the one hand, instinctive obedience on the other’ and was ‘a connection
of wills’ made by ‘obedience and force, fear of a ruler’.^6
The essence of the Modern State might be better described as an
unresolvable tension between government and people, the politics of
which have grown out of the making and challenging of laws as they
developed in the middle ages. In England, the killing of the king in 1649
and the replacement of King James’s ‘free monarchy’ by a
‘Commonwealth and Free State’ governed by ‘the representatives of the
people in Parliament’ still left an ineradicable ambiguity in the concept
of the State (was it the frame of the commonwealth or the governors
who ruled it ?), because neither the coercive quality of sovereign power
nor challenges to its legitimacy disappeared with its formal vesting in
the people. In their tracts and debates the Levellers, drawn from the
soldiers of the parliamentary army and the people of London, immedi-
ately denied the claim made by ‘those men that now sit at Westminster’
in their Declaration for a Free Statethat they were the true parliament
of England. The state the Levellers wanted but did not think that the
new Presbyterian establishment would give them was one in which
every man, of whatever religious persuasion, was ‘free in the state he
lives in and is obedient to—matters of opinion being not properly to
be taken into cognisance any further than they break out into some
disturbance or disquiet to the state’; one also in which the absence of an
estate worth 40s. a year should not deprive him of his birthright of a
vote in the election of his representatives—the way in which ‘the state
and the Army’ were going. The Commons must listen to the people if
they really wished to ‘make this nation a state free from the oppressions
of kings and the corruptions of the court’.^7
The Levellers demanded for ‘that famous and worthy sufferer for his
country’s freedoms, Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne’, ‘illegally’
imprisoned by Parliament, the right accorded by Magna Carta to trial
by his peers. But generally they regarded the Common Law as a product
of a ‘Norman Yoke’ imposed on the English people by William the
Conqueror and serving only the wealthy professional lawyers, and
wanted ‘a new and equal Representative’ to make laws which ‘ought to
be equal’ and ‘not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of
the people’. A Leveller tract called Vox Plebis(the voice of the people),
remarked that ‘All States in the beginning are venerable’, but that a
republic which would avoid ruin must above all ‘keep their religion
Conclusion: Law and the State in History 339(^6) Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, tr. with notes by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1952), 279; id., Reason in History, tr. R. S. Hartman (Indianapolis, 1953), 60.
(^7) The English Levellers, ed. A. Sharp (Cambridge UP, 1998), 17–19, 106, 196; The
Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, 423, 442; S. D. Glover, ‘Putney Debates:
Popular versus Elitist Republicanism’, Past and Present, 164 (1999), 78.