Winstanley in Plainer Sight

I'm reading Christopher Hill's 1973 edition of Gerrard Winstanley's writings at the moment. It's instructive that (in the Introduction) he reads Winstanley through the lens of modern (as it was then) socialist political thought, and frames a lot of his discussion in terms of Winstanley's thinking being a precursor for the communist/socialist models of ownership/distribution.

What's particularly striking to me - reading this afresh in my post-Marxist incarnation - is how Hill has to downplay the centrality of religious thought and experience in which Winstanley was soaked/embedded in order to make his reading fit better with the tenets of secular modernity. Hill says at one point: "We must make allowances for the Biblical idiom which Winstanley shared with almost all his contemporaries, and try to penetrate through to the thought beneath." How patronising is that? As if we, with our modern political theories, can know better than the person themself what they were thinking and saying?

So interesting to re-read things with a different mindset: when I read Hill on Winstanley et al originally, I too was looking for the echoes and signs that might reinforce or 'validate' my own Marxist commitments. Now, I can read Winstanley anew, less encumbered by those particualr ideological distortions, and see his writing afresh. And he's good.