Levellers and Universal Manhood Suffrage During the Putney Dabates (1647)

This is a review article. Its purpose is to present the findings of researchers on the English Levellers’ attitude to universal manhood suffrage, especially during the Putney Debates (1647). This issue is not clear and the dispute of researchers has been going on since the 1960s. The aim of the article is to present the findings on this issue contained in the important English studies on Levellers. The article presents the results of research that allows to answer the questions: whether the Levellers really supported the universal manhood suffrage, or were they therefore unconditional democrats? and why despite the success achieved during the Putney Debates the electoral reform proposed by them did not gain broad support.

Popular Sovereignty in the Political Thought of the Levellers

Natural law, natural rights, and consent theory formed the language of popular sovereignty, to which appealed Parliament’s defenders and the Levellers during the English Civil War in the first half of the 17th century. The aim of the article is to reveal how the Levellers differed from the Parliament’s theorists in terms of the idea of popular sovereignty. These differences concerned primarily the understanding of the people and natural rights concepts, which was related to the political goals of the Levellers. In the political dispute that was the conflict between the king and Parliament, supporters of the latter appealed to the idea of popular sovereignty to justify Parliament’s activities, while the Levellers did so to defend the people from Parliament. To this end, they created an individualistic and contractualistic concept of popular sovereignty. The article presents this concept.