THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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between social paradise and the old class world. The first part had explained crime in terms of economic causes, and accordingly demanded the humane treatment of
prisoners; the second part recognizes criminal slaves in the midst of ‘Utopia’, who have to perform heavy labour in chains. The warfare of the Utopians and their desire
for annexation seem a related inconsistency: ‘They regard it’, More remarks, ‘they regard it as a highly just reason for war if a nation seeks to prohibit the use and
possession of land, which it does not need itself but leaves barren and unproductive, by another nation which according to the dictates of nature should draw its
subsistence from it’. Hermann Oncken rightly stresses in his edition of the ‘Utopia’ that this martial passage no longer has anything whatever in common with the
isolated and exemplary peaceful existence of the Utopians, but rather with the later practice of England: ‘The communist and primitive­agrarian ideal state, which
already revealed itself as a class state in the question of slaves, now shows itself to be a state based on domination and power politics with the first signs of a capitalist
imperialism which seems almost modern.’ Thus ‘Utopia’ by no means appears of a piece, by no means as if it has sprung from one single person and his socially
conscious love of Christ. But the eminently English nature of many of these inconsistencies once again does not argue in favour of Erasmus but shows that More too
could accommodate breaks in his work, and further that the abolition of private property (with all its consequences) is an anomaly within bourgeois anticipations which
even the noblest faith in Christ cannot dispose of. Dreams of the early bourgeoisie, in which the bourgeois himself disappears as a class, cannot avoid irony and
dissonances. Thus the explanatory value of Brockhaus's hypothesis is very much reduced even over and above the suspicious nature of its social brief: a series of
difficulties certainly arises not just from the editing by Erasmus. No ideology is more English than that of a morally justified colonial war, as taught in ‘Utopia’, none
could be further from the monastic republic on Mount Athos. The ‘Utopia’ is most probably a hybrid creation with two authors, but England is already criticized by
More, not just by Erasmus, and it is once again exclusively England, not Rome, that is to become the best state. The ‘Utopia’ is and remains, with all its dross, the first
modern portrait of democratic­communist wishful dreams. In the womb of capitalist forces that were only just beginning, a future and supra­future world anticipated
itself: both that of formal democracy, which delivers capitalism, and that of material­humane democracy, which cancels it out. For the first time democracy was here
linked in a humane sense, in the sense of public freedom