Introduction: The far right and the crisis of world capitalism

Across Europe and Britain, the far right is gaining strength. This isn’t a fleeting anomaly or the work of individual demagogues; it reflects a deepening crisis in global capitalism. Years of austerity, stagnant wages, failing public services, and a cost-of-living crisis have pushed millions into desperation. Privatisation, deregulation, and the systematic dismantling of welfare systems have torn the social fabric. Workers face rising rents, unaffordable energy bills, and collapsing essential services, even as corporations post record profits and governments claim there is “no money” for social needs.

Simultaneously, all major imperialist nations are rearming and gearing up for conflict. Countries like the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, and Japan are involved in a worldwide race for markets, resources, and strategic control. The tensions between NATO and Russia, increased militarisation in the Indo-Pacific, and the rise of proxy wars signal a new phase in the disintegration of the post-Cold War global order. The ruling class is preparing for conflicts that could surpass the tragedies of the last century. Militarism is not an anomaly but a natural outcome of ongoing capitalist crises.

The ruling class offers no progressive solutions to the crisis. Reversing austerity, increasing wages, or ending militarism would require actions contrary to profit interests. Instead, they turn to reactionary measures. The far right is cultivated as a political tool to shift social anger away from capitalism and onto migrants, minorities, and the impoverished. This pattern of capitalist failure shows that, during crises, the ruling class tends to adopt authoritarian solutions. Fascist movements are not spontaneous acts of hate but are intentionally shaped and promoted by parts of the state, media, and corporate elite.

In this context, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has rediscovered the Weimar Republic. Socialist Workers warns that “history is repeating itself,” that fascism is again at the gates, and that only a broad coalition of Labour MPs, union leaders, clergy, and “celebrities” can stop it. Invoking Weimar is not an attempt to clarify the present crisis but to obscure it. The SWP’s historical analogy is politically motivated: it seeks to channel growing anger behind the Labour Party and the trade‑union bureaucracy under the banner of Stand Up To Racism (SUTR).

The SWP’s story is straightforward: fascism is the biggest threat, Labour is the lesser threat, and criticising the party or unions “divides the movement.” Workers are urged to prioritise their struggles over political institutions. This approach was what hampered the German working class in the early 1930s, as the SPD claimed the capitalist state would prevent fascism, rejected revolutionary efforts, and called for allegiance to bourgeois democracy. Ultimately, this led to disaster.

The SWP reuses this approach with a new appearance. It portrays Labour politicians who have adopted anti-immigrant rhetoric, implemented austerity, and supported imperialist wars as defenders of democracy. It also highlights union leaders who have often undermined strikes and enforced deals below inflation as advocates of anti-racism. Additionally, it advocates for a cross-class alliance that places workers under the influence of the same forces that create the social conditions enabling the far right to flourish.

This is not a lesson from Weimar; in fact, it is quite the opposite. The true lesson of the 1930s is that defeating fascism requires the working class to act independently, based on a socialist and internationalist agenda. This cannot be achieved through alliances with the political establishment but must come from breaking away from it.

The historical Weimar Republic: A deeper historiographical analysis

To grasp the current crisis, it is essential to explore what transpired in Germany from 1918 to 1933. The Weimar Republic did not emerge as a stable democracy; it resulted from a revolutionary upheaval that destabilised German society. In November 1918, after four years of brutal war, the German working class and soldiers revolted against the Kaiser and the military leadership. Mutinies in the navy quickly spread to industrial cities. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils arose nationwide, mirroring the soviets of the Russian Revolution. The old imperial regime collapsed almost instantly. Germany was on the verge of socialism.

For a short period, the working class held the lead, with councils managing factories, garrisons, and local governments. The monarchy was dismantled, and Germany had the chance to follow the Bolsheviks’ example in 1917. However, the revolution was compromised from within.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which supported the war in 1914 and was a key part of the imperial state, quickly moved to quash the revolutionary movement. Friedrich Ebert, the SPD leader, feared the working class more than the remnants of the Kaiser’s regime. In November 1918, he secretly negotiated the Ebert-Groener Pact with General Wilhelm Groener, where the army agreed to protect the new government from workers’ councils, and the SPD committed to maintaining the capitalist system. This pact ensured the old military and bureaucratic elites remained in power and effectively suppressed the revolution.

The SPD relied on the Freikorps, right-wing paramilitary groups made up mainly of demobilised soldiers, to suppress revolutionary uprisings. In January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the Spartacus League and key figures in the revolution, were targeted and murdered by Freikorps officers operating under SPD orders. Their killing was a strategic political move, aimed at removing revolutionary leadership and restoring bourgeois stability.

This fundamental crime shaped Weimar’s history. The SPD emerged as the main supporter of bourgeois dominance, defending the capitalist state, military, judiciary, and police institutions still largely opposed to democracy and sympathetic to the far right. The republic rested on a delicate compromise: the working class received limited political rights, while the bourgeoisie kept its economic and institutional power intact.

The Weimar Republic faced significant structural weaknesses. Historians like Detlev Peukert, Hans Mommsen, and Richard J. Evans have highlighted that the military remained unreformed, monarchists dominated the judiciary, and industrialists continued to hold substantial influence over economic policy. The SPD aimed to keep the working class within bourgeois democratic boundaries and prevent challenges to capitalist property rights.

The SPD and the suppression of the German Revolution

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which supported World War I in 1914, quickly acted to suppress revolutionary efforts. Friedrich Ebert, the SPD leader, was more concerned about the working class than the imperial remnants. In November 1918, he secretly negotiated the Ebert-Groener Pact with General Wilhelm Groener, where the army promised to protect the new government from worker councils, and the SPD committed to maintaining the capitalist system.

This alliance influenced the entire Weimar era. The SPD relied on the Freikorps, right-wing paramilitary groups made up mainly of demobilised soldiers, to suppress revolutionary uprisings. In January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the Spartacus League and icons of the revolutionary movement, were killed by Freikorps officers acting under SPD orders. Their assassination was a targeted political move, aiming to eliminate the revolutionary leadership and reestablish bourgeois stability.

This fundamental crime influenced Weimar’s entire history. The SPD emerged as the main supporter of bourgeois dominance. It upheld the capitalist state, the military, the judiciary, and law enforcement all institutions still resistant to democracy and aligned with the far right. The republic rested on a delicate balance: the working class received limited political rights, but the bourgeoisie’s economic and institutional strength remained unchanged.

Structural weaknesses of the Weimar Republic

Historians have highlighted the Weimar Republic’s structural weaknesses. The republic’s foundations were shaky, with an unreformed army led by monarchists and a judiciary dominated by nationalists who often gave lenient sentences to right-wing extremists while targeting left-wing militants. Industrialists held significant sway over economic policies, actively working to weaken democratic institutions.

The SPD’s role was to contain the working class within the framework of bourgeois democracy. It suppressed strikes, defended private property, and insisted that any challenge to capitalism would “endanger the republic.” In reality, the republic was endangered precisely because capitalism remained intact.

The 1929 Great Depression disrupted this delicate balance. Industrial output nearly halved, and unemployment rose to six million. The parliamentary system collapsed under the strain. Starting in 1930, Germany was governed by a presidential, increasingly authoritarian approach that sidelined the Reichstag and paved the way for Hitler’s appointment.

The rise of the Nazis

The Nazis’ rise wasn’t simply due to “hate,” “rhetoric,” or Hitler’s charisma, as often highlighted in liberal narratives. Instead, these explanations overlook the deeper social and political dynamics that enabled fascism’s ascent. The real cause was the collapse of the capitalist system, which pushed the ruling class to support a movement designed to suppress the working class. Fascism was a deliberate political tool of the bourgeoisie, emerging directly from a period of severe crisis, rather than an irrational outburst.

By 1930, the Weimar Republic was collapsing under the weight of the Great Depression. Industrial output nearly halved, and unemployment reached six million. Working-class areas suffered from hunger, homelessness, and despair. The parliamentary system disintegrated as governments increasingly governed by presidential decree, sidestepping the Reichstag and weakening democratic standards. The ruling elite feared the crisis could radicalise workers and rekindle the revolutionary spirit of 1918–19.

In this context, the Nazis rose as a powerful force, supported by top industrialists like Fritz Thyssen and Ruhr magnates who aimed to suppress the labour movement and restore profits. The judiciary turned a blind eye to Nazi violence, penalising fascist thugs with easy sentences while targeting Communists and left-wing activists. The army viewed the Nazis as potential allies against Marxism. Ultimately, President Paul von Hindenburg, a reactionary aristocrat backed by the SPD as the “lesser evil,” appointed Hitler as chancellor on January 30, 1933. The key factor that enabled this disaster was the working class’s political paralysis, caused by its own leadership.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), having betrayed the 1918–19 revolution, dedicated the Weimar era to defending the bourgeois state. It argued that institutions like the courts, police, and army patrols filled with monarchists and nationalists would safeguard democracy. The party condemned revolutionary movements as “extremism,” suppressed strikes, and endorsed austerity policies that harmed workers. In 1932, it supported Hindenburg’s bid for president, claiming he could stop Hitler. However, Hindenburg was actually laying the groundwork for Hitler’s rise to power.

On the opposite side was the Communist Party (KPD), which, under Stalinist influence, followed the harmful “Third Period’ policy of the Comintern. The KPD labelled social democracy as “social fascism,” equating it with Nazism. They condemned SPD workers as adversaries, rejected any form of united front, and believed that a Nazi win would ‘speed up the revolution.” This sectarian approach fractured the working class just when unity mattered most.

Leon Trotsky, writing from exile, repeatedly warned that the SPD and KPD were steering the working class toward catastrophe. He emphasised that only a united front where workers’ organisations collaborated against fascism and criticised openly could prevent Hitler’s rise. His warnings went unheeded. The SPD persisted with bourgeois legality, while the KPD adhered to Stalinist dogma. This dynamic left the working class paralysed between these two poles.

The tragedy of Weimar was not due to a weak proletariat. In fact, the German working class was among the most powerful and well organised in Europe, with millions in trade unions, mass parties, and cultural groups. It proved its revolutionary potential in 1918–19 and again in 1923. However, what it lacked was strong revolutionary leadership to unify its efforts and steer them toward overthrowing capitalism.

The SPD’s “lesser evil” strategy and the defence of bourgeois democracy

During the Weimar era, the SPD’s strategy focused on defending bourgeois democracy against the far right. It believed that the capitalist state, such as the courts, police, and military, would contain fascism. The party rejected any pursuit of socialism, labelling revolutionary efforts as “extremism,” and viewed the working class not as agents of societal change but as a threat to “stability.” This outlook stemmed from the SPD’s betrayal of the 1918–19 revolution, turning it into the main defender of the capitalist system.

During the 1920s, the SPD formed coalition governments with bourgeois parties, claiming these alliances were essential to “defend democracy.’ In reality, however, they prioritised protecting German capitalist interests. The SPD-led administrations carried out austerity measures, suppressed strikes, and maintained the power of the army and judiciary, institutions still largely controlled by monarchists and nationalists. Their primary goal was to prevent any independent mobilisation of the working class that could jeopardise capitalist property rights.

When the Great Depression began in 1929, the SPD’s stance grew more reactionary. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, ruling by presidential decree, implemented harsh cuts to wages, social benefits, and public expenditure. Instead of rallying workers against these measures, the SPD backed Brüning’s decrees, claiming that opposition could threaten the republic. In truth, the republic was already faltering under the strain of the capitalist crisis, and the SPD’s support for austerity worsened millions of people’s suffering.

In 1932, the SPD’s “lesser evil” strategy culminated as they supported Paul von Hindenburg for president, opposing Hitler. Hindenburg, an aristocratic reactionary who disliked democracy and favoured restoring authoritarian rule, was urged by the SPD to vote for him to “stop fascism.” Shortly after, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor.

This was no accident. It resulted logically from the SPD’s approach: defending bourgeois democracy at all costs, even if it meant empowering those who would eventually destroy it. By aligning the working class with the capitalist state, the SPD caused political paralysis among workers during crucial moments. Trotsky summarised the SPD’s impact when he stated: “The policy of the Social Democracy is the chief obstacle in the path of the German proletariat.”  What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat (1932). The SPD’s tactic of viewing the lesser evil ultimately led to disaster.

If the SPD limited the working class’s actions from the right, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) did so from the left. Led by Stalin, the KPD followed the Comintern’s “Third Period” doctrine, claiming social democracy was “social fascism” essentially the same as Nazism. This approach was not just wrong; it proved disastrous.

The KPD labelled SPD workers as fascists and refused to collaborate with them. It organised separate unions, protests, and electoral efforts, viewing the SPD as the main enemy, not the Nazis. In some cases, KPD members even tactically cooperated with Nazi forces against the SPD, believing that a Nazi victory would ‘speed up the revolution.’ This sectarian approach tore the working class apart when unity was most needed. The KPD’s stance of not cooperating with SPD workers, while still allowing criticism, left the working class divided and confused in the face of fascism.

The SWP’s misuse of Weimar: Popular front politics in new clothes

The SWP claims to oppose Trotsky’s ideas but actually practices what he warned against. Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) is not a unified front; it’s a broad alliance across classes, where the interests of workers are often subordinate to sections of the political establishment. While the SWP uses radical language, its underlying strategy mirrors that of the SPD in Weimar Germany, promoting the “lesser evil” by defending bourgeois democracy and aligning workers with forces responsible for its decline. SUTR’s platform includes Labour MPs whose government has ramped up attacks on migrants and asylum seekers, adopted anti-immigrant rhetoric to outflank the far right, enforced austerity and wage cuts, and supported NATO’s military interventions abroad.

These policies are not accidental; they are central to Labour’s identity as a party that supports British imperialism. However, SUTR portrays these politicians as defenders of democracy and opponents of racism. The SWP claims that workers should join a “broad movement” with them against the far right. Similarly, union leaders are presented as champions of anti-racism, despite their repeated actions to sabotage strikes, impose deals below inflation, and suppress rank-and-file dissent. Their main role has been to limit and demobilise workers’ struggles rather than combat racism or fascism. Nonetheless, SUTR considers them essential allies, fostering the false impression that the union bureaucracy truly represents the working class.

The SWP clearly states that if the far right is considered the main threat, workers should avoid criticising Labour, challenging union leaders, or pushing for an independent political agenda. Instead, they should support any establishment figure condemning racism. This mirrors the SPD’s “lesser evil” approach, updated for today. The SPD argued that workers had to defend bourgeois democracy by backing “progressive” bourgeois politicians. This led to political paralysis among workers and ultimately facilitated Hitler’s rise.

The SWP still uses this approach today. It insists that workers should subordinate their struggles to Labour and the unions, even though these institutions are directly accountable for the social conditions that enable the far right to flourish. This tactic politically disarms the working class precisely when an independent response is most desperately needed.

The far right’s growth isn’t due to a lack of anti-racist slogans but because it can position itself as opposing a political establishment that has caused only misery. The SWP’s populist strategies hide this truth. Each time a Labour government reduces public services and funds wars abroad, it gives the far right an advantage. Labour’s adoption of anti-immigrant language also boosts the far right’s story. When Labour blames migrants for social breakdown, it creates a political space that benefits fascist movements.

Each time union leaders cancel strikes, endorse betrayals, or suppress worker dissent, the far right expands influence. Workers recognise that the official labour movement fails to address their hardships. The union bureaucracy’s cooperation with employers and the government opens a space for reactionary forces to position themselves as “anti-establishment.”

By portraying Labour and the union bureaucracy as allies in the fight against fascism, the SWP hides their own role in creating the conditions where the far right flourishes. It directs opposition into a dead-end that initially caused the crisis. Instead of holding Labour and the unions accountable as tools of capitalist power, it protects them from critique and urges loyalty to their leadership. This leads to political paralysis. Workers are told that breaking away from Labour or the unions “divides the movement” and benefits the far right. In truth, workers’ submission to these institutions allows the far right to expand.

Lessons of Weimar for today

The lesson from Weimar is not that workers should unite with “progressive” bourgeois forces. Instead, fascism can be overcome only through the working class’s independent political mobilisation around an international socialist agenda. Workers must definitively abandon Labour and the pro-capitalist trade unions, as these organisations are incapable of reform and serve as tools of the capitalist state.

Workers should establish rank-and-file committees at every workplace, independent of union bureaucrats, to coordinate struggles across industries and borders. The fight against fascism is a global effort. Workers in Britain must unite with their comrades across Europe and the world, no matter their nationality, religion, or immigration status. Above all, the working class requires revolutionary leadership. The tragedy in Germany was not the lack of a combative working class but the absence of a party capable of leading it.

The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) embody the ongoing tradition of Marxism. They are the only groups that truly understand the lessons of Weimar: fascism emerges from capitalist crises, the working class must maintain political independence, and only a revolutionary party can lead the fight for socialism. The SWP’s concern about Weimar is not a call to action but a surrender. The true battle against fascism starts with building the SEP and the ICFI.

Primary Sources:

Trotsky’s Writings on Germany and Fascism

Trotsky, Leon. What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat. 1932. Trotsky, Leon. The Only Road. 1932. Trotsky, Leon. For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism. 1931. Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Pathfinder Press edition. Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1928. Trotsky, Leon. The German Revolution and the Bureaucracy. 

Secondary Sources: Weimar Republic, SPD, KPD, and the Rise of Nazism

Broué, Pierre. The German Revolution, 1917–1923. Brill, 2005. Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin, 2003. Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power. Penguin, 2005. Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Hill and Wang, 1992. Mommsen, Hans. The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. UNC Press, 1996. Kolb, Eberhard. The Weimar Republic. Routledge, 2004. Fischer, Conan. The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes. Berg, 1995. Weber, Hermann. The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Germany. Pluto Press, 2017. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: Hubris (1998) and Hitler: Nemesis (2000). Bessel, Richard. Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism. Yale University Press, 1984. Carsten, F. L. The Rise of Fascism. University of California Press, 1967. Haffner, Sebastian. Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918–1919. Winkler, Heinrich August. Weimar 1918–1933: The Illusion of Normalcy. Oxford University Press.

These works provide the historical foundation for this article.

North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo‑Left. Mehring Books. North, David. The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century. Mehring Books. David Walsh, Chris Marsden. Articles on Labour, the unions, and pseudo‑left politics (WSWS). Barry Grey, Thomas Scripps. WSWS coverage of British politics, Labour, and the trade‑union bureaucracy. International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). WSWS analyses on fascism, imperialism, and the crisis of capitalism.

Supplementary Sources (Use Critically)

Harman, Chris. The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918–1923. Bookmarks. Cliff, Tony. Trotsky: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy. Bookmarks.

Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising marks the first major effort by a contemporary director to portray a key mass uprising in medieval Europe: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. This is noteworthy because the film industry has traditionally focused on the dramas of monarchs, aristocrats, and court factions. At the same time, moments of direct action by the oppressed have often been marginal or considered too risky to explore. Greengrass’s ambitious, sometimes uneven film highlights the lasting significance of 1381 and exposes the deep ideological concerns of today’s cultural establishment.

The revolt of 1381 stands as one of the earliest and most intense displays of popular anger against feudal exploitation. Thousands of peasants, artisans, and labourers marched to London, freed prisoners, executed despised officials, and occupied the capital for several days. This mass uprising exhibited remarkable courage and clarity, fueled by oppressive taxation, the repercussions of the Black Death, and the strict hierarchies of feudal society. However, films have seldom portrayed it. This is no accident; bourgeois cinema often favours stories about kings and nobles, portrays conflict as personal drama, and tends to shy away from depicting collective action by oppressed groups. Such portrayal challenges social order, legitimacy, and class structures.

Greengrass’s film opens powerfully, depicting the harshness of feudal taxation and how personal suffering sparks collective anger. Andrew Garfield’s Ploughman, Jamie Bell’s John Ball, and Cosmo Jarvis’s Wat Tyler are depicted with seriousness and dignity. Ball’s egalitarian sermon, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” preserves its radical impact. Greengrass recognises that the rebellion was not a conspiracy but a spontaneous outburst of class rage, illustrating a society pushed to its limits.

The film accurately depicts that, initially, the rebels did not oppose the king. They believed Richard II was a just ruler, misled by corrupt advisers. This idea of the “good king” was common among peasant groups and, as Engels later noted in his analysis of the 1525 German Peasant War, reflected the structural position of peasants in feudal society. Spread out in villages, bound to the land, without a unified plan, they could rally heroically but lacked a vision for a new social system. Their tragedy was not naivety but real-world limitations.

The film struggles in its latter half. Once the rebels take over the king’s council, Greengrass shows the night descending into looting and random violence. The camera increasingly focuses on the palace window view, portraying the crowd as an irrational, frightening force. The deliberate, calculated violence by the ruling class is seen as treachery, rooted in personal betrayal, whereas the violence by the oppressed is depicted as chaos. This reflects a typical liberal view of revolution—sympathising with the oppressed while simultaneously fearing their autonomous actions.

The studio made a decisive change just three weeks before the release, renaming the film as The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood. This new title drew on a brief epilogue showing the Ploughman wearing a green hood and ambushing the king in Sherwood Forest. This connection of Robin Hood to the events of 1381 is not just a marketing tactic, but reflects an ideological shift. It shifts focus from collective resistance to individual heroism, replacing mass activism with personal rebellion. Clearly, the studio decided that portraying a collective uprising against exploitation wouldn’t attract enough viewers.

Greengrass’s film, despite its strengths, struggles to resolve its perspective on the rebellion it portrays fully. It sympathises with the peasants’ pursuit of justice but is uncomfortable with their tactics. The film begins with a serious historical tone and ends in a mythic way. The key lesson from 1381 emphasises the importance of the oppressed taking independent action, rather than outlaws like those in Sherwood Forest- a message that remains relevant today.

A society strained to the breaking point.

Greengrass begins The Uprising after the Black Death, the devastating pandemic that killed half of England’s population and disrupted social order. Few modern films have depicted the scale of this upheaval. The plague did more than reduce the population; it challenged the very ideology of feudal society. Labour shortages threatened landowners’ economic dominance, wages increased, and the ruling class responded with repression—implementing wage controls, raising taxes, and trying to keep peasants tied to the land. Greengrass’s opening scenes, where young King Richard II and the nobles and clergy decide that the Church and merchants cannot be taxed, so the burden falls on peasants, embody the core principle of class rule. The elite protects itself, shifting the crisis’s costs downward. Today’s workers recognise this pattern.

Andrew Garfield’s Ploughman symbolically echoes Langland’s Piers Plowman, an allegorical poem about social injustice and moral defiance. He begins by burying his family, victims of the plague. The tax collector insists he pays “death taxes’ again, citing missing documentation. The scene highlights bureaucratic cruelty- cold, impersonal, and typical of a system where the poor must constantly justify their existence to the wealthy. Greengrass depicts village girls being humiliated, forced to strip so soldiers can verify their taxable age, in a straightforward manner that avoids sensationalism. This serves as a stark reminder that feudal exploitation was real, enforced through physical control, surveillance, and looming violence.

The film’s most powerful moments are in its early sequences. Greengrass excels at capturing the moment when personal suffering transforms into collective outrage as individual grievances, long suppressed, resonate with others’ experiences. The rebellion ignites not through conspiracy or manipulation but because of the unbearable burden of exploitation. A single act of defiance sparks in a landscape full of flammable material. This portrayal is historically accurate. The Peasants’ Revolt wasn’t premeditated; it broke out unexpectedly. It stemmed from years of accumulated resentment, intensified by the poll tax and harsh enforcement tactics.

Jamie Bell’s portrayal of John Ball and Cosmo Jarvis’s Wat Tyler captures the revolt’s historical leadership. Ball, a radical priest whose sermons energised the countryside, is depicted with seriousness and conviction. His well-known statement, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” maintains its powerful call for equality. It stands as one of the earliest clear assertions of human equality challenging divine hierarchy. Greengrass lets this line stand out without adornment. In a society that saw hierarchy as natural and divine, Ball’s words directly challenge the ideological roots of feudalism.

Jarvis’s Tyler, a seasoned soldier, appears disciplined, focused, and politically aware. While not a proto-revolutionary in the modern sense, he understands the stakes. The film portrays Tyler and Ball collaborating to bring coherence to the revolt, articulate demands, organise the march on London, and contain some of the crowd’s more destructive tendencies. This depiction is grounded in history. The revolt was not without leadership; rather, it lacked a class able to maintain political organisation beyond the immediate crisis.

Greengrass’s portrayal of the march on London stands out as one of the film’s greatest achievements. The rebels appear purposeful rather than chaotic and angry rather than reckless. The scenes of prison openings, the burning of John of Gaunt’s palace, and the execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury are depicted as acts of political justice, not mere random violence. For several days, the insurgents effectively control the capital. The film highlights the remarkable fact that Europe’s most rigidly hierarchical society was temporarily upended from below.

Greengrass’s portrayal captures the sense of possibility often missing in many historical dramas. The peasants, artisans, and labourers who marched on London weren’t just reacting to oppression; they were asserting their agency. They believed—though mistakenly—that they could appeal to the king, achieve justice, and make the world fairer. These illusions were structural rather than psychological, rooted in their worldview. As Engels later noted in his study of the German Peasant War of 1525, while the peasantry could rise heroically, they couldn’t, on their own, establish a new social order. Their fragmented, local existence and dependence on the monarchy limited their broader ambitions.

Greengrass’s initial sequences, marked by clarity and seriousness, nearly recognise this reality. They depict a society in turmoil, with a ruling class intent on maintaining its privileges and a mass of oppressed individuals realising their collective power. These moments bring The Uprising close to true historical understanding—before the film’s subsequent ideological withdrawal into fear, chaos, and eventually myth.

Illusions in the monarchy and their tragic consequences

Greengrass correctly highlights that the rebels initially did not oppose King Richard II. They regarded him as just but were deceived by malicious advisors. This trust in the “good king” was not naïve but reflected the peasantry’s social position within feudal society. As peasants spread across countless villages, connected to the land and without any national organization, they could stage significant and heroic revolts but struggled to envision a new social structure. Their demands to abolish serfdom, end feudal dues, and dismantle legal ties to the land were radical, yet articulated within feudal ideas. They looked to the monarch as a defender of justice, not as the system’s. This text emphasises Engels’ key political insight from the German Peasants’ War of 1525, which applies to 1381 as well. It highlights that while the peasantry can overthrow feudalism through a courageous, widespread uprising, they cannot establish a new order. Engels explained that the tragedy wasn’t their lack of bravery or clarity, but the social constraints they faced. Their local focus, land dependence, and loyalty to the monarchy prevented them from forming a sustainable plan to succeed beyond destroying the old system.

Greengrass stages the betrayal of the rebels with considerable dramatic force. At Mile End, Richard II promises sweeping concessions: the abolition of serfdom, freedom of labour, and the redress of grievances. The rebels disperse, believing they have won. The film captures the extraordinary moment when Europe’s most rigidly hierarchical society seemed on the brink of transformation. But the promises were a calculated deception. Once the rebels had returned home, the king revoked every concession. The ruling class acted with cold calculation, not treachery born of emotion but treachery born of class necessity. The feudal order could not survive the fulfilment of the rebels’ demands; therefore, the rebels had to be destroyed.

The depiction of Wat Tyler’s death at Smithfield emphasises its brutality. While negotiating with the king, Tyler is unexpectedly killed. This scene symbolises more than personal betrayal; it reaffirms feudal authority. Tyler’s death signifies the fall of the revolt’s leaders and the start of a counter-revolution. John Ball, a radical priest known for his inspiring sermons, is captured and executed—hanged, drawn, and quartered. In response, hundreds of rebels are executed nationwide. Greengrass highlights how this repression is methodical: rather than panic, the ruling class restores order through terror.

One of the film’s strengths is its clear portrayal of betrayal. It illustrates that the ruling class won the revolt not with better arguments or morals but through violence and deception. However, Greengrass does not fully explore the political implications. The betrayal was not accidental; it was inevitable. The peasantry’s trust in the king was rooted in their class ideology, which could not yet act independently of the monarchy. Their defeat stemmed from structural constraints, not personal errors.

In this sense, The Uprising brushes against a significant historical truth but doesn’t fully reach it. The 1381 revolt was one of medieval Europe’s major mass uprisings, yet it failed because its leadership couldn’t go beyond the social system they aimed to challenge. Greengrass highlights this betrayal; Engels clarifies why it was inevitable. The film’s most powerful scenes hint at this understanding, though later parts shy away from exploring these deeper implications.

The descent into “mob” framing

The film struggles in its second half. After the rebels take the king’s council- a rare moment in medieval European history when society’s lowest classes briefly control political power- Greengrass shows the night descending into looting, drunkenness, and random violence. The Ploughman, Tyler, and Ball are horrified, trying to control what the film repeatedly calls, whether explicitly or implicitly, the “mob.” This change is sudden and revealing. What was once shown as a disciplined, purposeful crowd suddenly appears as an uncontrollable force of nature. The leaders must restrain the crowd to prevent it from self-destructing.

There was violence in 1381, including xenophobic attacks on Flemish immigrants. No serious historian denies this. But the framing matters. Greengrass’s camera increasingly adopts the palace window’s viewpoint: the masses as an unpredictable, terrifying presence, a dark tide threatening to engulf civilisation. The king’s nightmares of “demons”, grotesque, contorted figures emerging from the shadows, become a recurring visual motif. What begins as the subjective fear of a frightened monarch becomes, through repetition and framing, a perspective the film itself partially endorses. The rebels’ seizure of power is not shown as a moment of political possibility but as a descent into chaos.

Liberal filmmaking on revolution often shows sympathy for the oppressed but also reveals a fear of their independence. The oppressed are allowed to suffer, endure, and seek justice, yet when they act together, the camera withdraws. Their collective agency appears threatening, and their violence— even if aimed at their own exploiters—is viewed as disorderly. In contrast, violence by the ruling class—systematic, calculated, and much larger in scale—is seen as legitimate. Treachery is often seen as individual dishonesty rather than a systemic flaw.

This distinction is ideological, not based on fact. In 1381, the ruling class acted with cold strategic intent. Richard II’s promises at Mile End were a calculated deception, meant to scatter the rebels and enable their slaughter. Tyler’s murder at Smithfield was not a tragic mistake but a premeditated killing. The subsequent reprisals—hundreds executed, villages terrorised, leaders hunted—were not random chaos but organised violence by a class defending its authority. However, Greengrass describes this violence as “betrayal,” a moral failing, while portraying the violence of the oppressed as “mob rule,” a natural disaster.

This inversion is key to bourgeois ideology. It shapes how revolutions are usually shown: rulers are portrayed as rational, even if cruel; the masses are seen as emotional, even when justified. The oppressed are granted dignity only while passive. When they act, they become threatening. The latter part of the film exposes the limits of Greengrass’s political vision. He can show exploitation, suffering, and righteous anger, but he struggles to portray the masses as active agents in history rather than unpredictable mobs.

The tragedy is that the 1381 revolt was not chaotic. It was organised, purposeful, and politically consistent within its class perspective. Its violence mainly targeted tools of feudal dominance: tax collectors, judges, officials, and aristocratic symbols. Meanwhile, the ruling class’s violence was unchecked and total. Greengrass’s framing flips this reality. This flip is driven not by past events but by ideology: a deep-rooted liberal fear that the oppressed might act outside the authority of the institutions claiming to serve them.

The second half of the film is not just a narrative mistake but also a political setback. It exposes how modern cinema struggles to portray collective action without framing it as a problem. Instead of highlighting a moment of real historical change, the revolt becomes a warning. Both the camera and the ruling class seem to be afraid of the crowd.

The Robin Hood graft: a revealing capitulation

The most remarkable incident happened not on screen but within the marketing team. Just three weeks before the film’s release, the U.S. distributor suddenly changed the title to The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood, citing a short epilogue in which the Ploughman wears a green hood and ambushes the king in Sherwood Forest. The British distributor quickly rejected this change, emphasising that Greengrass’s film was a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, not a Robin Hood origin story. Critics called the ending “tacked on” and “damaging,” and they were right. Attaching Robin Hood to 1381 was not just a marketing mistake; it was a revealing political statement.

The rebranding reveals how ideological pressures influence modern filmmaking. The studio apparently decided that depicting a large-scale uprising against exploitation wouldn’t attract audiences. Instead, it relied on well-known “intellectual property,” reflecting the industry’s risk-averse preference for safer content. This shift replaced collective resistance with the narrative of the lone outlaw hero, turning a significant act of political mobilisation into a personal story of defiance. This choice goes beyond marketing; it signals a retreat from the revolt’s true political significance.

Robin Hood embodies the bourgeois fantasy of rebellion, representing a form of revolt that lacks social depth. His defiance is personal and moral rather than based on social or structural change—he steals from the rich but does not question wealth or the social relations that create it. Living in the forest rather than in towns and villages, his struggle is individual rather than historical, making him an admired hero who doesn’t threaten societal assumptions. Essentially, Robin Hood symbolises rebellion without aiming for revolution.

The Peasants’ Revolt stands in contrast. It was a large-scale uprising involving tens of thousands of peasants, artisans, and labourers who marched to London, liberated prisoners, executed despised officials, and occupied the capital for several days. No lone outlaw orchestrated this; it was a collective assertion of the oppressed class’s strength. Its demands—abolishing serfdom, securing labour freedom, and ending feudal dues—challenged the core structures of the social order. Linking Robin Hood to 1381 distorts the revolt’s significance. Such an attempt represents an ideological retreat and a refusal to face the true meaning of mass action.

The epilogue is politically confusing. The Ploughman ambushes the king but then spares him, claiming his group operates “beyond royal authority.” This sentimental gesture replaces the real historical lesson—that the oppressed must act independently of the ruling class—with a romanticised fantasy of noble outlawry. The film originally depicted the peasants’ trust in the king as their downfall, yet it ends by reinforcing the myth it previously criticised. The collective effort of many, defeated by the ruling elite, is overshadowed by the lone hero lurking in the forest. Ultimately, history becomes folklore and politics becomes myth.

The film’s poor box-office performance, earning only $3.3 million against a $20 million budget, indicates that audiences were not convinced. The rebranding failed to expand the film’s appeal and instead compromised its integrity. Viewers saw the disconnect between the revolt’s serious message and the trivial Robin Hood ending. The studio’s panic and distrust of authentic history ultimately harmed the film it was trying to preserve.

The Robin Hood graft exemplifies modern cinema’s ideological boundaries. While the industry can portray suffering, injustice, and rebellion, it confines these elements within familiar narrative structures. When faced with real mass action, cinema turns to myth. Greengrass’s film, despite its merits, is limited by these constraints, starting with history and ending with legend, and unable to uphold the revolt’s true political significance.

Contemporary resonance and contemporary limits

Some reviewers have noted the film’s relevance to today: a society recovering from the pandemic, with elites growing wealthier while workers endure austerity, inflation, and escalating war costs. These similarities are evident. The social landscape of 2026, much like that of 1381, is characterised by stark inequality, political distrust, and a ruling class eager to shift the fallout of its crises onto the populace. Widespread unrest shows up in strikes, protests, and growing anger over living conditions. It’s easy to understand why the Peasants’ Revolt inspired Greengrass and why the film’s initial scenes strike such a chord.

Greengrass rightly earns praise for recognising the importance of 1381 and persisting through years of production and cast changes to bring the film to life. He stands out as one of the few modern directors willing to seriously confront issues of state violence and large-scale political movements. Garfield, Bell, and Jarvis deliver earnest performances, and the film’s first half is marked by clarity, urgency, and a sincere effort to understand the revolt on its own terms. However, The Uprising ultimately struggles to decide its stance on the rebellion it portrays. It sympathises with the peasants’ pursuit of justice but feels uneasy about their tactics. The film starts with Engels’s observation that the peasantry could rise heroically but could not, alone, create a new social order, yet it shifts away from this, fading into myth and liberal worry.

The film’s failure to portray oppressed characters acting independently highlights more than just an artistic flaw; it reveals the ideological boundaries of modern cinema. Bourgeois filmmaking can show suffering, injustice, and even rebellion, but only when these elements stay within familiar storytelling structures. When the masses act collectively, gain power, or challenge the current order, the camera pulls back. In these moments, the crowd becomes a “mob,” individual agency dissolves into chaos, and historical events turn into warnings. Greengrass’s film exemplifies this tendency: it starts with the potential for mass action but concludes with the fantasy of a lone outlaw.

The Robin Hood graft exemplifies this retreat most clearly. The studio’s panic—believing that the true history of a mass uprising wouldn’t attract audiences—exposes a deep ideological unease with collective resistance. The film’s ending, where the Ploughman spares the king and claims his group is “beyond royal authority,” isn’t genuinely political but an outright avoidance of politics. It replaces the lessons of 1381 with a romantic act that leaves issues unresolved.

The lessons of 1381 are not about outlaws in Sherwood Forest but highlight the importance of the oppressed acting independently of the ruling class and its promises. The peasants’ tragedy was not due to a lack of courage but to their misplaced trust in the monarchy, which was based on the fixed social limitations they faced. Their defeat was inevitable: the ruling class responded with calculated strategies, while the peasants lacked the organisation and ideological resources to continue the fight.

The enduring question today is whether the oppressed act independently of the institutions that claim to represent them, especially amid growing inequality, authoritarianism, and war. Greengrass’s film hints at this truth but ultimately pulls back. The true history of 1381, however, cannot be fully understood in Sherwood Forest; it calls for a direct challenge to the social order—an unresolved confrontation.

Articles and Bibliography

Marxist and Theoretical Works

• Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany. The foundational Marxist analysis of peasant uprisings, indispensable for understanding the structural limitations of rural revolts and the class dynamics that doomed them.
• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (sections on primitive accumulation) For the broader context of feudal dissolution, the emergence of capitalist relations, and the role of coercion in restructuring labour.
• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Ch. 1–3): Not directly about 1381, but essential for grasping the Marxist method of analysing mass movements, class agency, and the difference between spontaneous revolt and organised revolutionary leadership.
• George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: For the theoretical distinction between class “in itself” and class “for itself,” crucial for understanding why the peasantry could revolt but not reorganise society.

Primary and Medieval Sources

• Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana: A contemporary chronicler whose hostile account nonetheless provides detailed descriptions of the events of 1381.
• Jean Froissart, Chroniques: Offers a vivid aristocratic perspective on the revolt, revealing elite anxieties about mass action.
• Langland, Piers Ploughman: The literary backdrop to the Ploughman figure; a major source for understanding popular religious dissent and proto‑egalitarian sentiment.
• The Anonimalle Chronicle: One of the most detailed accounts of the negotiations at Mile End and Smithfield.

Modern Historical Scholarship on 1381

• Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381. The classic Marxist history of the revolt. Essential for its analysis of class structure, feudal exploitation, and the political consciousness of the rebels.
• Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: For the economic pressures that shaped peasant life and contributed to the revolt.
• Alastair Dunn, The Great Rising of 1381: A modern narrative history with strong archival grounding.
• Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer. Useful for understanding the ideological climate of late‑14th‑century England and elite responses to popular unrest.
• Justine Firnhaber‑Baker, The Jacquerie of 1358: A comparative study of another major peasant uprising, illuminating the structural similarities across Europe.

On Feudalism, Class Structure, and Revolt

• Marc Bloch, Feudal Society: A foundational work on the social and economic structures of medieval Europe.
• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class: Not medieval, but indispensable for understanding how class agency develops historically- a contrast to the peasantry’s structural limitations.
• Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism: For the broader European context of feudal decline and peasant resistance.

Film, Ideology, and Representation

• John Newsinger, “Revolution and the Cinema” (various essays): Marxist analyses of how film treats mass uprisings and class struggle.
• Peter Watkins, interviews on La Commune (Paris 1871): Watkins’s reflections on why mainstream cinema fears collective agency are directly relevant to Greengrass’s retreat into “mob” framing.
• Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique: For a theoretical framework on how bourgeois aesthetics constrains depictions of mass political action.
• WSWS Arts Reviews on Les Misérables, Judas and the Black Messiah, Bloody Sunday: Parallel analyses of how liberal filmmaking oscillates between sympathy for the oppressed and fear of their independent action.

On Robin Hood Mythmaking

• J.C. Holt, Robin Hood: The definitive scholarly study of the outlaw myth, useful for understanding why Hollywood prefers Robin Hood’s individualised rebellion to the collective politics of 1381.
• Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. Explores how the legend has been repeatedly reshaped to fit bourgeois ideological needs.

The publication of Rachel Foxley’s The Levellers marks a significant moment in English Revolution historiography. It is the first monograph devoted exclusively to the Leveller movement since H. N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), and this half-century gap is itself historiographically revealing. The absence of sustained scholarly engagement with the Levellers cannot be attributed to a lack of archival material or interpretive difficulty. Rather, it reflects the political and intellectual realignments that have reshaped academic history since the late twentieth century. The Levellers’ marginalisation has accompanied the rise of revisionist approaches that seek to separate political thought from social conflict, limit the scope of revolutionary agency, and displace class analysis from the centre of historical explanation. In this sense, the historiographical silence surrounding the Levellers reflects a broader ideological shift within the discipline.

Foxley’s opening chapter, aptly titled “The Levellers and the Historians,” acknowledges this context with admirable clarity. She observes that revisionist scholars “have questioned almost every aspect of the historical reputation of the Levellers” (p. 3), from the coherence of their political programme to the extent of their influence within the New Model Army. Her study is thus situated within a long-running historiographical dispute- one that has, in effect, constituted a British Historikerstreit over the nature of radicalism, republicanism, and political agency in the 1640s. Although Foxley does not explicitly present her work as a polemical intervention in this debate, her analysis inevitably engages with it, and her conclusions challenge several entrenched assumptions of the revisionist orthodoxy.

Foxley’s intervention becomes clearer when set against the intellectual climate in which revisionism emerged. Beginning with G. R. Elton and consolidated by scholars such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky, revisionism rejected the structural and class-based interpretations advanced by Marxist historians including Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. Rather than emphasising social conflict, revisionists focused on constitutional crisis, administrative breakdown, religious sensibilities, and the contingent decisions of political elites. The Levellers, whose programme articulated demands for popular sovereignty, legal reform, and political accountability, sat uneasily within this framework. Their radicalism was minimised, reinterpreted as derivative, or dismissed as marginal. As a result, historiography often presents the Levellers as episodic actors rather than a coherent political movement.

Foxley’s study challenges this reduction. By emphasising the intellectual originality of Leveller political thought, she shows that their arguments cannot be dismissed as mere extensions of Independent or sectarian discourse. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, the petitioning campaigns of 1646–49, and the ideological exchanges surrounding the Putney Debates reveals a movement capable of sustained organisation and theoretical innovation. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the relationship between political ideas and social forces, the extent of popular mobilisation, and the ideological diversity within the parliamentarian coalition.

At the same time, Foxley’s work reflects the constraints of the historiographical environment in which it was produced. Her emphasis on political theory, rather than the class dynamics shaping Leveller activity, partly aligns her with post-revisionist tendencies. She places the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu and, while cautioning against dissolving them into an undifferentiated political world, does not fully articulate the structural tensions that defined their position within the revolutionary process. This unresolved tension between recognising Leveller distinctiveness and situating them within a wider coalition marks the limits of her intervention.

Nevertheless, The Levellers makes a major contribution to the field. It restores the movement to the centre of debates on political thought during the English Revolution and challenges the revisionist minimisation of radical agency. In doing so, Foxley’s study helps correct a long-standing imbalance in the historiography and reasserts the Levellers’ importance in shaping the political imagination of the 1640s.

Revisionism and Its Discontents

Foxley’s relationship with revisionist scholarship is complex and, in many respects, emblematic of the broader tensions that have shaped English Civil War historiography over the past half-century. On the one hand, she challenges the more reductive claims advanced by scholars such as Gary De Krey, whose critique focuses on the chronology and coherence of Leveller organisation. De Krey argues that the term “Leveller” emerged only in late 1647 and, therefore, that no identifiable movement existed before then.

This insistence on terminological precision leads him to reduce the political developments of 1645–47 to a series of contingent alliances, obscuring the ideological continuity and strategic coherence that Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn were already shaping. As the review notes, “Movements do not wait for their opponents to name them before they exist.” Foxley’s readiness to identify a Leveller movement before it was formally named therefore challenges revisionist scepticism and signals her refusal to regard political identity as purely retrospective.

Yet Foxley’s resistance to revisionism is not absolute. Her methodological focus on political theory, rather than on the social forces that produced and sustained it, places her partly alongside post-revisionist approaches that seek to combine ideological analysis with a more pluralistic understanding of political culture. She locates the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu, emphasising the fluidity of alliances and the permeability of ideological boundaries. This approach enables her to highlight the Levellers’ intellectual originality without artificially separating them from the wider political world in which they operated. At the same time, she warns against “dissolving them into an undifferentiated part of that complex political world” (p. 6), demonstrating her awareness of the dangers of excessive integration. The Levellers were neither mere Independents nor simply one faction among many; they articulated a distinctive political programme that cannot be reduced to the sum of their alliances.

The tension between these positions, however, remains unresolved. Foxley’s analysis does not fully articulate the class character of Leveller politics or the structural limits that shaped its trajectory. Her focus on political argumentation, petitions, pamphlets, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves the social base that enabled it underexplored.

The Levellers drew their support mainly from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and sections of London’s lower middle strata, as well as those of other urban centres. These groups held distinctive economic interests and political expectations that shaped Leveller demands for legal reform, popular sovereignty, and magistrate accountability. Without placing Leveller ideology in this social context, the movement can appear as a free-floating constellation of ideas rather than a political expression of specific class forces.

This omission becomes more apparent when Foxley examines the structural limits of Leveller influence. She acknowledges the hostility of the army grandees and political elite. Still, she does not fully consider why Leveller demands became intolerable to the propertied classes that ultimately shaped the post-revolutionary settlement. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 resulted not simply from ideological disagreement or personal animosity, but from a class struggle within the revolutionary camp, as the interests of small producers collided with those of landowners, merchants, and military commanders. By failing to foreground these dynamics, Foxley’s account risks underestimating the material constraints that defined both the possibilities and the limits of Leveller radicalism.

In this sense, Foxley’s work occupies an intermediate position within the historiographical landscape. She challenges revisionist minimisation of Leveller coherence and influence, but does not fully adopt the class-centred analyses advanced by Marxist historians such as Hill, Manning, or Slaughter. Her study thus serves both as a corrective to revisionist reductionism and as an expression of the post-revisionist reluctance to engage directly with the structural determinants of political action. This duality is not a flaw, but a marker of the historiographical moment in which her work was produced, a moment characterised by methodological pluralism, theoretical caution, and an ongoing effort to reconcile political ideas with social forces.

The Intellectual Originality of Leveller Thought

One of the major strengths of Foxley’s study is its demonstration of the originality and intellectual coherence of Leveller political thought. Against the long-standing revisionist tendency to depict the Levellers as derivative or merely reactive, Foxley convincingly argues that their political language was neither a simple extension of Independent polemic nor an improvised response to the accelerating crises of the late 1640s. Instead, she shows how Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, and their associates forged a distinctive idiom that combined scriptural references, historical analogies, and emergent secular reasoning in unprecedented ways within English political discourse. Their pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals reveal a sustained effort to theorise political authority, liberty, and representation at a moment when inherited frameworks were collapsing. As contemporaries recognised, the Levellers were the revolution’s ideologues, seeking to make sense of unprecedented political developments with the intellectual resources available to them.

Foxley’s analysis is especially effective in showing that Leveller thought cannot be reduced to the religious idioms through which it was often expressed. While recognising scripture’s pervasive influence on seventeenth-century political argument, she demonstrates that the Levellers used biblical language strategically rather than dogmatically. Their appeals to “freeborn rights,” “the laws of nature,” and “the people’s consent” were not simply theological extensions, but elements of a broader shift toward secularised political reasoning. In this respect, Foxley challenges interpretations that trace Leveller radicalism exclusively to congregational practice or covenant theology. Instead, she places their political creativity within a wider intellectual transformation that was beginning to separate political and social questions from scriptural authority.

It is important to place this intellectual creativity within a broader European context. The erosion of scriptural authority after the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1543), followed by the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, destabilised the cosmological foundations on which medieval political thought had rested. As scientific inquiry undermined the Ptolemaic universe and challenged the epistemological supremacy of biblical revelation, new forms of political reasoning became possible. The Levellers were neither scientists nor consciously involved in the scientific revolution, but they operated in an intellectual environment increasingly receptive to secular explanations. Their arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality reflect this shift. They belonged to a generation beginning, however tentatively, to seek answers to political and social problems beyond the confines of theological orthodoxy.

In this sense, Leveller thought anticipates aspects of the Enlightenment. Their insistence that political authority derives from the people rather than divine sanction, emphasis on rational law over arbitrary power, and belief in the universality of certain rights all foreshadow developments in eighteenth-century political philosophy. At the same time, their critique of oligarchic power and defence of small producers and artisans echo themes later adopted by socialist thinkers. It would be anachronistic to describe the Levellers as proto-Marxists, and Foxley avoids such simplifications. Nevertheless, their political language contains early elements of later democratic and egalitarian traditions, showing that the intellectual genealogy of modern radicalism cannot be confined to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

Foxley’s contribution, therefore, is not merely to rehabilitate the Levellers as significant actors in the English Revolution but to restore the intellectual depth of their political project. By situating their ideas within both the immediate revolutionary context and the longer trajectory of European thought, she shows that Leveller radicalism was neither accidental nor derivative. It was a creative and historically consequential attempt to rethink the foundations of political authority at a moment when the old world was collapsing and a new one struggling to be born.

A Movement with a Mass Audience

Foxley’s analysis of Leveller mobilisation is one of the most empirically substantial and historiographically consequential elements of her study. Against the revisionist tendency to minimise the movement’s organisational capacity and popular resonance, she reconstructs a pattern of sustained political activity that demonstrates the Levellers’ ability to reach, mobilise, and coordinate large numbers of supporters across London and beyond. Her discussion of the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (July 1646) is particularly illuminating. She identifies it as “the first Leveller text to claim a mass following” (p. 36), and treats it not as rhetorical exaggeration but as evidence of a developing political constituency. By foregrounding this document, Foxley challenges the assumption common among conservative historians that Leveller radicalism was confined to a narrow circle of pamphleteers and sectaries. Instead, she shows that by mid‑1646 the Levellers were already articulating demands that resonated widely among artisans, apprentices, small producers, and politically conscious segments of the urban population.

Her use of recent scholarship on petitioning and print culture further strengthens this argument. The figures she cites- 30,000 copies of a petition printed in January 1648, 98,000 signatures on a later Remonstrance, 20,000 copies of the Agreement of the People distributed free, and 10,000 signatures on the women’s petition of March 1649- are striking not only for their scale but for what they reveal about the infrastructure of Leveller mobilisation. These numbers indicate a movement capable of coordinating printers, distributors, ward organisers, and networks of sympathisers across multiple parishes and guild structures. They also suggest that Leveller texts circulated far beyond the immediate circles of their authors, reaching readers who may not have identified formally with the movement but who were receptive to its arguments. In this respect, Foxley’s work undermines the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal or ephemeral. Instead, she presents them as a dynamic political force whose organisational practices anticipated later forms of mass politics.

Equally important is Foxley’s challenge to the claim that Leveller political ideas were fundamentally religious in origin. While acknowledging the period’s pervasive religious idiom, she argues that “there is simply no need to go hunting in covenant theology or congregational practice for Leveller political ideas of equality or ‘democracy,’ or for a prototype of the Agreement of the People” (p. 9). This intervention matters in a long‑standing historiographical debate. For decades, revisionist scholars have attempted to locate the roots of Leveller radicalism in sectarian ecclesiology, thereby reducing their political programme to an extension of congregationalist church governance. Foxley rejects this reduction. She shows that Leveller arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality cannot be explained solely, or even primarily, through religious categories. Their political language drew on a wider repertoire: classical republicanism, common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the emergent secular reasoning that was beginning to reshape European intellectual life.

By disentangling Leveller political thought from narrowly theological explanations, Foxley restores the movement’s intellectual autonomy. She shows that while the Levellers operated within a religious culture, their political arguments were not derivative of it. This distinction matters because it repositions the Levellers within the broader history of political ideas. Rather than treating them as a sectarian offshoot, Foxley presents them as participants in a wider transformation in political reasoning- one that was beginning to detach questions of authority, liberty, and representation from the interpretive monopoly of scripture.

Taken together, Foxley’s analysis of mobilisation and her critique of religious reductionism significantly revise the historiographical landscape. They reveal a movement that was both organisationally sophisticated and intellectually innovative, capable of articulating political demands that resonated across a broad social base. In doing so, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of Leveller significance and restores the movement to its rightful place within the political imagination of the English Revolution.

Levellers and the New Model Army

The chapter on the Levellers’ relationship with the New Model Army constitutes Foxley’s most substantial and consequential historiographical intervention. For more than four decades, revisionist scholars such as Austin Woolrych, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky have argued that Leveller influence within the army was limited, episodic, or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. In this view, the army’s political actions in 1647–49 can be explained through institutional grievances, professional honour, and war experience, rather than through the penetration of radical political ideas. Foxley challenges this orthodoxy directly. She highlights the petitioning campaigns of spring 1647, the cooperation between civilian and military radicals, and the striking consistency of demands articulated by Leveller leaders and army agitators. Her analysis demonstrates that Leveller influence was neither accidental nor superficial but formed part of a sustained dialogue between civilian activists and politically conscious soldiers.

Central to Foxley’s argument is her treatment of the Putney Debates. Although constrained by the publisher’s space limitations, her discussion is judicious and incisive. She rejects the revisionist tendency to treat Putney as an isolated episode, a momentary eruption of radicalism unconnected to the army’s broader political development. Instead, she situates the debates within ongoing exchanges among agitators, grandees, and civilian Levellers, showing how the issues raised at Putney had already circulated in petitions, pamphlets, and informal discussions throughout the army. This contextualisation is crucial. It shows that the debates were not an aberration but the culmination of a political process in which soldiers actively engaged with questions of sovereignty, representation, and constitutional settlement.

The review reinforces Foxley’s argument by listing the numerous Levellers who served in the army or maintained close ties with it. Figures such as Edward Sexby, William Allen, Thomas Prince, John Harris, and the Rainsborough brothers demonstrate that Leveller sympathies were not confined to civilian circles. Lilburne’s own military record was widely known, and army chaplains such as Jeremiah Ives and Edward Harrison openly supported Leveller positions. These connections undermine the revisionist assertion that the Levellers were “exterior to the army.” They instead reveal a porous boundary between civilian radicalism and military activism, where ideas, personnel, and organisational practices circulated freely.

Foxley’s conclusion that Putney marked “not the end but the beginning of a potentially fertile alliance between civilian Levellers and army radicals” (p. 158) directly challenges the standard revisionist narrative. Rather than viewing the debates as a moment of radical overreach swiftly contained by Cromwell and Ireton, she interprets them as the opening of a political space in which Leveller ideas could shape the army’s constitutional imagination. This interpretation restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary dynamic. It emphasises the agency of rank‑and‑file soldiers, the army’s ideological diversity, and the possibility, however constrained, of a democratic transformation emerging from within the military structure itself.

Foxley’s intervention has broader historiographical implications. By demonstrating the depth of Leveller–army interaction, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of radicalism and reasserts the importance of ideological conflict within the parliamentarian coalition. Her analysis suggests that the army was not merely a professional fighting force but a political institution in which debates about authority, liberty, and representation were actively contested. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the extent of popular political consciousness, the relationship between military organisation and political radicalism, and the structural tensions within the revolutionary movement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on the army is a major contribution to the field. It dismantles the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal and restores the New Model Army’s political complexity. By reintegrating Putney into the broader revolutionary process, she offers a more dynamic and historically grounded account of radicalism in the 1640s- one that recognises the army not as a passive institution but as a site of ideological struggle and political possibility.

Class Limits and the Cromwellian Settlement

Where Foxley’s analysis is less satisfactory is in her treatment of the class limits of Leveller politics. Although she acknowledges the hostility of the grandees and the structural pressures facing the movement, she does not fully explore the deeper social dynamics that shaped both the possibilities and the constraints of Leveller radicalism. The Levellers drew their support primarily from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and segments of the lower middle strata groups whose economic interests and political expectations diverged sharply from those of the propertied classes who ultimately determined the trajectory of the post‑revolutionary settlement. This divergence was not incidental. It was rooted in the material conditions of seventeenth‑century England, where the emerging capitalist order was reshaping relations of production, property, and political authority.

The Levellers’ programme- universal male suffrage, equality before the law, accountability of magistrates, and the subordination of rulers to the people- reflected the aspirations of those who were being drawn into the early capitalist labour market yet still retained elements of economic independence. Their demands expressed both a desire to preserve older forms of small‑scale production and a need to articulate new forms of political agency in a rapidly changing society. In this sense, Leveller radicalism was simultaneously forward‑looking and rooted in the social position of its supporters. It advanced democratic ideas but was limited by the class base from which it emerged.

Foxley recognises aspects of this dynamic but does not fully develop its implications. Her emphasis on political theory pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves underexplored the structural forces that shaped the movement’s trajectory. The suppression of the Levellers at Burford in May 1649 was not, as the review notes, “an accident of personalities but the outcome of a class struggle within the revolutionary camp.” The grandees, representing the interests of landowners, merchants, and the higher strata of the bourgeoisie, could not tolerate demands that threatened property qualifications, social hierarchy, and the stability of the emerging capitalist order. Cromwell’s actions- arresting Leveller leaders, suppressing mutinies, and consolidating state power- were not simply tactical decisions but class imperatives.

Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility but does not fully explore why Leveller ideas became intolerable to the propertied classes. The Levellers’ insistence on political equality clashed with the economic inequalities that underpinned the revolutionary elite’s power. Their critique of arbitrary authority threatened not only monarchical absolutism but also the authority of those who had assumed leadership of the parliamentarian cause. Their demands for legal reform challenged the very structures that maintained property relations. In short, the Levellers’ political programme was incompatible with the class interests of those who emerged victorious from the revolution.

This omission matters because it limits Foxley’s ability to explain the movement’s defeat. Without situating Leveller radicalism within the broader class structure of seventeenth‑century England, the suppression at Burford risks appearing as a contingent event rather than as the predictable outcome of a deeper social conflict. The Levellers were not defeated because their ideas were impractical or because they misjudged the political moment. They were defeated because their demands threatened the foundations of the new order the propertied classes were constructing.

Law, Liberty, and the Freeborn Englishman

The chapter on law and liberty is among the most stimulating in Foxley’s book, offering a nuanced account of Leveller legal thought and its place within the political culture of the 1640s. Yet it contains a notable omission: Foxley does not engage with Soviet legal scholarship, particularly the work of Evgeny Pashukanis, whose analysis of early modern legal forms provides one of the most sophisticated frameworks for understanding the Levellers’ juridical innovations. This absence is striking because Pashukanis’s Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927) remains one of the few attempts to situate Leveller legal arguments within a broader theory of the emergence of bourgeois law. His insights illuminate precisely the terrain Foxley explores, and their omission leaves a gap in an otherwise rich chapter.

Pashukanis argued that John Lilburne’s legal thought anticipated key principles of bourgeois criminal law, including the requirement that punishment correspond to the crime and the prohibition of ex post facto legislation. These principles, which would later become foundational to modern liberal jurisprudence, appear in Lilburne’s writings not as abstract theoretical propositions but as practical demands arising from his own experiences of arbitrary imprisonment, judicial manipulation, and executive overreach. Pashukanis’s observation that Lilburne was “the first man in England to succeed in being served with an indictment” underscores the novelty of Leveller legal arguments. It highlights how Lilburne’s struggles forced the state to articulate and formalise procedures that had previously been applied inconsistently or not at all. In Pashukanis’s reading, Lilburne’s confrontations with authority reveal the embryonic formation of legal norms that would later underpin the bourgeois state.

Foxley’s silence on this tradition is regrettable, given its relevance to her subject. Her analysis rightly emphasises the Levellers’ insistence on due process, legal accountability, and the rights of the accused. She shows how their arguments drew on common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the political language of freeborn English liberties. Yet without engaging with Pashukanis, she misses an opportunity to connect Leveller legal thought to a broader theoretical account of law’s historical development. Pashukanis’s framework would have let her situate Leveller demands within the transition from feudal to bourgeois legal forms, illuminating the structural forces that shaped their arguments and why those arguments resonated so powerfully in the 1640s.

Moreover, Pashukanis’s analysis provides a counterpoint to interpretations that treat Leveller legal thought as merely an extension of religious or constitutional traditions. By emphasising the material and class dimensions of legal development, he offers a way of understanding why the Levellers’ juridical innovations emerged when they did and why they took the form they did. His reading suggests that Leveller legal arguments were not simply moral appeals or constitutional clarifications but expressions of deeper social transformations associated with the rise of market relations, the consolidation of property rights, and the emergence of a new political subject: the legally autonomous individual. Foxley gestures toward these themes but does not fully develop them, and her omission of Pashukanis leaves this dimension of Leveller thought underexplored.

This gap is particularly evident in her discussion of the relationship between law and class. Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility to Leveller legal reforms but does not analyse the structural reasons why those reforms were unacceptable to the propertied classes. Pashukanis’s framework would have clarified this point: the Levellers’ insistence on legal equality and procedural fairness challenged elites’ discretionary power. It threatened the hierarchical legal order that underpinned emerging capitalist relations. Their defeat, therefore, was not simply political but juridical: a suppression of legal forms that were incompatible with the interests of those shaping the post‑revolutionary settlement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on law and liberty is rich and insightful, but her omission of Pashukanis represents a missed opportunity. Engaging with Soviet legal scholarship would have deepened her analysis, connected Leveller legal thought to broader theoretical traditions, and clarified the structural forces that shaped both the movement’s achievements and its limits.

Conclusion

Foxley’s The Levellers is, without question, a major scholarly achievement. It synthesises a wide range of recent research, challenges entrenched revisionist assumptions, and restores the Levellers to a central place in the political thought of the English Revolution. In doing so, it intervenes decisively in a historiographical landscape long shaped by scepticism toward radical agency and by a tendency to minimise the intellectual coherence of seventeenth‑century popular movements. Foxley’s work demonstrates that the Levellers were not marginal pamphleteers or episodic agitators but serious political thinkers whose ideas resonated across a broad social base and contributed meaningfully to the revolutionary dynamic of the 1640s.

One of the book’s most impressive accomplishments is its ability to integrate intellectual history, political theory, and close textual analysis without losing sight of the broader revolutionary context. Foxley’s readings of Leveller pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals are consistently sharp and historically grounded. She shows how the Levellers developed a distinctive political language that combined scriptural references, common-law traditions, and emerging secular reasoning. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, in particular, highlights the movement’s constitutional imagination and its attempt to articulate a vision of political authority rooted in popular sovereignty rather than inherited privilege. In this respect, Foxley’s work significantly revises the revisionist portrayal of Leveller thought as derivative or improvisational.

Equally important is her challenge to the long‑standing assumption that Leveller influence within the New Model Army was minimal or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. By reconstructing the petitioning campaigns of 1647, the exchanges between agitators and grandees, and the connections between civilian and military radicals, Foxley demonstrates that Leveller ideas circulated widely within the army and shaped debates about representation, authority, and settlement. Her treatment of the Putney Debates is particularly effective, situating them within a broader pattern of political engagement rather than treating them as an isolated eruption of radicalism. In doing so, she restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary process and challenges the revisionist minimisation of rank‑and‑file political consciousness.

Despite these strengths, the book has limitations. Foxley’s reluctance to foreground class dynamics leaves an important dimension of Leveller politics underdeveloped. The movement’s social base- artisans, apprentices, small producers- shaped both the radicalism of its demands and the structural limits of its influence. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 was not merely a political defeat but the outcome of a deeper class conflict within the revolutionary camp. While Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility, she does not fully explore the material interests that made Leveller demands intolerable to the propertied classes who ultimately shaped the post‑revolutionary settlement. A more explicit engagement with class analysis would have strengthened her account of both the movement’s achievements and its defeat.

Similarly, Foxley’s silence on Soviet legal scholarship, particularly Evgeny Pashukanis, represents a missed opportunity. Pashukanis’s analysis of Lilburne’s legal thought provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of modern legal norms and the relationship between law and class power. Engaging with this tradition would have deepened Foxley’s discussion of Leveller jurisprudence and connected it to broader debates about the historical development of legal forms.

These limitations, however, do not diminish the book’s overall significance. The Levellers represents a major step toward a more balanced and historically grounded understanding of radical politics in the 1640s. It challenges the revisionist orthodoxy, reopens questions that had been prematurely closed, and restores the Levellers to the centre of debates about political thought in the English Revolution. It deserves a wide readership, and one hopes that a more affordable paperback edition will make it accessible to students and scholars alike.

Primary and Secondary Works

Brailsford, H. N. The Levellers and the English Revolution. London: Cresset Press, 1961.

De Krey, Gary. Review of The Levellers, by Rachel Foxley. History (online). Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-0206.12111_4 (onlinelibrary.wiley.com in Bing)

Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Preface.

Kishlansky, Mark. Various works on the New Model Army and revisionist interpretations (not directly cited with title in the essay but referenced as part of the revisionist school).

Morrill, John. Works on the English Civil War and the New Model Army (referenced in discussion of revisionist historiography).

North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism. Published online, 24 October 1996. Available at: https://www.wsws.org

Pashukanis, Evgeny B. “Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law” (1927). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm (marxists.org in Bing)

Rees, John. – Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519. Available at: https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1519 (reviews.history.ac.uk in Bing) – Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution. PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/ (research.gold.ac.uk in Bing)

Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt.” Labour Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (May–June 1958), pp. 77–82.

Talbot, Ann. “‘These the times … this the man’: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill.” World Socialist Web Site, 25 March 2003. Available at: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html (wsws.org in Bing)

Contextual and Historiographical References

Elton, G. R. Foundational works on Tudor government and the origins of revisionist historiography (referenced indirectly).

Historikerstreit. General background on the German historiographical dispute. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit (en.wikipedia.org in Bing)

Woolrych, Austin. Works on the New Model Army and the English Civil War (referenced in discussion of revisionist interpretations).

Notes Corresponding to the Original Essay

1. Rees, John. Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
2. “Historikerstreit,” Wikipedia.
3. De Krey, Gary. Review in History.
4. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface.
5. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
6. Talbot, Ann. WSWS, 25 March 2003.
7. North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism.
8. Rees, Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution, PhD thesis.
9. Foxley, The Levellers.
10. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
11. Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt,” Labour Review, 1958.
12. Pashukanis, Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927).