A Critical Essay On Sir Thomas More

’s Utopia Essay, Research Paper

As its title hints, the essay which follows is not the history but biographical of an idea. The idea for the book called Utopia. Like all ideas for books it was born and had its whole life span in the mind of an author. Like all such ideas it ceased to be when the printed book Utopia became a black-on-white reality. Although there is no accurate record of its birth date, it seems to have been born in the mind of Sir Thomas More. As the writer I shall have to take into account the environment in which our subject passed its life and that environment was the mind of Sir Thomas More. To establish the lineaments of the idea for Utopia we shall perforce, for lack of better sources of information, rely on the book called Utopia We ourselves shall have to look very closely to separate the thinkers thought from the literary tricks of the trade.

More’s intentions in Utopia, must remain mysterious. A little more difficult to accept is the general implication of the review that the mysteriousness of the author’s intent in Utopia is somehow a point in his favor, that the obscurity of his meaning enhances the merit of his work. The one point of unanimous agreement about Utopia is it is a work of social comment. Since Utopia is a work of many ideas, it is impossible of course to expand the book unless one has some notion of the hierarchy of conception in it. A caretul reading of Utopia does seem to me to reveal clearly the hierarchy of it author’s ideas at the time he composed the book. Although the interpretation of Utopia which follows has no pretension to substantial novelty, but rather disavows it, my approach to the problem may seem singular and eccentric. The account of such an analysis will necessarily be a little dull, so I shall have to request the forbearance of the reader without being able to promise for his patience any large reward in the shape of a brand new insight.

The inconsistency between the prospectus in the curious paragraph and the subject matter that follows in the printed version of Utopia becomes intelligible if we make a few assumptions about the development of the books composition. The conclusion various scholars have come to about More’s attitude toward the institution of property coincides to a remarkable degree with their own pre-dilection on that point, or with their notion of what More should have thought. In Utopia More put the only criticism of community of property and the only defenses of private property into his own mouth. For there is no defense of private property at all in the Utopia of More’s first intention. Perhaps the best way to evaluate this contentions to set down next to each other those two defenses of private property.

Now there is an enormous difference between these two critiques of community of property and goods. The second argument is serious and consequential. Not one of those contemporaries would have maintained for a moment that what mattered in a commonwealth were splendor, magnificence, and majesty. More’s contempt for earthly magnificence, and splendor appears not only in his earnest direct denunciations of it in Utopia, and in his elimination of all pomp from his ideal commonwealth except in connection with religious worship, but also in his humorous asides, and particularly in his autobiographical aside about the mission of the ambassadors of Anemolia to Utopia. Indeed More’s revulsion against pomp and display is embedded in levels of his being deeper than his discriminating intellect and rational consciousness. Now if anyone honestly wanted to uphold private property, surely he would rest his case with a mature, not with a palpably silly and insincere argument. Of course More could not put this serious argument against community of property at the end of Book II, because he had already used it near the end of Book I. It is a curious tactic for a man committed to the defense of private property, and one that surely calls for explanation. The argument against community of property at the end of Book I is neither novel nor remarkable, but it is venerable and durable. It raises two classical problems of egalitarian socialism: the problem of incentives and the problem of order and authority.

We need not seek to evaluate these arguments against egalitarianism and the community of property ourselves; we need only to try and learn how More evaluated them. But what of the dire consequences that the argument in Book I against the community of property ascribes to such social arguments. Indeed it is the rather sour cream of the jest that it is not Utopia but sixteenth century Europe, with its well rooted institutions of private property, that is running to ruin with scarcity, idleness and crimes of violence. At this point to demonstrate the sincerity and seriousness of More’s aversion to private property may seem supererogatory. Having tidied up this little point, which we will have to untidy later, writers in the hagiographic tradition either dismiss Utopia as one of More’s lesser works with no serious intent or concentrate their attention on the section dealing with Utopian philosophy and religion almost to the exclusion of those on Utopian social an economic policy. Yet to regard the section on religion and philosophy as the key to the interpretation of Utopia and to the intent of its author is in effect to surrender at the outset any hope of determining what that inten