The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored (Studies in the Libertarian and Utopian Tradition)
by Gerrard Winstanley
Category: Communism

"Gerrard Winstanley's Law of freedom in a platform was the first serious and sober attempt in the English language to restructure the whole of society along avowedly radical lines. By no means a literary Utopia in the tradition of Thomas More and Francis Bacon, it was designed as a blueprint for immediate and specific reform, the adoption of which would--in the writer's belief--allow the country to achieve an unprecedented degree of peace, harmony, and social justice. It was the final and most important literary production of the Diggers, a tiny band of mid-seventeenth century visionaries who undertook to turn the political revolution that had just destroyed monarchical government into a social revolution that would remedy the economic grievances of generations of 'oppressed commoners.' The Diggers [commonly referred to as Levellers] never numbered more than a hundred ... and their efforts were repeatedly--and sometimes cruelly--quashed by indignant neighbors bent on protecting their own rights"--Introduction, page 1.