A Critical Essay on Sir Thomas More's Utopia

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 …

…is pride itself that prevents actual realms from attaining to that best state. If the sector of thought covered in my paper on Utopian philosophy and religion was-as it has sometimes been treated4he key to More's meaning in the whole of Utopia or in the Utopia of his first intention, we would have on our hands a work so contrived by the author that its central ideas were bound to elude the reader's grasp.