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? With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world. Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.
