Socialism was a moral impulse prior to being a political movement. Long before Marx, prophets and peasants in Europe dreamed of justice in terms of religion, shared labour, and communal life. Their uprisings failed, but their ideals were durable, echoing through the moral fabric of Europe’s future democracies.
Across Europe’s hills and valleys, from the Swiss Alps to the slopes of Monte Amiata, religion was a language of protest.
Long before the modern state offered the promise of welfare, equality, or group improvement, rural communities were experimenting with what can be called moral socialism, a concept of justice based on divine law rather than on political ideology.
They built communities where equality was not announced in manifestos but was a reality in daily labour, prayer, and shared care. Their stories are fragmented and often end in suppression, exile, or quiet dispersal, but they form an invisible lineage of European social conscience.
There is something these “utopias on the hills” can teach us: that the wellsprings of social justice are not merely reason and revolution, but also faith, humility, and the stubborn hope of small communities that refuse to live otherwise.
Faith and Rebellion in the Countryside
The mountains and countryside that covered the continent – from Tyrol to Moravia, from Württemberg to Tuscany – were the hideouts of those who resisted the new order of the world.
Industrialisation, urbanisation, and secularisation transformed Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. For many, it was not freedom but displacement: a loss of traditional bonds, of shared faith, of meaning. Rural and mountain communities, often poor but tight-knit, were laboratories for new ways of living.
Here rebellion and religion intertwined. Visionaries arose – farmers, preachers, and artisans, not professional revolutionaries – who believed that divine justice demanded earthly equality. Their messages varied in theology but converged in ethics: communal property, shared labour, moral purity, and resistance to corruption. In a world rushing towards profit and hierarchy, they preached fraternity and spiritual rebirth.
The Täufer: Equality Before God
It begins with the Täufer, the Swiss Anabaptists, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Born in the tumult of the Reformation, they carried its radical impulse to its logical conclusion: if all believers were equal before God, then no authority, papal or princely, could claim divine privilege.
The Täufer rejected infant baptism on the grounds that faith must be freely embraced, and they would not take oaths or bear arms. Their most revolutionary proposition was social, though: that the Christian community should share its goods in common and live without hierarchy. Some of them practised forms of communal ownership and independent agriculture.
This was outrageous for Protestant and Catholic monarchs alike. The Anabaptists’ insistence on equality threatened not only church hierarchies but the feudal system itself. They were persecuted, drowned, burned, and banished, yet their moral logic persisted. One can discern, in their clandestine meetings and concealed farms, the germ of a social ethic that centuries later would reappear in socialist and cooperative movements.
The Moravians: Discipline, Faith, and Cooperation
There was a new beginning in Saxony in the early eighteenth century. A group of religious refugees formed the Moravian community of Herrnhut under the protection of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf. They were not striving for revolution but for renewal: a disciplined, egalitarian, and spiritually intense form of communal life.
The Moravians organised themselves into “choirs” based on age, sex, and marital status, sharing work and goods under a common rule of faith. Their villages were unusually modern: neat, well-organised, and economically self-sufficient. They combined the Anabaptist zeal with an orderly government that allowed for stability and continuity.
During a period of increased individualism, Moravians were a subtle counter-culture, proof that a society could be at the same time religious, communal, and productive. Their model of moral economy influenced Protestant missions, early cooperatives, and even the social thought of later reformers.
Pietists and Separatists: The Moral Economy of Faith
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Württemberg and Switzerland, the same ideals were pursued by other groups. Pietists, separatists, and religious colonists sought the withdrawal from the corruption of the world and the purification of themselves through labour, prayer, and simplicity. They were not revolutionaries but moral radicals. They cultivated the soil as an act of devotion, organised collective work, and viewed wealth with suspicion. Some established common ownership of land or tools; others practised mutual aid with rigour. Their small colonies occasionally persisted for decades, protected from political life and sustained by faith.
They represented a pre-socialist theory-free ideology, equality lived rather than written. While isolation protected them from widespread influence, their moral vocabulary would find echo in the future in both Christian social teaching and secular socialism: dignity of labour, solidarity with the poor, and suspicion of excess.
Davide Lazzaretti and the Giurisdavidici: The Prophet of Monte Amiata
In the late nineteenth century, this tradition of moral rebellion had one of its last and most flamboyant expressions on the slopes of Monte Amiata in Tuscany. There, between 1868 and 1878, a man called Davide Lazzaretti – a humble cart-driver turned mystic – proclaimed a “New Law”.
Italy had recently achieved political unification, but social unity was far from reality. The peasantry remained impoverished, and the promises of the new liberal state rang hollow. Lazzaretti’s message spoke to that disappointment. Drawing on Christian mysticism, medieval prophecy, and socialist rhetoric, he envisioned a community where faith and justice would finally coincide, where peasants could live as equals, sharing labour, land, and hope.
He and his followers, the Giurisdavidici, established communal laws, schools, and rituals that erased the line between reform and religion.
To the authorities – the state and the Church – this was heresy and sedition. In 1878, while Lazzaretti was leading a peaceful procession to Arcidosso, soldiers opened fire into the crowd. He was killed, unarmed, under the banner of his “New Law”.
His movement dissolved, but the myth survived: Lazzaretti as the “prophet of the Amiata”, the saint of social justice who tried to turn the Gospel into a constitution.
Common Threads: The Moral Genealogy of Equality
Across these centuries and geographies, the patterns persist. The Täufer, the Moravians, the Pietists, and the Giurisdavidici all shared the belief that communal ethics and moral reform could revitalise society. Their socialism was not the child of class strife but of conscience.
They believed in equality not ideology but theology: each soul was valuable, each person responsible for the other. Their emphasis on work, simplicity, and community anticipated the values that would one day underpin modern cooperative movements and welfare states.
Yet these movements also reveal the limits of moral utopia. Their isolation, geographical, cultural, and often linguistic, protected them from corruption but condemned them to marginality. Without institutions, their ideals could not outlive their prophets. Idealism, unembedded in structure, was a fragile virtue.
From Prophecy to Policy: The Nordic Transformation
The contrast with Northern Europe is instructive. Where the “hill utopias” failed, the Nordic variant of socialism thrived; not by suspending ethics, but by institutionalising them.
In Scandinavia, the same moral vocabulary that had once energised religious communities was retranslated into civic ethics. Lutheran traditions of obligation, modesty, and social responsibility provided fertile ground for democratic reform. Justice was not a revelation but a communal project.
Nordic societies chose gradual transformation instead of rupture; through education, cooperatives, and social dialogue. The village’s moral order was extended to national institutions: cooperatives became unions, mutual aid societies became welfare states.
Equality was achieved not through prophecy but through taxation and participation; the saints’ charisma was succeeded by the bureaucrats’ patience. Yet the moral content remained. The rhetoric of solidarity, humility, and social trust still had a spiritual resonance, even in secular democracies.
Education, too, replaced revelation as the road to salvation. Where prophets had spread divine truth, schools now spread civic reason. Knowledge was the tool of emancipation; literacy replaced liturgy. Democracy itself was a moral discipline, with constant negotiation and cooperation among labour, capital, and the state, on the basis of dialogue rather than dogma.
In this transformation lies the subtle triumph of Europe’s moral rebels: their creed survived because it changed form.
The Legacy of the Hills
These mountain utopias are lost, maybe, but their moral heritage remains. They call us to remember that social justice was originally a spiritual quest: a longing to merge the sacred and the social, to find divine meaning in human equality.
From the Täufer’s simple gatherings to Lazzaretti’s tragic procession, these communities embodied a vision of life where dignity was shared, not granted. Their revolts were crushed, their communes dissolved, but the intuition at their core – that a good society must also be a good moral one – remained.
When that impulse was given institutional expression in the twentieth century democratic welfare states, ethical socialism was no longer a dream but a structure. It had lost its prophets but gained durability; it had ceased to preach and begun to rule.
The “utopias on the hills” have shown us that religion and justice, mysticism and reform, can be reconciled; but only when idealism learns the art of structure.
Their fate is not one of defeat, but of transformation: from revelation to policy, from vision to institution.
The moral socialism which struggled for existence in hidden valleys now lives, quietly but persistently, in the civic morals of Europe’s most egalitarian communities.
Eventually, their dream was not conquered. It descended from the mountains and found a home in democracy.
