Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Socialism
- The Cambridge History of Socialism
- The Cambridge History of Socialism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume I
- Abbreviations
- Introduction to Volume I
- Part I Beginnings
- Egalitarianism
- 1 Mazdak and Late Antique ‘Socialism’
- 2 Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought and Praxis
- 3 Egalitarianism in Europe: Hussites, Anabaptists, Racovians, Hutterites, and Diggers
- 4 The Taiping Land Programme: Creating a Moral Environment
- Early Socialisms
- The Arrival of the Hostile Siblings: Marxism and Anarchism
- Part II Negating State Power
- Index
- References
3 - Egalitarianism in Europe: Hussites, Anabaptists, Racovians, Hutterites, and Diggers
from Egalitarianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2022
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Socialism
- The Cambridge History of Socialism
- The Cambridge History of Socialism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume I
- Abbreviations
- Introduction to Volume I
- Part I Beginnings
- Egalitarianism
- 1 Mazdak and Late Antique ‘Socialism’
- 2 Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought and Praxis
- 3 Egalitarianism in Europe: Hussites, Anabaptists, Racovians, Hutterites, and Diggers
- 4 The Taiping Land Programme: Creating a Moral Environment
- Early Socialisms
- The Arrival of the Hostile Siblings: Marxism and Anarchism
- Part II Negating State Power
- Index
- References
Summary
There were a number of religiously inspired European experiments in communal living, social egalitarianism, and the apostolic sharing of goods, especially between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. This chapter offers an analysis of concepts of egalitarianism as implemented around 1420 by the Hussites at Tábor in the Kingdom of Bohemia. There was a variation of this experiment by the next generation of Hussites in the late 1450s but it was spread much farther afield. Of equal value and interest are two related but quite different attempts to establish a form of social egalitarianism by sixteenth-century Anabaptists.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Socialism , pp. 79 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
References
Further Reading
Elmen, Paul, ‘The theological basis of Digger communism’, Church History 23, 3 (1954), pp. 207–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fudge, Thomas A., ‘“Neither mine nor thine”: communist experiments in Hussite Bohemia’, Canadian Journal of History 33 (April 1998), pp. 25–47.Google Scholar
Hessayon, Ariel, ‘Early modern communism: the Diggers and community of goods’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism 3, 2 (2009), pp. 1–49.Google Scholar
Hsia, R. Po-Chia, Society and Religion in Münster, 1535–1618 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Kaminsky, Howard, A History of the Hussite Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).Google Scholar
Kot, Stanislaw, ‘Polish Brethren and the problem of communism in the sixteenth century’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society in London 11 (1956), pp. 38–54.Google Scholar
Luszczynska, Magdalena, ‘The Polish Brethren versus the Hutterites: a sacred community?’, Journal of Early Modern Christianity 4, 1 (2014), pp. 21–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Packull, Werner O., Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Scribner, Bob, ‘Practical utopia: pre-modern communism and the Reformation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994), pp. 743–74.Google Scholar
Stayer, James M., The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar