In his seventeenth-century radical pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness, Gerrard Winstanley declared war on the political and social arrangements of his time. In the name of an intransigent liberty and equality, he denounced the injustices of political authority, the iniquities of private property and their ideological support in the Church. Such pernicious institutions and mystifications must submit to a more fundamental and universal law – the law of equity – and would be swept away before a new communist vision of society:

The law of righteousness was sanctioned by God, but would be implemented directly by the people. Real equality and liberty – each implicated in the other – would be realised in utopian experiments in common ownership and communal life and work, in which neither private property nor government authority would be recognised. It was only in such an environment that liberty could be imagined, that each could be lord over him- or herself.