William Walwyn: or a preference for states of transition over acts of transgression

It is oddly exciting to hear that Deleuze lived a quiet life. What if we wrote a half-way satirical ‘anti-political guide to etiquette and everyday life’… discussing behavior at meals, politeness, refusing the spectacular role of the rebel who talks too much while still retaining a critique of social relations. The subtitle could be ‘On Being a Polite Nutter’.

This puts me in mind of H.N. Brailsford’s portrait of William Walwyn who is represented simultaneously as a throwback to the humanist renaissance, a conduit for techniques and perspectives of the various antinomian tolerances energised during the 1640’s, and as the most modern of the political theorists/pamphleteers of his time. Brailsford’s reading of Walwyn might serve as something of a model for discussions here concerning conduct.

Of his biography we may briefly sketch that he was born into a wealthy family but because of the laws of primogeniture he inherited nothing. He apprenticed as a weaver, and eventually became a master weaver and then a merchant. During the revolutionary period he associated with the most radical individualist elements and yet also, Brailsford claims, was sympathetic to communist ideas: ‘No man is born for himself only, but obliged by the laws of Nature (which reaches all) of Christianity (which ingages us as Christians) and of Publick Societie and Government, to employ our endeavors for the advancement of the communitatie Happinesse…” Following the disappointments of the Commonwealth (imprisonment in 1649 for adocating communism) and then the Restoration, Walwyn returned to ordinary life, re-trained as a ‘physician’ and didn’t publish any further works on politics.

The most remarkable aspect of Walwyn’s biography is the uncomplicated manner in which he was able to ‘channel’ the spirits of his times. He was acutely sensitised to the events and relations of the present moment, and lived as a person entirely possessed by the now of existence. Like a bird compelled to sing at dawn he seems to have been seized by the need to record his reflections upon events as they occurred. Walwyn lived as one would live without the borders of any defining tradition, and without the psychological need to act out the transgression of those borders.

Without reservations or misgivings, he permitted himself to live wholly in accordance with the pressures of the revolution, becoming one of its mouthpieces. He crossed some psychic-social threshold, playing host to, being possessed by, revolutionary voices that spoke through him – only to fall silent again when its moment had passed.

Walwyn’s life of immanence was defined by his radically quiet adaptation to changing conditions, he flowed like water in water. The rising and passing of his states of connectedness are an extraordinary example of both how individuals respond to the radicalising potential within social crises, and of a great personal tactical awareness. At a particular juncture, like a player-piano, or a clockwork automaton, and to some unknown external command, he erupted, possessed with revolutionary thought and then, equally abruptly, he passed again into political inertia just as the ‘command’ was rescinded.

Brailsford, calls Walwyn the éminence grise of the levellers, the quiet string puller. He claims that Walwyn remained a quiet, private individual throughout the period, never seeking public confrontation in the manner of Lilburne. And like a character in a Buñuel film, Walwyn retained the constant character of the consummate host of dinner parties, but where once the polite talk concerned mercantile affairs, at the throw of some directorial switch, the conversation, by some obscure mechanism, abruptly turned to social revolution and the nature of human existence.

It is the unlooked for appearance of revolutionary ideas as emergent transitional states in ordinary circumstances, the sudden energising of latent and already existing potentials, which is so enticing in the present. This ‘channelling’ of revolutionary spirits, which ebbs and flows according to wider, external pressures, is a very different model of consciousness to that of Lilburne, whose theatre of transgression continues to this day as a sort of protestant-based activism/witnessing. It is to the falling quiet/bursting forth model we first discover in Walwyn that now forms the object of our study. Watching the ordinary, waiting for its singing.