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  1. Home
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  3. Winstanley 'The Law of Freedom' and other Writings
  • Cited by 10
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2010
Print publication year:
1983
Online ISBN:
9780511558504
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511558504
Subjects:
History of Ideas, British History after 1450, Regional and World History: General Interest, History, Politics and International Relations
Series:
Past and Present Publications
Information

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. 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.

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