Communalism

Autorentext

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) spent his teenage years in jazz-age Chicago and hitching around the country. In 1927 he moved to San Francisco, where he played a key role in preparing the ground for the political and cultural ferments of the 1950s and 1960s. Author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, essays, social criticism, and translations from seven different languages, he wryly described his main themes as “sex, mysticism, and revolution.”

Klappentext

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 a few notes, a new introduction, a bibliography, and an appendix on Rexroth's radical politics.

Inhalt

Introduction by Ken Knabb
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