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Reviews 253 muddle of 'apprehensions and misapprehensions' promises to be a rich historical field. Barry Collett Department of History University of Melbourne Wegemer, Gerard B., Thomas More on Statesmanship, Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 1996; cloth; pp. vii, 262; R.R.P. US$49.95. Statesmanship is so inseparable from everything that w e associate with More that it is paradoxical how its treatment by scholars has tended to be incidental to other concerns. Gerard Wegemer's bookfitsinto a considerable but almost invisible gap._ Only Martin Fleisher's Radical Reform and Political Persuasion in the Life and Writings of Thomas More comes close to Wegemer in overall content and purpose, making for an interesting comparison. Fleisher's conclusions do not always differ in essence, but his greater confidence and flexibility enable him to avoid some of the interpretative difficulties w e find in this study. The intention throughout is to show that "Thomas More—as a civic humanist grounded in classical political thought, in biblical theology, and in English common law—offered an alternative to Machiavelli's absolutist prince, to Hobbes' institutional substitute for virtue, and to later social contract theorists' (p. 12). In More's life and works, Wegemer gives the place of Machiavelli and Hobbes to Raphael and to the radical reformers, who are seen to replace reason and virtue by a self-serving, arbitrary will and to represent the antithesis of all that More understood by statesmanship. In the tripartite scheme of this work, Part 1 identifies the basis of More's political beliefs as the freedom of the will; a freedom for virtue but also, in the terms of the City of God, for 'living according to a lie of [its] own making'. The analyses of More's Picus, his Lucian translations and the Dialogue of Comfort focus on this conflict. A series of moderate and realistic political principles emerge: that the human ruler is fallible and can only act as guide to persons who are essentially self-governing; that law and tradition are society's clearest expression of reason; that the stmggle for justice is ongoing because its ideals cannot be fully materialised; and that human reason and conscience harbour God's laws and are the guiding force of the statesman. The Yale Collected Works, whose impact, as Wegemer comments, has only 254 Reviews begun to be felt in More studies, is used extensively, and the customary practice of glossing More's ideas with Erasmus' works is entirely avoided. The larger middle section which deals with Utopia is an opportunity to apply and develop the above ideas. It draws upon Ciceronian civic humanism to add to the argument More's belief that literature is society's primary civilising force because it encourages the ability to see things clearly as they are. The debate of Book I of Utopia is analysed to show that M o m s is a statesman with just such clarity, supplemented by a 'polite and Christian ethos'. Raphael meanwhile emerges as a deluded wrangler and railer who takes refuge in his own 'uncommon experience'. It seems, in fact, that the debate is treated as a pre-enactment of the conflict between More, as the true statesman, and the radical reformers. Wegemer's close analyses of parts of Book I would make it impossible to read Utopia again without noting the chinks in Raphael's armour and from there identifying the sort of political response that More sought to modify. But the insistence that More's authorial perspective totally excludes Raphael, and that the Utopian account is Raphael's own self-justifying myth, places strains upon the text. It requires, for example, that Raphael's appeal to equity and the L a w of Christ to challenge legal and monarchical injustices, though consistent with the statesmanship that this study proposes, be overlooked. It requires a uniformly dim view of Utopia that can only be sustained at times by a superficial reading. A glaring example is the quoting of lines 7-15 (Collected Works 4, p. 163) to prove the Utopians' self-serving hedonism (p. 135), but avoiding line 6 which states that this view of pleasure would exist only...

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