Introduction

Summary

He takes upon him to tell you the meaning of other men's words and writing by his studying or imagining what another man's knowledge might be, and by thus doing darkens knowledge and wrongs the spirit of the authors who did write and speak those things which he takes upon him to interpret.

G. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652), p. 351 below.

Winstanley's Place in History

Modern political thought begins in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) is the classic statement of the ‘possessive individualism’ which underlies traditional English Whig and Utilitarian theories. Ideas later developed by radicals and democrats were expressed in the Putney Debates of 1647 and in Leveller pamphlets of the late sixteen-forties. James Harrington's Oceana (1656) was the first systematic statement of the thesis that political change is determined by economic change. In exactly these years Gerrard Winstanley was working out a collectivist theory which looks forward to nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism and communism as well as glancing backwards to a vanishing village community.

Winstanley had grasped a crucial point in modern political thinking: that state power is related to the property system and to the body of ideas which supports that system. He is modern too in wanting a revolution which would replace competition by concern for the community, in insisting that political freedom is impossible without economic equality, and that this means abolishing private property and wage labour.