ABSTRACT
The late medieval and early modern experiments in community of goods owed much to the fervour of the Reformation. Others to show interest in the communist principle were Renaissance humanists. Thomas More’s famous work, the first great modern utopia, was published in 1516. This chapter makes a brief visit to late-medieval northern Italy, where humanism as a political philosophy was originally formulated. It talks about the new national monarchy of England. George Logan characterises More’s Utopia as a ‘federation of fifty-four city-states’, together making up a territory the size of England, i.e. of a ‘Renaissance nation-state’. The Italian Dominican friar, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun was the other major communist utopia of the era. In the eyes of the prophet of the Diggers, the establishment of the earth as a common treasury would represent a return to the world as it had been before the Fall.
