Book dossier

More's Utopia: the biography of an idea

by J. H. Hexter

This book in which he rescues a great man from his modern interpreters, is a brilliant example of how historical imagination can be persuasively used. Incidentally, by basing his historical reconstruction on what is no less than scientific evidence. The author has effectively challenged the skepticism of the relativists. His main contention is that More really meant what he said, and did not say what Aquinas or Marx or anyone else would have meant. More was no social revolutionary in the modern sense, but his contemporaries, including Erasmus, had no doubt about his intention to use the ideal of "Utopia", with its elaborate presentation of a community of property and goods, as the most powerful kind of criticism of sixteenth-century society. [Back cover].