Mediaeval Socialism

Socialism is modern, Bede Jarrett concedes—so what could it possibly have to do with the Middle Ages? His answer begins with a startling Christian paradox: all people are equal, yet authority, property, and even slavery may be defended.

Writing in the early twentieth century, Jarrett looks back to the Christian teachers whose account of the Fall made government, private ownership, and slavery necessary restraints on human disorder. In the centuries that followed, ideas of community and possession took shape in a society unlike our own, where the boundary between private and common ownership could be hard to draw. Jarrett asks whether these older arguments contain the germ of socialism—not by treating medieval thought as a copy of modern doctrine, but by tracing the principles beneath it. If human life is always changing, can the ideas that govern it ever be wholly new?

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