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INTRODUCTION More's Utopia is a very strange book for the twentieth­century reader. Although it is short, clear, vivacious and easily read, one finishes, on the first or the tenth attempt, with the feeling that the work has somehow disintegrated in the reading. It is like one of those wooden puzzles, a segmented ball, where we seem always to end with some dominant idea that approximates the whole and yet find ourselves left with a numberof awkward­shaped pieces that cannot be made to fit. H. G. Wells expressed this commonlyfelt difficulty when he wrote that Utopia was "one of the most profoundly inconsistent ofbooks'' in its mixingofwhat seem like irreconcilable ideas1—and this characteristic, felt by every student, accounts for the many conflicting interpretations which have been produced in this century. By some the work is seen as a simpleJew a"esprit, a "holiday work," of no serious consequence,2 and by others as a most profound piece of political philosophy;3 to some it is the expression of the strictest medieval Catholicism,4 and to others of the most atheistic communism.5 The variety and mutual exclusiveness of these views leaves us in a difficult position. It will readily be allowed that each account looks like the original in some ways and yet, because they are contradictory insofar as each presents itself as the true account ofthe whole, it appears impossible to hold together all the parts of the original. It seems that contemporary interpreters have either been content to look to a descrip­ tion of some part of what More says without attemptingto put the whole together, or else, fitting together such pieces as they can, have been forced to the unhappy expedient of reconstituting the ball by sanding off the protruding pieces and filling in the gaps with sawdust. Throughout this essay I assume that More had some definite thing he wanted to say and that he said it in the best and most intelligible way he Reference notes to the Introduction appear on pp. 11­17. 1 2 THE NEW REPUBLIC: A COMMENTARY knew how—given what he knew of the audience to whom he was speaking. This is what I would like to uncover—working from the assumption that it is there to be found. In other words, I do not want to have to accept Wells' conclusion that More wrote and published a work which he knew to be "profoundly inconsistent."6 But this is not to deny that, from our standpoint, many apparent inconsistencies have allowed the mutually contradictory interpretations of our own day. How are we to explain this?Ifwe suppose that More himself was neither inconsistent nor incompetent, how is it that we see many inconsistencies when the book itself has not changed? We may suspect that our difficulties, in arriving at an understanding of the work as a coherent whole, arise primarily from the many differences, in prejudice and point of view, between ourselves and the sixteenth century. In other words what we seem to lack is a share in the principle More had in mind in composing the Utopia—and we will have this, and can know we have it, only if we can read and understand the book without altering any piece and with none left over. Where should we look to find such a principle? I suggest that the answer must lie in something both More and his intended audience possessed in common; otherwise we would have to suppose that he wrote a book which none of his contemporaries could have understood. That More and some, at any rate, of his readers shared such a principle can be deduced from those sixteenth­century figures whose opinions we know—his humanist friends and admirers7 —all of whom are unani­ mous inpraise ofthe book and who are allagreed that its meaning isclear and unambiguous.8 The conflictinginterpretations of the twentieth cen­ tury have no parallel in the sixteenth and this itself deserves our atten­ tion. If we look to the evidence of More's contemporaries it is impossible to argue, as does Kautsky, that More was "a whole epoch in advance ofhis time," having perceived "a newly evolving mode of production and its social consequences not only sooner than most of his contemporaries, but straining far into the future, also glimpse[d]the more rational mode of production into which it will develop" (Thomas More and His Utopia, p. 161). If, as Kautsky would have it, a...

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