Beyond Utopia: Thomas More as a political thinker

ABSTRACT

Despite his producing voluminous writings beyond Utopia, scholarly consensus seems to be that if we want to understand the political thought of Thomas More, we must turn to this ‘little book’. This approach, however, has yielded little consensus about how to categorise More as a political thinker, as Utopia is notoriously and intentionally enigmatic. This article attempts to generate a portrait of More as a political thinker by going beyond an investigation of Utopia alone and taking into consideration those texts often overlooked or rejected by scholars, primarily his polemical and religious writings. Doing so provides an outline of More as a thinker concerned with themes of natural and artificial inequality, popular authority and representation and, at the least, justifies the exercise of reading More’s work beyond Utopia.

KEYWORDS:

• Thomas More
• Utopia
• renaissance
• politics
• authority
• inequality

Acknowledgements

This article has gone through many revisions over many years, and it would be difficult to properly thank all those who have contributed to it. Nevertheless, special thanks are owed to Quentin Skinner and Adrian Blau for supportive comments throughout the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘libellus’, from the original title of the book we now know as Utopia: De Optimo Reipublicae Statu Deque nova insula Utopia libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, clarissimi disertissimique viri Thomae Mori inclytae civitatis Londinensis civis & Vicecomitis. See, for instance, Ian Adams and R. W. Dyson, Fifty Major Political Thinkers (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 47: ‘More’s contribution to political theory lies entirely with his short book, Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia.’ For political theory survey texts that primarily or exclusively treat Utopia see B. Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 95–131; Eric Voeglin, History of Political Ideas: Renaissance and Reformation (Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 109–30; Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 275–80; Alan Ryan, On Politics (London: Penguin, 2012), 311–19. The only one of More’s texts to be in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series is Thomas More, Utopia, George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The most notable exception is Gerard B. Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996).

2 Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility’, in Visions of politics: volume 2, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 213–44; Eric Nelson, The Greek tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 1.

3 Gerard B. Wegemer, Young Thomas More and the Arts of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Richard Marius, Thomas More: a biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 235.

4 See Helen Taylor, ‘Sir Thomas More on the politics of To-Day’, The Fortnightly Review 44 (1870): 132.

5 See Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and his Utopia, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 94; Norman Dennis and A. H. Halsey, English Ethical Socialism: Thomas More to R. H. Tawney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

6 See Edward L. Surtz, ‘Thomas More and communism’, PMLA 64.3 (1949): 549–64; Gregory Claeys, ‘Utopia at Five Hundred’, Utopia Studies 27, no. 3 (2016): 402–11; Terry Eagleton, ‘Utopias, Past and Present: Why Thomas More remains Astonishingly Radical’, Utopian Studies 27 no. 3 (2016): 412–17. See the Alexander Garden Obelisk in Moscow, which lists More as one of history’s great communists.

7 Wolfgang E. H. Rudat, ‘Thomas More and Hythloday: some speculations on Utopia’, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 43 no. 1 (1981): 123–7; J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Hanan Yoran, Between Utopia and Dystopia: Erasmus, Thomas More, and the Humanist Republic of Letters (Lexington Books, 2010), 13, 167, 174, 182–3.

8 Cathy Curtis considers the poems and Richard the Third, but doesn’t go into More’s religious texts, ‘“The Best State of the Commonwealth”: Thomas More and Quentin Skinner’ in Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 93–112. Although ‘Reformation’ is technically an anachronistic term, it here serves a purpose as designating those debates over the nature and purpose of the Church in the 1520s and 1530s; see Richard Rex, ‘Thomas More and the heretics: statesman or fanatic’, in The Cambridge companion to Thomas More, ed. George Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 97. I have used ‘evangelical’ for the anachronistic ‘Protestant’, in line with the work of Diarmaid MacCulloch, The boy king: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 2 and Peter Marshall, ‘Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in The beginnings of English Protestantism, eds. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15.

9 Eamon Duffy, ‘“The comen knowen multytude of Crysten Men”: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the defence of Christendom’, in The Cambridge companion to Thomas More, ed. George Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 191.

10 Marius, Thomas More, 425.

11 Rex, ‘Thomas More and the Heretics’, 93–115 gives a summary of many of these views. There are exceptions: particularly Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History & Providence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship ; Thomas Curtright, The One Thomas More (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012); Joanne Paul, Thomas More (Oxford: Polity, 2016) all of which attempt to examine More’s ideas beyond Utopia.

12 See Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘More’s Rhetoric’ in The Cambridge companion to Thomas More, ed. George Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 52–3.

13 See Brian Gogan, The Common Corps of Christendom: Ecclesiological Themes in the Writings of Sir Thomas More (Leiden: Brill, 1982); Paul, Thomas More, chapter 4.

14 These are treated in Curtright, The One Thomas More, 1–14. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Thomas More as Renaissance Humanist’, Moreana 65 (1980): 5.

15 Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

16 More’s translation reinforces these messages. For instance, he adds the reference to pride in those who had ‘forgotten that because they were mortals, they were only acquiring mortal and perishable goods’; CW 3, I, 30. References to More’s works are from the Yale Edition of the Collected Works of Thomas More (CW). I have added the titles of the works, where not cited in the body of the text, for clarity.

17 CW 3, I, 176.

18 Ibid.

19 For More’s further reflections on pride and the stage-play, drawn from Lucian, see The Four Last Things, CW 1, 150–8.

20 For More’s comments on free will, see Letter to Bugenhagan, CW 7, 49–83; Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CW 6.1, 373; CW 8.3, 497–8. For a discussion of these themes see Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship, 29–31, 60, 176–7.

21 See for instance, Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 602. More references Augustine on pride as ‘The Mother of all Heresies’; Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CW 6 no. 1: 423.

22 Latin poems, CW 3, II, 164. Wegemer, Young Thomas More, 45 shows how this image is also related to Seneca.

23 CW 2, 5.

24 Ibid., 12; CW 15, 333 (the Latin edition and translation of the text).

25 CW 2, p. 12; CW 15, 335.

26 CW 4, 243.

27 Ibid. See Thomas I. White, ‘Pride and the Public Good: Thomas More’s Use of Plato in Utopia’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 20 no. 4 (1982): 346.

28 For the ways in which the Renaissance dialogue played with the barrier between fact and fiction, see Chloë Houston, The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 10. The same can be said of the genre of travel writing, which More also employs, see Andrew Hadfield Literature, travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–2.

29 Pride is not born of these things (it emerges from Original Sin), but it is stoked by them.

30 CW 4, 239. The lesson is made even more striking in the 1551 English translation: ‘For in other places they speak still of the common wealth; but every man procureth his own private wealth’, Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (London, 1551), sig. R, 7^r.

31 CW 4, 239.

32 Ibid., 35.

33 CW 15, 279.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 More makes a similar point in Treatise on the Passion, CW 13, 8–9.

37 CW 6, I, 179.

38 Ibid., 163.

39 Ibid., 185.

40 CW 4, 247.

41 For this reason, the map of Utopia resembles a skull, a memento mori; see Paul, Thomas More, 55–6.

42 See Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93.

43 Letter to Martin Dorp, CW 15, 35; Paul, Thomas More, 7.

44 CW 15, 37. As Stephanie Elsky, ‘Common law and the common place in Thomas More’s Utopia’, English Literary Renaissance 43, no. 2 (2013): 195 points out, such scholastic theologians commit the same crime as the propertied nobles in Utopia.

45 Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CW, 6, I, 123.

46 Responsio ad Lutherum, CW 5, 101.

47 Ibid., 623.

48 Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, CW 8, I, 480–1.

49 Ibid., 399.

50 Ibid., 343.

51 Ibid., 613.

52 CW 5, 159.

53 Ibid., 93.

54 Ibid., 191.

55 Ibid., 251.

56 CW 3, II, 161, 231; see Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship, 54–5.

57 Ibid., 231.

58 Ibid.

59 CW 2, 79.

60 CW 5, 279.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., 277. ‘Leges ergo si tollas: et omnia permittas libera magistratibus: aut nihil neque praecipient: neque uetabunt: et iam inutiles erunt magistratus: aut naturae suae ductu regent: et pro imperio, quidlibet exequentur, et iam nihilo populus erit liberior, sed seruituis conditione deterior; Ibid., 276. See also Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CW 6, I, 262, which contains a discussion of the partiality of judges and the impartiality of the law.

63 CW 12, 252.

64 Ibid., 253.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, CW 8, II, 597–8, 585.

69 See also Responsio, CW 5, 141; Confutation, CW 8, II, 580, 595.

70 CW 8, II, 911.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

73 Life, then, despite being ‘artificial’ in this way, is not wholly trivial. My thanks to the anonymous reader for bringing this out.

74 In both the Institutio and the Moria, Erasmus notes how the trappings of kingship should recall a monarch to the virtues that they are meant to exhibit, Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, Lisa Jardine, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16; Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folie, trans. Thomas Chaloner (London, 1549), sig. O, ii^v.

75 CW, 14, 373.

76 Ibid.

77 Confutsation, CW 8, I, 75.

78 Ibid., 179. This is in the context of speaking about Erasmus’s Moria.

79 Wegemer, Statesmanship, 4, 65, 208. More’s petition for free speech as Speaker of the House of Commons was limited to that institutional space.

80 CW 1, 58.

81 CW 4, 125.

82 Ibid.

83 Confutation, 8, II, 561.

84 Ibid., 590.

85 CW 9, 96.

86 Ibid.

87 CW 6, I, 335.

88 Confutation, CW 8, I, 56.

89 Ibid.

90 This appears in contradiction to his comments, detailed below, about the power of a representative body to overthrow the king/pope. This might be a straightforward contradiction, or it might be to do with More’s thinking on the relationship between consent, authorisation and authority. It is a fruitful topic for further investigation. My thanks the anonymous reader for bringing this to my attention.

91 Ibid. 353.

92 Ibid.

93 Elizabeth Frances Rogers, ed., St. Thomas More: Selected Letters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 221.

94 Confutation, CW 8, I, 31, 32.

95 CW 12, 230; see Matthew 6:24.

96 The Debellation of Salem and Bizance, CW 10, 15.

97 Ibid., 138.

98 Ibid., 119.

99 Ibid., 229.

100 As Lord Chancellor, and thus Keeper of the King’s Conscience in the Court of Chancery, More was also open to the ways in which ‘conscience’ and ‘equity’ could guide the development of law. This was, importantly, not arbitrary; see William Bader, ‘Saint Thomas More: Equity and the Common Law Method’, Duquesne Law Review 52, no. 2 (2014): 435; Merridee L. Bailey, ‘“Most Hevynesse and Sorowe”: The Presence of Emotions in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Court of Chancery’, Law and History Review 37, no. 1 (2019): 9–10.

101 CW 15, 321. In the Confutation, CW 8, I, 287 he argues this approach also translates to city governance, suggesting that ‘senatus Londinensis’ could be translated ‘as mayor, aldermen, and common council’.

102 For the context of English conciliarism see Francis Oakley, ‘Constance, Basel and the two Pisas: The conciliarist legacy in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England’, Annuarium historiae conciliorum 26 (1994): 87–118.

103 Rogers, ed., Letters, 213–14.

104 Ibid., 213.

105 Confutation, CW 8, I, 146.

106 See Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 28–31.

107 David Runciman and Monica Brito Vieira, Representation (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 10.

108 Ibid., 11.

109 CW 8, II, 937.

110 Ibid., p. 938.

111 Rogers, ed., Letters, 221.

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid., 222.

114 William Roper, The life of Thomas Moore, Knight, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 93.