I agree that the Leveller leaders were not much different from other men of their times (actually that's Hill's point). One thing that Hill notes repeatedly is, though, that there was a wide gap between the Leveller leaders and rank-and-file: hence the title of one of the book's chapters: "Levellers and True Levellers."
>But the commons, like the German Mark (see Engels on Peasant Wars in
>Germany) was a property form that was a barrier to social development.
>It is certainly true that enclosure was a vicious form of appropriation,
>but it was the condition of the emergence of the working class.
>Projecting that class back into an age where it does not exist is just
>bad history.
<snip>
>If you make communism a possibility at any point in history, regardless
>of whether the social and productive conditions that could ground it
>exist, you depart from the materialist theory of history in favour of
>idealism.
Obviously I'm not making such a utopian argument. I'm simply pointing out the social forces whose needs and desires that Locke, Kant, etc. had to address, partially incorporate, neutralize, and beat back at the same time. In other words, the Enlightenment was not simply made by philosophers whose names everyone remembers, though the 'history of ideas' would have us believe that it was. The question I'm interested in is, "What was the Enlightenment?"
Yoshie