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Full Idea
The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality.
Clarification
They were radical libertarians during the English Civil War, 1642-51
Gist of Idea
The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality
Source
Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.11)
Book Ref
MacIntyre,Alasdair: 'A Short History of Ethics' [Routledge 1967], p.152
A Reaction
John Lilburne, the Leveller, 'Free-Born John', was the most important of them. They mainly fought for rights of religious conscience, but it quickly escalated into a demand for economic and social rights. It spread to France and the United States.
| 7822 | A neo-Stoic movement began in the late sixteenth century [Lipsius, by Grayling] |
| 7504 | Modern science comes from Descartes' view that knowledge doesn't need moral purity [Descartes, by Foucault] |
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| 7662 | Romanticism is the greatest change in the consciousness of the West [Berlin] |
| 8060 | In the 17th-18th centuries morality offered a cure for egoism, through altruism [MacIntyre] |
| 8021 | The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality [MacIntyre] |
| 8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
| 9307 | Modern Western culture suddenly appeared in Jena in the 1790s [Svendsen] |
| 19648 | Since Kant we think we can only access 'correlations' between thinking and being [Meillassoux] |
| 19674 | The Copernican Revolution decentres the Earth, but also decentres thinking from reality [Meillassoux] |
| 21855 | Only in the 1780s did it become acceptable to read Spinoza [Lord] |
| 20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
| 20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |