Early Ideas About Equality
Long before modern communism, people were already imagining societies built on shared property and equal status. In ancient Greece, Plato argued that division began when people started thinking in terms of mine and not mine. He believed a stable city would ask citizens to identify closely with the whole community, sharing both joy and suffering. Even when such ideas were mocked, they remained part of the political imagination.
Christianity gave equality a moral force that older political theories often lacked. It taught that the poor mattered just as much as the rich, and that wealth could be spiritually dangerous. Voluntary poverty, charity, and care for the weak became signs of virtue. Over time, this moral vision helped create the idea that large differences in wealth were not just unfortunate, but wrong.
Later, reports from the New World added another layer to European thinking. Some travelers described indigenous societies as simple, communal, and less corrupted by greed. Thinkers like Thomas More used such stories to imagine ordered societies without money or private wealth. Yet these imagined communities often depended on strict rules and close control over daily life.
Attempts to build perfect equality by force soon showed a harsher side. During the Reformation, radical Anabaptists took over Münster, abolished money, and imposed collective ownership. Dissent was crushed, books were burned, and terror replaced freedom. The promise of total equality quickly turned into total control.
The French Revolution pushed these ideas closer to modern politics. Rousseau argued that property had poisoned human life and that society should follow the general will, even if individuals had to be forced to obey. During the Revolution, men like Robespierre applied this logic through price controls, purges, and violence against supposed enemies of the people. Equality was no longer only a moral hope. It had become a political program backed by state power.
After Robespierre fell, François-Noël Babeuf carried the idea further. He claimed political rights meant little if economic inequality remained. His Conspiracy of Equals called for the abolition of private property and a society where the state controlled labor and distribution. The plot failed, and Babeuf was executed, but his movement left behind a model: secret organization, revolutionary discipline, and the belief that terror might be necessary to create equality.
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