, it’s just that I believe it does not stand up to scrutiny. The relationship between self-ownership and Marxism is actually a very interesting one; I think Jerry Cohen is surely right when he says that something like self-ownership lies latent in Marxist condemnations of exploitation (I wrote a blog post on this a couple of weeks ago, if you’re interested) – so I don’t think that Marxists can jettison it that easily.
Paul said,
September 21, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Yeah, but I never said that he was either of those things.
I was advancing a hypothesis about why it might have come about that a Tory is claiming the Levellers for the Tory party.
Pace your fair remarks about Carswell’s personal intellectual integrity, I don’t feel the core thrust of the OP is affected (?)
Paul said,
September 21, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Dan,
Your comment to Dave got caught in the spam net. I don’t know why this keeps happening to your posts, but it could be because you use a fake email address?
2009: Blogging Year in Review « Though Cowards Flinch said,
December 31, 2009 at 9:13 am
[...] here anyway. Plenty of our posts address similar matters, such as right-wing attempts to co-opt Left history, the No Platform Policy/Question Time or the question of Swiss democracy and banning minarets. I [...]