Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Pelican classics) [Paperback]

Gerrard Winstanley (Author), Christopher Hill (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Pelican classics | Publication Date: October 25, 1973

Leader of the Diggers, or True Levellers, whose colony was forced to disband in 1650, Gerrard Winstanley stands out from a century remarkable for its development in political thought as one of the most fecund and original of political writers. An acute and penetrating social critic with a passionate sense of justice, he worked out a collectivist theory which strikingly anticipates nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism. He was the first modern European thinker to write in the vernacular advocating a communist society, and to call upon ordinary people to realize it. Winstanley published a number of pamphlets on the colony's behalf, among them a summary of his ideas, published in 1652 as The Law of Freedom in a Platform and dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. Christopher Hill's selection from Winstanley's many published pamphlets demonstrates the coherence and social relevance of Winstanley's philosophy, while it reveals his mastery of colloquial prose and his superb use of imagery.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

Leader of the Diggers, or True Levellers, whose colony was forced to disband in 1650, Gerrard Winstanley stands out from a century remarkable for its development in political thought as one of the most fecund and original of political writers. Christopher Hill's selection from Winstanley's many published pamphlets demonstrates the coherence and social relevance of Winstanley's philosophy, while it reveals his mastery of colloquial prose and his superb use of imagery. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (October 25, 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140400230
• ISBN-13: 978-0140400236
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,314,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN-CIRCA 1650, October 24, 2006

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Pelican classics) (Paperback)

As the document under review, True Leveler Gerrard Winstanley's agrarian socialist utopian tract from the 1640's, demonstrates the notion of a socialist solution to the problems of humankind has a long and storied history. The solutions presented by Winstanley had and (in a limited sense still do) do represent rudimentary ways to solve the problem of social and economic distribution of the social surplus produced by society. Without overextending the analogy Winstanley's tract represented for his time what the Communist Manifesto represented for Marx's time. And those with property hated both in their respective times.

One of the great advances of Marx over Winstanley was that he did not place his reliance on an agrarian solution to the crisis of society as Winstanley was forced to do by the conditions of social development of his time. Marx, moreover, did not concentrate on the question of distribution but rather on who controls the means of production that all previous theorists had either failed to account for or did not know about. Thus, all pre-Marxist theory is bound up with a strategy of moral as well as political persuasion as a means changing human life styles rather than the question of creating social surplus so that under conditions of plenty the struggle for daily survival can be taken off the human agenda and other more lofty goals put in its place. Still, with all the True Levellers weaknesses and the improbabilities of their success in the 1640's Cromwellian England we today still doff our hats to Winstanley's vision.