Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor happily, because all things will be divided among a few (and even these are not in all respects happy), the rest being left to be absolutely miserable. 2 Is it not remarkable how these sentences from the sixteenth century speak directly to today’s social and political debates? I only need remind the reader, for example, of French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and the controversy it has sparked. These same concerns occupy More’s mysterious stranger, who continues: When I reflect on the wise and good constitu- tion of the Utopians, among whom all things are so well governed and with so few laws, where virtue hath its due reward, and yet there is such an equality that every man lives in plenty – when I compare with them so many other nations that are still making new laws, and yet can never bring their constitution to a right regulation . . . where, notwithstanding everyone has his property, yet all the laws that they can invent have not the power either to obtain or preserve it, or even to enable men certainly to distinguish what is their own from what is another’s, of which the many lawsuits that every day break out, and are eternally depending, give too plain a demonstration. The historical Thomas More was a lawyer. From his professional life, he was all too famil- iar with the ways in which “many lawsuits” could be a symptom of deep problems in a country’s legal system. This minor observation highlights an ambiguity that runs throughout the book: it’s far from clear that the “Thomas More” whom we meet in the pages of Utopia is identical to the real Thomas More. After all, here it is the foreign sailor Raphael who Plough Quarterly • Winter 2017 29 Left, Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More, 1527 Right, The Island of Utopia, colorized version of a woodcut in Thomas More’s Utopia, 1516 Images from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)