Melissa Mowry's book argues that the Levellers, the radical political protesters active during the English Civil War, formulated an idea of collective living that mainstream British culture anxiously suppressed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The book is relatively short, and it has a lot of ground to cover. It aims for conciseness by focusing on a handful of representative authors. To picture Leveller thinking, it profiles the legal troubles and the publications of two controversial Leveller couples: John and Elizabeth Lilburne, and Richard and Mary Overton. In their pamphlets and in their petitions to the government, and then again in the mutual support they gave one another and their community, the Lilburnes and Overtons repudiated sovereignty as a principle of social order and preferred collective cooperation instead. To depict the repression of the collectivist culture they envisioned, Mowry reviews the careers of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, the one a royalist, the other a commercial individualist. Both strove, each in a distinct way, to delegitimize the culture of Leveller collectivism. Behn did it by romanticizing sovereignty in stories and plays about glamorous, passionate, aristocratic heroes. Defoe did it by celebrating individual work as the means by which poor people might redeem themselves and attain the status of citizens. The differences between Behn and Defoe seem to Mowry less important than what they shared: their opposition to affectionate community collaboration as a basis for social organization, and their belief that authority expresses itself in a solitary voice, in particular that of the king or the self-directing businessman.

The book has many strengths. The overall thesis is provocative. It makes an innovative contribution to the intellectual history of the period it covers. It displays an impressive range of reading, including primary texts, recent scholarly work, and classic theoretical works by the likes of Benjamin and Derrida. It is sophisticated and ambitious; it is also readable.

It has not solved a problem, though, that comes with its topic's expansiveness: the problem of how to cover it all. Despite helpful passages surveying the authors’ general views and situation, the discussion of isolated quotes does most of the work of explanation, and as a result the presentation feels under-argued and overly spare. By themselves Behn and Defoe are not able to make Mowry's general case about the repressive intent of British intellectual culture of the period. They need to be situated more fully and in greater detail in a large picture of the era. This problem is even more evident in the discussion of the Levellers. The book represents them almost exclusively through quotes from the Lilburnes and the Overtons. These, though illuminating as far as they go, cannot tell us what we need to know about the Levellers as a wider community. How many of them were there, and how did they identify themselves? What was it like living among them, and how far did their everyday lives embody the principles of community affection that Mowry admires in their writing? By focusing primarily on isolated quotes, the book leaves questions like these hanging.

Perhaps the book's most provocative claim is that the Levellers made community affection the basis of political knowledge. For them it was a hermeneutic. Mowry affirms this claim repeatedly, but, as with other aspects of Leveller experience, she barely explores her idea and gives no illustrations. Perhaps she means that affection is the basis for political knowledge in a tight-knit community: there, one's personal experience is bound up with that of the whole group through such an array of emotional associations that feeling amounts to knowing. But how this worked in the case of the Levellers, Mowry does not say. The omission is doubly disappointing inasmuch as she suggests that the Leveller hermeneutic might point literary-historical scholarship away from its prevailing method, which foregrounds the work of authors as (in Mowry's formulation) “sovereign individuals,” and promote a communitarian approach instead, leading to a communitarian kind of knowing. Since Mowry does not explain what this hermeneutic is, it is unclear what the new style of scholarship she is referring to would look like. Her own work relies on the conventional method of profiling authors one by one, as sovereign individuals relaying abstract concepts.