Unfinished Acts: Utopia, Thomas More, and the Peasants’ War – O. L. Silverman, 2025

This essay interprets Thomas More’s Utopia, not chiefly through its intended audience, an elite, international circle of humanists and jurists, but through its intentionally excluded audience: the lower classes of Europe. Five centuries of scholarship on the critique of private property in his Utopia have generally overlooked More’s opposition to the largest popular uprising of his time, the German Peasants’ War. This essay argues that More’s polemics against proto-communist movements and thinkers, like Protestant propagandist Simon Fish, are essential to understanding Utopia in context. More’s Tudor schooling trained him in forms of legal play meant to sharpen the faculties to adroitly enforce law and social order. Challenges to law, private property, and authority were “heresies” for Sir Thomas More. The attempt to restrict Utopia’s readership mirrored More’s opposition to heretical, vulgar translations of the New Testament. He feared that the ungovernable play of a literal reading would result in disastrous misinterpretations: in acts of popular uprising that sought to put all things in common.
— Read on journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00905917251345497