Karl Kautsky’s Thomas More and His Utopia is a work of historical materialism: a study of the first modern socialist thinker, written by one of Marxism’s leading theorists. Kautsky sets More against the economic upheavals of the sixteenth century — the decay of feudalism, the rise of capitalism and the modern state — and reads Utopia as the product of that transition. The book moves through three parts: an analysis of “The Age of Humanism and of the Reformation,” a study of “Thomas More” himself, and a close examination of “Utopia.”
From Feudal Community to Capitalist World
Two Socialists at the Threshold
Kautsky opens by pairing Thomas More with Thomas Münzer, the radical preacher of the Peasant War. The two men share an object—communism—and a fate: both died on the scaffold for their convictions. They differ in standpoint, method, and temperament, and the question of which of them truly inaugurated socialist history has been argued ever since. Both, Kautsky notes, stand in a lineage running back through Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Catilina, and Christ and his apostles. Yet he insists on distinguishing the ancient from the modern: commodity production had produced a propertyless class the Romans already called proletarians, but the modern proletariat, itself transformed since 1848, is not the same as its prototype in the age of Utopia, when capital had only begun its economic revolution and feudalism still wielded extensive power. New ideas still wore feudal vestments. More was a child of his age; the bases of his socialism are modern, but overlaid with much that is not, and though he was never reactionary in tendency, he often had only feudal resources, twisted fantastically toward modern aims. To understand him one must know the beginnings of capitalism and the decline of feudalism, the Church, and world commerce—the work of the book’s first part.
Feudalism and the Local Community
The chapter proper opens with Hutten’s exclamation that the sciences are flourishing and minds are active, that it is a pleasure to be alive. As a Knight of the Spirit he had reason to rejoice; as a member of the Order of Chivalry he might not. The keynote of the sixteenth century, Kautsky writes, is the death-grapple of feudalism with nascent capitalism. Feudalism rested on peasant and handicraft production within the local community—one or more villages holding woods, meadows, water, and originally arable land in common, self-sufficing, exclusive toward strangers, breeding particularism and caste separation. Feudal states were loosely tied; even national language mattered little, with dialects persisting. The one strong organisation above the local community was the universal Catholic Church, with its Latin and its universal landed property. The king’s power was slight, drawn from landed property like any lord’s; he was first among equals, his position growing more precarious as feudalism developed. Princely power began to raise its head again only when the towns grew strong enough to support it.
The Towns and the Rise of Commodity Production
The township, like the village, grew from the local community; commerce, especially with Italy, gave the impulse. Nobles and higher clergy wanted finer goods than court artisans could supply, and German nobles procured them on pilgrimages to Rome, while systematic commerce was sustained after the tenth century by silver mining in the Harz, the Goslar mines being worked from 960. Depôts arose at lords’ courts, bishops’ seats, trade junctures where Alpine roads met the Rhine or Danube, and protected places accessible to large ships, such as Paris and London; these needed fortifying, and so the town grew out of the village. Burghers remained locally narrow; guilds arose beside the old privileged families; handicraft was not originally commodity production. A class struggle between guilds and old families set in, generally ending in the guilds’ complete victory, alongside struggles for independence from landed or provincial nobility, in which handicraftsmen felt sympathy with the peasants and often acted with them. Handicraft commodity production broke down urban exclusiveness; town and country began their economic interactions and antagonism. The towns’ segregation weakened political cohesion; with their aid the squires’ power was directed against the nobility, though the towns themselves were threatened with destruction by their former allies—a tendency only slightly asserted, for within the towns grew the revolutionary power of mercantile capital, giving rise to world commerce and turning towns into bulwarks of absolutism.
World Trade and the Origins of Absolutism
Trade between Italy and the Teutonic North had never quite ceased and had founded the towns, but remained too weak while chiefly petty commerce. Towns favoured by circumstance became centres of overseas trade. In medieval Europe the trade with the East first developed in Lower Italy, at Amalfi, where Greeks and Saracens traded with the natives. The East surpassed the West in artistic skill and technical knowledge; silk production existed in the Greek Empire, and the Islamic migration brought India and China closer to Egypt and the Mediterranean seaboard than they had been under Roman rule. Greed for Amalfi’s treasures seized Europe’s ruling classes, contributing to the Crusades and drawing favourably situated towns, first in North Italy, into the lucrative commerce. Imitation of imported products followed: in the thirteenth century silk-weaving sheds at Palermo were worked by Greek prisoners of war; in the fourteenth century similar sheds appeared in North Italian towns. Once imitation succeeded, merchants found it more profitable to import raw material and have it worked up at home by hired workers—free workers whom no guild compulsion or feudal service prevented from selling their labour power, and whom no ownership of means of production relieved from that necessity.
Erasmus’s Portrait of More
Erasmus’s letter to Hutten gives the fullest contemporary likeness of More, and Kautsky leans on it heavily. The face, Erasmus says, wears cheerfulness and raillery rather than gravity; one shoulder sits a little higher from long habit; the hands are somewhat coarse, and More has never bothered much about dress. Erasmus first knew him at twenty-three, and More is now just past forty, sound rather than robust, with a vigorous old father who promises him long life. He is unfastidious at table: as a youth a water-drinker, hiding it behind weak small beer, sipping wine only when custom demands. Plain beef and household bread suit him better than delicacies, though he has a weakness for milk puddings, fruit, and eggs. His voice carries; his articulation is remarkably distinct. He avoids silk and gold chains, distrusts ceremony as effeminate, and once hated courts and the intimacy of princes, loving liberty and equality. Henry VIII had to drag him to Court, and “dragged” is the word Erasmus chooses.
He was born for friendship, easy of access and constant, untying knots of intimacy without tearing them, and he shuns tennis, dice, and cards. He neglects his own interest but attends to his friends’. His kindness cheers the dullest company; from boyhood he loved jokes without buffoonery or bitterness, wrote and acted farces as a youth, enjoyed witticisms even against himself, and it was he who suggested the Praise of Folly. He adapts to learned and stupid alike, is humorous with ladies and with his wife, and observes animals’ forms and instincts, keeping birds, monkeys, foxes, and ferrets and buying strange imported objects to fill his house. He drank deep of Good Letters and Greek and Philosophy, though his father, an expert in English law, withdrew his allowance and nearly disowned him for deserting the hereditary study. After tasting scholastic learning he became so conversant with it that no one was more consulted by suitors, and his income rivalled theirs. Scarcely more than a youth, he lectured publicly on Augustine’s City of God before an audience of old men and priests not ashamed to learn from a young layman. He thought of taking orders and prepared by watchings, fastings, and prayers—showing more wisdom than those who engage rashly—but the wish to marry stood in the way, so he resolved to be a chaste husband rather than a licentious priest. He married a very young girl of good birth, kept in the country, whom he fashioned to his habits and instructed in learning and music; she bore three girls and a boy and died early. A few months later, against his friends’ advice, he married a widow for household management rather than fancy—no great beauty and no longer young—and lives with her sweetly, winning compliance by blandishments and jests rather than severity, even persuading her, elderly and busy, to learn the harp, viol, spinet, and flute and practise daily. He rules his household without quarrels, and no member has left it hostilely or without advancement. He is affectionate to each of his father’s successive stepmothers as to a mother. Free from avarice, he sets aside enough for his children and spends the rest liberally; as a lawyer he gave clients true counsel, advising them to settle cheaply. As judge in the London civil court, which sat only on Thursday mornings, he disposed of more suits with more integrity than any judge before him, remitting the fees, and became extremely popular. He meant to be content with that dignified, safe position, but was thrust more than once into embassies and finally into the King’s household, where Henry is so intimate with him he cannot bear to let him go. In serious affairs no one gives wiser counsel; in agreeable talk no one is better company; no one has ever induced him to accept a present. Erasmus wishes sovereigns everywhere would put magistrates like More in office.
The Humanist Who Mocked the Church
More’s Catholicism was never the slavish kind. The priest Stapleton admits he abandoned becoming a monk because the priests of his day had lapsed from former discipline; More retracted nothing of his censure of the priesthood and could ridicule monks like any Humanist. In the first book of Utopia, Raphael Hythloday recalls a meal at Cardinal Morton’s where a jester and a friar fall to quarrelling over what to do with beggars too old to work. The fool proposes sending them to monasteries, men to the Benedictines as lay brothers, women to be nuns; the Cardinal smiles, others take it seriously, and a brother theologian jests that this will not rid him of all beggars unless he provides for the friars—to which the fool answers that the Cardinal has already provided for them by his scheme for restraining vagabonds and setting them to work, “for I know no vagabonds like you.” The friar is made to look so foolish that the table laughs, and he threatens God’s wrath and a Bull against mockers until the Cardinal changes the subject. The episode ridicules the stupidity, laziness, and greed of the monks. More’s ridicule reached bishops too: his epigrams mock a bishop called Posthumus, rejoicing that he was chosen with such special care that a worse, more stupid bishop could scarcely be found among thousands, and observing that he loves quoting “the letter kills, but the spirit quickeneth” though he is too ignorant for any letter to kill him. Even the Pope seemed to More only an ordinary mortal. In More’s house, under his encouragement, Erasmus wrote the Praise of Folly, which More delighted in; the manuscript was secretly carried off, probably by More himself, and printed in Paris, seven editions following in a few months. The bold satire on monkery and the Papacy was put on the index of prohibited books, and there is no reason to think More ever regretted his share in it. In his Confutation of Tyndall’s Answer he even wrote that a general council is above the Pope, may exhort and punish him, and can depose him if he prove incorrigible.
The King’s Book and the Charge at Resignation
When the Reformation began, Henry VIII declared for the Pope and published a book against Luther in 1521, written by others though issued under his name; More was widely regarded as its author but had only a small share. Once Henry broke from Rome the book became an annoyance, its author now a traitor. Among the charges brought when More resigned the chancellorship in 1532 was that by subtle sinister slights he had procured and provoked the King to set forth the Assertion of the Seven Sacraments and maintain the Pope’s authority, putting a sword in the Pope’s hand to fight against himself—comical, since for ten years Henry had passed as the book’s author and taken all the praise.
The Golden Age and the Coming of Poverty
Kautsky turns to the economic history that made More’s thought possible. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he argues, were a golden age for English peasants and wage workers; what followed plunged them into misery. The ranks of the workless swelled, and the gruesome punishments devised to check them failed either to reduce their numbers or to restrain crime, since punishment for crime was uncertain while starvation for abstaining from it was sure. Propertyless agricultural labourers fared little better. What parliamentary legislation left incomplete, the sixteenth century finished through the sheer weight of the reserve army of the unemployed. Real wages fell while labour time lengthened: food prices rose by three hundred per cent, wages by only a hundred and sixty. From More’s day the steady decay of the English worker set in, reaching its lowest point in the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, before trade-union organisation improved the lot of some sections. Wages fell with rents, while profits and capitalism grew.
Capitalism invading industry and then agriculture seems benevolent at first. Needing to extend its markets while the importation of labour is slow, it complains of a lack of labour-power and outbids handicraftsmen and peasants, so wages rise; in many countries it was hailed as a blessing. Not so in England, where capitalism first invaded and revolutionised agriculture. Improvements made many workers superfluous, setting them free in the severest forms, while industry developed slowly and needed little labour-power—least of all the ignorant country labourer. Hand in hand with this went the rapid concentration of landed property into a few hands. Nowhere else in Europe were capitalism’s unfavourable reactions on the working classes so immediately obvious; nowhere did workers clamour so urgently for assistance.
Why More Became a Socialist
Such a situation would drive a man of More’s character to reflect and to seek means of alleviating intolerable conditions. He was not alone in propounding expedients; numerous writings and Acts of Parliament show how deep the impression made by the economic revolution, and how generally the shabby practices of landlords and tenants were condemned. But none had a wider outlook; none was convinced that the sufferings could end only through a transition to a higher mode of production; none save More was a Socialist.
Socialism, Kautsky insists, could only arise within Humanism. As a Humanist More learned to think methodically and to generalise, and could look beyond his own time and country, learning from classical antiquity of different social conditions. Plato’s ideal of an aristocratic-communist community must have prompted him to imagine opposite conditions free from poverty, and encouraged him to regard such a community as more than a figment and to set it as a goal. Yet English Humanism remained an imported, exotic growth without roots in national life, a mere academic affair; had More been merely a Humanist he would hardly have attained Socialism. His father tore him from his studies, to the regret of Erasmus and his Humanist friends, to study law and launch a practical career. More stood in close relationship to London merchants, entrusted with their interests; most of the positions he filled impelled him to deal with economic questions, proving he was regarded as an expert. He was a popular advocate; in 1609 he was appointed Under-Sheriff, gaining insight into the people’s economic life. Missions followed: first to Bruges in 1515; the same year Parliament appointed him Commissioner of Sewers; a second mission to Calais in 1617 to compose disputes between English and French merchants; in 1620 a mission to Bruges to settle disputes between English merchants and the Hansa. Then Treasurer, and in 1523 Speaker in the Commons, both posts presupposing financial experience, and shortly afterwards Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He came to know economic life from the most modern standpoint possible—that of the English merchant for whom world trade was opening. His close connection with mercantile capital cannot be too strongly emphasised; it explains why More thought on modern lines and why his Socialism was of a modern kind.
The essential roots of More’s Socialism, then: an amiable character in harmony with primitive communism; England’s economic situation, which brought capitalism’s disadvantages for the working class into sharp relief; and the fortunate union of classical philosophy with practical affairs—all inducing in a mind so acute, fearless and truth-loving an ideal regarded as a foregleam of Modern Socialism.
The Argument with the Lawyer at Cardinal Morton’s Table
More put forward economic theories, but the time was not ripe for them. He keenly observed economic conditions and recognised the principle, a basis of modern Socialism, that man is a product of material conditions and that a class can be elevated only through a corresponding change in economic conditions—a principle proved in Utopia, whose critical parts even today possess more than academic interest. Kautsky lets More speak for himself, quoting from the first book.
Raphael Hythloday relates dining with Cardinal Morton, where an English lawyer commended the severe execution of justice on thieves, “banged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet,” and wondered that since so few escaped there were yet so many thieves robbing everywhere. Hythloday boldly said there was no reason to wonder, since punishing thieves was neither just nor good for the public: the severity was too great and the remedy not effectual; simple theft is not so great a crime as to cost a man his life; and no punishment, however severe, can restrain those who find no other livelihood. England and much of the world, he said, imitate ill masters readier to chastise scholars than to teach them; dreadful punishments are enacted, but it were better to make provisions by which each man might live, preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it. The lawyer answered that there has been care enough: many handicrafts and husbandry by which men may shift to live, unless they have a greater mind to ill courses. Hythloday replied that many lose their limbs in civil or foreign wars, as lately in the Cornish rebellion and some time ago in the wars with France, who, being mutilated in the king’s and country’s service, can no more follow their old trades and are too old to learn.
England Against Spain, and the Lollards
The antagonism that won popular support for the Reformation in England, Kautsky argues, was not between England and Rome but between England and Spain. Papal exploitation of England had become insignificant even before Henry’s Reformation, so the Pope was less hated in England than in Germany. As England advanced as a commercial state, its interests became hostile to Spain, the great commercial power of the sixteenth century, which dominated the western Mediterranean seaboard and strove for mastery of the seas. English commerce found its road barred by Spain everywhere it sought to develop; it was strengthened by constant struggle and by systematic piracy. English privateers loitered from the Iberian coasts to the North Sea seeking silver galleons from America or merchant vessels carrying Indies treasures from Lisbon to Antwerp. Next to the slave trade, piracy was a foundation of England’s commercial prosperity; both were officially encouraged. Elizabeth fitted out slave ships, navy vessels engaged in piracy, and slave dealers and pirates such as Francis Drake were her favourites.
The Two Thomases at the Threshold
Kautsky opens by placing two figures at the gate of socialist history: Thomas More and Thomas Münzer. They share the goal of communism, the same daring, the same fidelity to conviction, and the same death on the scaffold — yet they differ in standpoint, method, and temperament. More was a child of his age. The bases of his socialism are modern, but they are overlaid by much that is not modern; he was never reactionary in tendency, yet he often had only feudal resources, twisted fantastically to modern aims. The contrast between More and Münzer, theorist and agitator, contains the seed of the great antagonism that runs through the whole history of socialism — the antagonism between Utopianism and the labour movement, resolved only by the Communist Manifesto. More shuddered at every attempt to end exploitation from below; his communism had to be ready-made in the mind, imposed on mankind from above by a powerful ruler.
The Economic Roots of a Modern Socialism
Kautsky insists that socialism could only arise within Humanism, and only in England. As a Humanist, More learned to think methodically and to generalise; from classical antiquity, above all from Plato, he learned that societies could be ordered differently. But English Humanism was an imported, academic growth without roots in national life — had More been merely a Humanist, he would hardly have reached socialism. What made the difference was England’s economic situation, which brought the disadvantages of capitalism for the working class into sharp relief: the enclosure of the commons, the dispossession of peasants, the swelling reserve army of the workless, wages falling while food prices rose three hundred per cent. More stood in close connection with London merchants, served as Under-Sheriff, and went on diplomatic missions to Bruges and Calais. His socialism was of a modern kind because he thought on modern lines, from the standpoint of the English merchant for whom world trade was opening.
A Communist Who Feared the Mob
The book’s most striking tension is More’s own. The author of Utopia condemned the Anabaptists as a monstrous plague, and in his Confutation of Tyndall’s Answer denounced as horrid heresy the claim that all goods ought to be held in common. Kautsky finds this no chance inconsistency but something bound up with the essence of socialist beginnings. More’s communism breathed partly the fresh spirit of feudal, primitive Catholicism, partly the joyous spirit of the aspiring bourgeoisie; the Lollards’ socialism, by contrast, expressed a tortured, despairing class — gloomy, ascetic, barbaric. More detested popular movements and any government but a prince’s. He was among the last representatives of the old feudal popular Catholicism, neither hypocrite nor intriguer — a man who could ridicule monks and bishops, who delighted in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and who yet regarded the Papacy as the international cohesive force without which Christendom would dissolve into chaos.
The First Blueprint of an Alternative
What survives is the achievement: the first attempt to depict a mode of production forming an alternative to capitalism while retaining the achievements of capitalist civilisation. More’s Utopia organises labour to abolish useless work and restricts wants to shorten hours — a programme Kautsky judges half-modern, sharing with socialism the organisation of labour but not the restriction of wants, which in an age of over-production would be a misconception. More did not preach monkish asceticism; he was a true Epicurean in harmless enjoyments. His communism is national, not the local and caste communism of primitive communities or of Plato’s guardians; equality becomes an equal obligation of all to labour. Kautsky’s book endures as a Marxist classic because it takes More seriously as an economist and a socialist — and because it refuses to make of him either a saint or a simple precursor, finding in his contradictions the contradictions of the age that produced him.
