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 16because 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 9 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)