Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Young Thomas More
- 2 Fashioning Peace and Prosperity
- 3 Cicero's and More's First Citizens
- 4 More's Earliest Views of Humanitas, Libertas, and Respublica, 1500–1506
- 5 More's Life of Pico della Mirandola (c. 1504–1507)
- 6 More's 1509 Coronation Ode
- 7 Political Poems of 1509–1516
- 8 Richard III
- 9 Utopia
- 10 The Un-Utopian Thomas More Family Portrait
- 11 The Arts of Liberty
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - Fashioning Peace and Prosperity
What Are the Necessary Arts?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Young Thomas More
- 2 Fashioning Peace and Prosperity
- 3 Cicero's and More's First Citizens
- 4 More's Earliest Views of Humanitas, Libertas, and Respublica, 1500–1506
- 5 More's Life of Pico della Mirandola (c. 1504–1507)
- 6 More's 1509 Coronation Ode
- 7 Political Poems of 1509–1516
- 8 Richard III
- 9 Utopia
- 10 The Un-Utopian Thomas More Family Portrait
- 11 The Arts of Liberty
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
[M]ost principes apply themselves to the arts of war … instead of the good arts of peace.
Thomas More, Utopia 56/22–24The princeps' art of rule … is easily seen in our faces and is made conspicuous in the prosperity of the people.
Thomas More, Epigram 19/82–85[A]rt produces nothing without reason. … When you see a statue or a painting, you recognize the exercise of art; when you observe from a distance the course of a ship, you do not hesitate to assume that its motion is guided by reason and by art.
Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.87Art is necessary to perfect nature – this classical principle More learned during his long and formative study of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca. He also learned this by his experience in a prosperous and self-governing London, home of many master artists. When young More, therefore, wrote that the “princeps' art of rule … is easily seen in [joyous] faces and is made conspicuous in the prosperity of the people,” he was drawing from firsthand London experience as well as from classical and medieval history and political theory.
Plato's Socrates showed how each art is a specific type of making that requires habits and skills based on extensive practice, careful reasoning, and long deliberation about best practices, or what one might call the laws that arise from the “nature” of what is made.
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- Information
- Young Thomas More and the Arts of Liberty , pp. 23 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011