Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1670)

Famous British utopian socialist thinker; leader of the Digger movement in 17th century England; the first utopian socialist who put his ideals into practice.

Winstanley was born on 19 October 1609, in in Lancashire, England, into a merchant’s family. In his early years, he did business in London and later went bankrupt due to the economic crisis caused by the English Civil War. In January 1649, Winstanley published New Law of Righteousness, which put forth the idea of using land in common and enjoying the fruits of land on the basis of communal property in the land. In order to realize this ideal, in April 1649, Winstanley led a group of poor peasants who lost their land to reclaim the unowned wasteland on St. George’s Hill in Surrey, which was the famous Digger movement in British history. The Digger movement led by Winstanley gained the support and endorsement of the vast number of poor peasants, and rapidly expanded to Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Huntingdonshire, Lancashire, Kent and other counties, and in some counties, even communes composed of thousands of people appeared. Although the Diggers declared themselves to be non-violent and “to conquer them by love”, the Cromwell regime sent troops to suppress to suppress the Digger movement.

Winstanley’s representative works mainly include: New Law of Righteousness (1649), A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England (1649), The Law of Freedom (1651), of which The Law of Freedom (full title: The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored) is the most famous. The Law of Freedom was written primarily as a “tribute” to Cromwell. In the book, Winstanley expounded the Digger’s views on the freedom in the land and put forth a formula for changing the existing society on the basis of communal property in the land and establishing agrarian socialism with equal reclamation and equal cultivation and freedom in the land. Its basic ideas include: (1) The true freedom as the foundation of the Commonwealth is not the freedom of trade, the freedom to preach, or the freedom to have community with all women, but the freedom to use land. (2) The freedom to use land presupposes that everyone must participate in labor and that the land and its fruits are the common wealth of all and cannot be bought and sold at will. (3) In order for the poor to gain the freedom to own land, it is necessary to rely on the grace of the rulers to realize the commonwealth’s government. (4) To distinguish between means of production and means of subsistence, land, its fruits, and store-houses are public property and can be used freely, while household property is private property and cannot be used freely. In addition, in his The Law of Freedom, Winstanley systematically expounded his thoughts on law, and was the first among the utopian socialist thinkers advocating to draw up a programme for an ideal society in legal form.

With his Law of Freedom, Winstanley depicted in detail the blueprint of an ideal society based on the public property in land, i.e., a “truly free commonwealth”, and the reasonable ideas contained therein had a great influence not only on the later utopian socialists, but also on the bourgeois thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, Winstanley’s design of the blueprint of an ideal society was of an idealistic nature.