https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-major-impact-of-leveler-political-ideas-upon-americas-founding-fathers-leading-to-the-american-revolution-and-the-declaration-of-independence/

The Major Impact of Leveler Political Ideas Upon America’s Founding Fathers Leading to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence

By Charles Burris

The Levelers were a radical, democratic movement that emerged within the New Model Army during the 1640s English Civil War. Led by figures like John Lilburne and Richard Overton, they championed universal male suffrage, religious tolerance, legal equality, and a written constitution (The Agreement of the People).

The Transmission of Radical Ideas
The Levelers’ core ideas did not die with the movement’s suppression by Oliver Cromwell. Instead, they were inherited, modified, and amplified by later 17th- and 18th-century thinkers known as the “Commonwealthmen” or Real Whigs.

Caroline Robbins, in her foundational work The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, traces how the anti-authoritarian philosophy of the English Civil War survived through generations of radical writers.

These ideals were popularized in the 1720s by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who wrote under the pseudonym “Cato”.

Cato’s Letters and the American Revolution

As thoroughly documented by Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and The Origins of American Politics, Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters became the most quoted and esteemed political texts in the American colonies. ......