POPULAR revolt was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition, and the middle decades of the seventeenth century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain.

The revolt within the Revolution which is my subject took many forms, some better known than others. Groups like Levellers, Diggers and Fifth Monarchists offered new political solutions (and in the case of the Diggers, new economic solutions too). The various sects - Baptists, Quakers, Muggletonians - offered new religious solutions. Other groups asked sceptical questions about all the institutions and beliefs of their society Seekers, Ranters, the Diggers too. Indeed it is perhaps misleading to differentiate too sharply between politics, religion and general scepticism. We know, as a result of hindsight, that some groups - Baptists, Quakers - will survive as religious sects and that most of the others will disappear. In consequence we unconsciously tend to impose too clear outlines on the early history of English sects, to read back later beliefs into the 1640s and 50s. One of the aims of this book will be to suggest that in this period things were much more blurred. From, say, 1645 to 1653, there was a great overturning, questioning, revaluing, of everything in England. Old institutions, old beliefs, old values came in question. Men moved easily from one critical group to another, and a Quaker of the early 1650s had far more in common with a Leveller, a Digger or a Ranter than with a modern member of the Society of Friends.

What was new in the seventeenth century was the idea that the world might be permanently turned upside down: that the dream world of the Land of Cokayne or the kingdom of heaven might be attainable on earth now.

One of the arguments advanced in propaganda for colonizing Ireland in 1594 was that 'the people poor and seditious, which were a burden to the commonwealth, are drawn forth, whereby the matter of sedition is removed out of the City'. The same argument was often used later to advocate exporting 'the rank multitude' to Virginia.

Further evidence of the unpopularity of the whole church establishment is to be found in the popular iconoclasm which broke out whenever opportunity offered: in the late 1630s and 40s altar rails were pulled down, altars desecrated, statues on tombs destroyed, ecclesiastical documents burnt, pigs and horses baptized.

A royalist looking back from 1648 noted that 'heresy is always the forerunner of rebellion.'

In a famous passage in The Gay Science (section 335) Nietzsche jeers at the notion of basing morality on inner moral sentiments, on conscience, on the one hand, or on the Kantian categorical imperative, on universalizability, on the other. In five swift, witty and cogent paragraphs he disposes of both what I have called the Enlightenment project to discover rational foundations for an objective morality and of the confidence of the everyday moral agent in post-Enlightenment culture that his moral practice and utterance are in good order. But Nietzsche then goes on to confront the problem that this act of destruction has created. The underlying structure of his argument is as follows: if there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates. There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. I myself must now bring into existence "new tables of what is good." "We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves." The rational and rationally justified autonomous moral subject of the eighteenth century is a fiction, an illusion; so, Nietzsche resolves, let will replace reason and let us make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will, an act of the will that by its quality may remind us of that archaic aristocratic self-assertiveness which preceded what Nietzsche took to be the disaster of slave-morality and which by its effectiveness may be the prophetic precursor of a new era. The problem then is how to construct in an entirely original way, how to invent a new table of what is good and a law, a problem which arises for each individual. This problem would constitute the core of a Nietzschean moral philosophy. For it is in his relentlessly serious pursuit of the problem, not in his frivolous solutions that Nietzsche’s greatness lies, the greatness that makes him the moral philosopher if the only alternatives to Nietzsche’s moral philosophy turn out to be those formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their successors.

In another way too Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. For I have already argued that the present age is in its presentation of itself to itself dominantly Weberian; and I have also noticed that Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism—irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unsolved and his solutions defy reason—remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture. Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the Left as well as of the Right.

MacIntyre’s blunt and “extreme” thesis in After Virtue is that ‘morality has been destroyed’ with the advent of modernity. The story he tells is of a decline from the healthy, well-ordered, “premodern, traditional” moral cultures to our own unhealthy, disordered modern moral cultures. The healthy well-ordered cultures of the West are those embodying the classical and Christian ethical tradition of the virtues. For MacIntyre, the big difference between premoderns and moderns is that the former understand statements about one’s duties and obligations, and moral claims and judgments generally, as objective factual statements that can be rationally grounded, whereas we moderns in the main understand moral commitments as subjective, as mere expressions of personal preference, attitude or emotion, and as ultimately grounded in an arbitrary “criterionless choice.” This difference is explained by the fact that the classical and Christian tradition affirms, whereas in the Enlightenment we moderns abandoned, the teleological conception of man.

The moral scheme attending that conception has three elements: a conception of our nature as it is in its untutored state; a conception of our nature as it could and would be if we realized our true potential, i.e., our essence or telos; and the moral precepts that facilitate the transition from the first state to the second. In this scheme, the human being’s essence or telos is understood as part of nature, something real or objective.

Within this scheme it’s possible to justify statements like, ‘you should feed and cultivate these desires, redirect those ones, but starve these others.’ This tradition can justify its demanding ethical precepts by giving as reasons for following them, ‘doing so will help you realize your true nature, your essence; defying them will frustrate your most essential desire to self-actualize.’

When moderns mistakenly abandoned teleology, they were left with only the conception of our untutored nature through which to justify the moral rules they’d inherited. This was impossible, for those moral rules were originally designed to lead us away from that natural state and towards our telos. It was only through the reference to our telos that the moral rules had authority over our untutored nature and its desires. MacIntyre details several failed, doomed, attempts undertaken by the Enlightenment project in its quest to ground morality in our untutored nature. When it definitively failed, our culture was left to conclude that moral commitments must be arbitrary and subjective acts of will. We could no longer give intelligible reasons why some desires should be frustrated, contained, or redirected.

In MacIntyre’s account, there is a stark difference between the cultures that had morality and our modern ones that don’t, in terms of their social structures, and corresponding differences in how they conceive the self. Cultures that had morality saw the social roles people found themselves inhabiting— “brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe”—as imposing objective obligations upon them that were impossible to “evade.” Moderns, by contrast, see “the essence of moral agency” precisely in “the capacity of the self to evade” identification with the social roles it’s thrown into, and thus to evade also the obligations that come with them. For MacIntyre, morality was possible and actual in the social structures of the premodern traditional societies, where the individual was demandingly tied to his role; it was lost in modernity when he was liberated from it. MacIntyre explicitly contrasts his account of modernity’s development with the standard liberationist account: what he sees as the loss of morality, is celebrated historically for the most part not as loss, but as selfcongratulatory gain, as the emergence of the individual freed on the one hand from the social bonds of those constraining hierarchies which the modern world rejected at it birth and on the other hand from what modernity has taken to be the superstitions of teleology.

"It will never be a good world," Baxter often heard men say, "while knights and gentlemen make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the people's sores. It will never be well with us till we have Parliaments of countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants."