The Levellers

From Sedley, Stephen. Ashes and Sparks: Essays on Law and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 89-90.  

"[T]he power of the Leveller programme - the first true political programme of a modern kind - lay in its amalgam of principle and realism. That principle rapidly becomes unrealistic and that realism is too often a betrayal of principle was the dilemma of the Levellers as it is of all politics. But their thinking and action show a clear consciousness of the dilemma and a serious endeavour to meet it. In this, and in their combination of a thought-out political programme with grassroots organisation, lies their modernity."