The Continuing Thread

Abstract

Excerpts from the works of three authors appear in this section. They were highly different men. Plato (427–347 B.C.), probably the West’s most influential thinker, was a conservative upper-class Athenian. Thomas More (1478–1535), an English commoner who rose to high position in public service, was held in a vice: close in spirit to the progressives of his times, he was unable to give up his loyalty to the traditional faith in which he had been brought up. For this loyalty he died on the scaffold. François-Nöel Babeuf (1760–1797), a fiery revolutionary, was an intellectual bent on setting straight the course of the French Revolution. Revolutionaries of another school of thought put him to death. Starting from different positions, the three aimed at man’s happiness. The conviction that communalism and its economic counterpart collectivism is the road to happiness made of them, if not actual socialists, forerunners of modern socialism.