The New Republic: A Commentary on Book I of More's Utopia Showing Its Relation to Plato's Republic

Evan Simpson is a professor of Philosophy at McMaster University in
Hamilton.

The connection between More’s Utopia and Plato’s Republic is here
represented as deeper and more important than many commentators have
taken it to be. Starnes’s central thesis is that Utopia was intended
as a Christianized Republic. Plato, in Starnes’s view, argues that
unruly and insatiable human beings can be held together within a just
and happy state only through a separation of classes under the rule of a
philosopher-king. More, however, saw this account of social organization
as mirroring the political problem of his time rather than constituting
a solution for it.

For a millennium, Christendom had remained united through the
separation of the Pope as its spiritual leader and the emperor as its
temporal head. However, the beginning of the modern era was marked by
the irreparable breakdown of this political structure. Coherence could
not be restored by organizing political life according to an idealistic
vision of objective or divine law. Needed, rather, was the “implicit
Christianity” of Utopia, in which people practiced the strict
communism of the medieval religious life, but without the asceticism or
vows or poverty typical of monasticism.

This is an original and controversial work. The discussion is sometimes
repetitious, but it contains much creative interpretation and extensive
consideration of contrary lines of analysis. The distinction between the
modern world and its ancient and medieval forerunners may be unduly
simplistic, but the critique of Platonic idealism and the discussion of
human beings as integrated wholes rather than as having special
functions are very good. The essay succeeds in its purpose of assisting
readers to read More’s Utopia with new understanding and appreciation.