Etienne Gabriel Morelly (1717–1778)

Famous French utopian thinker and writer in the 18th century.

Morelly was born into a French family of commoners. He worked as an elementary school teacher and wrote many books throughout his life, the most representative of which are The Basiliade, published in 1753, and The Code of Nature, published in 1755. In the long narrative poem The Basiliade, Morelly criticized the social system based on individualism and depicted a social system based on communist principles. After its publication, the book was distorted and attacked by some publications. In response to these criticisms and attacks, Morelly published The Code of Nature. In The Code of Nature, Morelly stated a “simple law” he discovered: human society, like nature, has an eternally immutable “natural law”, and the task of reason is to examine and analyze the process of phenomena themselves, to find out the laws of nature, and to concentrate and organize them and make them coherent laws. Starting from the ideal design of social system in The Code of Nature, Morelly tried to describe the blueprint of the future society in the form of legal provisions, and put forth many important principles of the communist social system, such as introducing public property in the means of production, labor for all, distribution from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, etc., which had a great impact on the later utopian socialist thinkers. However, due to historical and class limitations, his theory had great limitations and immaturity, strongly tinged with utopian egalitarian communism and asceticism. Engels had an objective evaluation of the utopian egalitarian theories of communism of Morelly and Mably: “These were theoretical enunciations, corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed; in the 16th and 17th centuries, utopian pictures of ideal social conditions; in the 18th century, actual communistic theories.”