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Utopia through Italian Eyes: Thomas More and the Criticsof Civic Humanism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Eric Nelson
Eric Nelson*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

Thomas More's Utopia has long been regarded as the great Northern European expression of Italian civic humanist ideals. This article argues, in contrast, that More's treatise constitutes an emphatic rejection of those values. In support of this claim, the article chronicles the reception of Utopia in Italy; it demonstrates that More's text was taken up, not by the civic humanists, but by their fiercest critics. These early Italian readers recognized in Utopia a repudiation of active citizenship, an assault on private property, a rejection of the Roman cult of glory, and a polemic against Ciceronian humanism. As a result, the reception of Utopia is shown to have opened up a fissure in the republican tradition which would have profound consequences for the subsequent development of European political discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , Winter 2006 , pp. 1029 - 1057
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2006

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Footnotes

*

A preliminary version of this article was presented to the 2003 annual meeting of The Renaissance Society of America in Toronto. I am grateful to that initial audience, and to my copanelists Richard Serjeantson, Andrew Taylor, and Alfred Hiatt, for many helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to Anthony Grafton, who generously agreed to chair our discussion. My chief thanks are due to Bernard Bailyn, James Hankins, Noel Malcolm, Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck, and the anonymous reader for Renaissance Quarterly, each of whom read earlier drafts of this essay and offered crucial advice and encouragement. I am, lastly, indebted to excellent audiences at Harvard, Columbia, and Yale Universities, and to my colleagues in the Harvard Government Department and Harvard Society of Fellows, for many stimulating exchanges. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted: my translations from Bodin's French are based somewhat on M. J. Tooley's (Bodin, 1955), although I depart from his text significantly.

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