The Commune

What would a society based upon principles of cooperation, mutuality, and radical self-governance look like? From the 19th century onward, the commune has been proposed as one answer. In this course we will begin with the famed Paris Commune of 1871 - both as it was described by Karl Marx in The Civil War in France, and as it was reimagined in Peter Watkins’ 2000 film La Commune. We will then explore Vermont’s back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which drew a variety of hippies, radicals, and religious sects to the state. This course will culminate in a collaborative proposal for a commune of the class' own imagining.