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Let us not seize power, but doing away with it and return society to an organic community of noncoercive human relations.
In this fascinating survey of communalism, Kenneth Rexroth takes readers from its prehistoric beginnings (the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherer societies and neolithic villages) through the Essenes and early Christians (who “held all things common”), millenarian revolts and apocalyptical sects (Anabaptists, Hutterites, Brethren of the Free Spirit), the Diggers in the English Revolution, nineteenth-century utopian communities (Oneida, Brook Farm, Fourierists), to the countercultural communes of the 1960s. Based on extensive historical research, Rexroth’s narration is enlivened by anecdotes about the foibles and fantasies of the communalists and worldly-wise comments on the factors that led to their successes and failures.
For this new edition, Ken Knabb has added notes, updates, a bibliography, and a new introduction.
“The well-known poet/translator/critic Kenneth Rexroth has presented a truly impressive potpourri of information about a vast number of eclectic groups, societies, and religious thinkers.… The focus may indeed be communalism—a loose definition which here includes everything from paleolithic hunting communities to Assassins and Franciscans and Knights Templars and transcendental free-lovers on Brook Farm. But there is at least as much history as sociology, not to mention political science, anthropology, and religion. Indeed, there is probably no more cogent recounting of the endless numbers of sects, schisms, heresies, reformers, and mystics whose normally incomprehensible struggles with papal authorities over the arcana of the Eucharist make up the history of the Middle Ages.”
—Kirkus Review
Introduction: The Libertarian Tradition
1. The Neolithic Village
2. Essenes, Therapeutae, Qumran
3. The Early Church, Monasticism
4. Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spirit
5. John Wyciffe, The English Peasants’ Rebellion
6. Huss, The Hussite Wars, Tabor
7. The Radical Reformation, Thomas Münzer
8. Münster
9. Anabaptists, Hutterites
10. Winstanley, The Diggers
11. The Near East and Russia
12. Early Communes in America
13. Amana, The Shakers, St. Nazianz
14. Oneida
15. Robert Owen
16. Josiah Warren
17. Brook Farm
18. Fourierism
19. Étienne Cabet
20. Hutterites Again
Epilogue: Post-Apocalyptic Communalism
Notes and Updates
Bibliography
Index