TY - BOOK ID - 98662991 TI - Winstanley : the law of freedom and other writings AU - Winstanley, Gerrard AU - Hill, Christopher PY - 1983 SN - 0521252997 0521031605 0511558503 PB - Cambridge Cambridge University Press DB - UniCat KW - Staatkunde KW - Winstanley (Gerrard). KW - Politique (Philosophie) KW - Social Sciences KW - Political Science KW - Communism KW - Levellers KW - History KW - Sources. KW - Great Britain KW - Diggers KW - Radicals KW - Bolshevism KW - Communist movements KW - Leninism KW - Maoism KW - Marxism KW - Trotskyism KW - Collectivism KW - Totalitarianism KW - Post-communism KW - Socialism KW - Village communities UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:98662991 AB - 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. ER -