author
Lewis Henry Berens
A businessman turned political thinker, he wrote with real energy about democracy, land reform, and radical ideas from the past. His best-known work brought the seventeenth-century Diggers back into view for modern readers.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in 1855, Lewis Henry Berens was an English-born businessman, lecturer, political theorist, and author who became active in South Australia. He was involved in commerce in Adelaide before gaining notice as a public speaker and writer on politics and social reform.
Berens is closely associated with the single-tax movement inspired by Henry George, and his writing often explored how political and economic systems could be made fairer. He also wrote fiction with a political edge, using imagined futures and public debate to examine democracy and reform.
Today he is best remembered for The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth (1906), a study of Gerrard Winstanley and the seventeenth-century Diggers. The book helped preserve interest in an important strand of English radical thought and still gives readers a window into Berens's historical curiosity and reforming spirit.