ABSTRACT
Gerrard Winstanley produced a massive volume of works that outline an agrarian communist political theology based on the New Testament. This chapter complements my chapter on Eliot by focusing on Winstanley’s Law of Freedom to argue that Winstanley creates an Imaginary challenge to the hegemonic royalist and capitalistic power structure as an orthopedic correction to England’s social, political, and religious ills that lead to the bloody series of civil wars. Through an archaeological exploration of scriptural authority, Winstanley’s communist challenge to the status quo foresees Marx, Engels, and twentieth-century post-Marxist thought, and in the Law of Freedom, Winstanley depicts a utopian subjectivity that, like Burton’s Anatomy, exists in Lacan’s Imaginary.
