More and still More

Blair Worden

The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation. S. H. Hexter and (Allen Lane E3.50) Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, Thomas More's Utopia and Claude de Seyssel's La Monarchic. de France, the three books discussed by Professor Hexter, were all written during the decade preceding the outbreak of the Reformation in 1520. The suggestion that these works share a 'vision of politics' would have surprised their authors. It is likely, too, to surprise readers who have been led to think Of The Prince as a cynical blueprint for desPotism, who take Utopia to be an innocuous fairytale, and who think of de Seyssel, if they think of him .at all, as the occupant of some Minor post on the road from mediaeval constitutionalism to modern sovereignty. One is left with the feeling that it might even have surprised Professor Hexter, had he not needed a collective title for the essays published, or in Most cases republished, in this volume. Yet the obvious differences of tone and subject. matter between the three works disguise cOmmon attitudes worthy of thorough investigation. Although nothing written by Professor Hexter could be other than distinguished and stimulating. it seems a pity that he does not explore more fully the theme which his title proclaims. The sketchy treatment of de Seyssel is perhaps understandable; more disappointing is Professor Hexter's failure to bring to The Prince the depth of sympathy and the sharpness of perception he devotes to Utopia.

Machiavelli and More were Renaissance Humanists, leading figures in a movement Which, nourished by emulation and fresh un

derstanding of ancient Greece and Rome, brought spiritual and intellectual awakening throughcrut Europe. They were also, to use the

term of a later movement that drew inspriation from both of them, 'Commonwealths.

men,' oppressed by a puritan sense of the corruption of their times, and regarding enforced subordination of private to public interest as the key to moral and political regeneration.

In Italy. whose urban culture had resisted feudal and ecclesiastical encroachment. Humanism was predominantly civic and even Pagan. The Florentine Machiavelli's assertion

that hatred and conflict are signs of political health would have shocked More, for whom princely virtue is the rigorous application of Christian values to public affairs. Machiavellis's point is that, in any political world containing the tension and historical movement that More's Utopia lacks, the cost of the prince's heavenly salvation may be the security of his state and the well-being of his subjects. For what matters in politics is not virtuous intentions but virtuous results; and Machiavelli's code of political morality begins with the stark recognition that good ends may require evil means. To Machiavelli the laws of political behaviour are rooted ,less in ethical precepts than in the immutable appetites of men. The needs of the state, and hence the duty of the prince who is its servant, involve the unsentimental manipulation of those appetites. Machiavelli does not acknowledge the more uncomfortable implications of his doctrine; yet his almost Calvinist abhorrence of emotional waste demands of the prince a greater honesty and self-knowledge than is ever likely to be exacted from the philosopher kings who preside over More's Utopia.

Professor Hexter, clearly would not agree. It is More, not Machiavelli, who reminds him of Calvin. Professor Hexter's important long essay on Utopia, first published in the Yale edition of More's works, reappears here. Its theme is the moral urgency which runs beneath the 'playful surface,' of the work. Professor Hexter sees Utopia as some of More's contemporaries saw it; as a profound and radical commentary on the emptiness at the heart of European civilisation. Utopian society, built without the knowledge of Christ, epitomised the virtues which Christians professed; European society, preaching Christianity, practised greed, pride and injustice. The moral urgency is undeniable, and Professor Hexter illuminates it with a series of swift and brilliant insights. But does it pervade the whole work? Is it really the motor of More's inspiration? Utopia is, among other things, an image of delight, a literary and imaginative coup. It is also a celebration of pleasure, More's version of the Elysian fields, and Professor Hexter's dismissal of More's "broken-backed hedonism" as "a rather intricate piece of humanstic intellectual fancywork" betrays the limitation of an approach which says so little about More's classical models.Utopia is full of humour and irony. Of course, fun can have as serious and as biting a purpose as solemnity; but whereas in The Prince humour and irony are weapons of attack, in Utopia tney seem weapons of defence, elegantly deployed by a man who is ill at ease with himself, who is anxious for approval yet uncertain of the level of seriousness at which he wishes his writing to be taken.

More left unanswered the interesting questions raised by Utopia about the ability of laws and institutions to make people virtuous. To have offered practical remedies for the evils he so acutely diagnosed would no doubt have been to lessen the impact of the book; yet, forcefully though Professor Hexter argues his case, it is hard to believe that More ever saw the abolition of money and of private property as practicable or desirable solutions to Europe's ills. Throughout his career, More allowed himself to bring seriousness of mind to bear on radical ideas only when — as in writing Utopia — he felt himself to be on intellectual holiday.

Not all of Utopia was written at once, and possibly More's intentions changed as the idea of the book developed. In the course of some ingenious speculation on this point, Professor Hexter suggests that More shared with Hythlodaeus, the narrator of Utopia a reluctance to compromise his principles by accepting office at ,court: Hythlodaeus, says Professor Hexter, foresaw "the frustration of the job-oriented expert rapped and sinking in the ooze of sycophancy and self-seeking manoeuvres that is the perdurable milieu of

.0the councils of ihe great." In the long essay

on Utopia, writing like this is happily an ex.. ception. In the rest of the book it is the norm. .., It is sad to see sq fine a .historian allowing

addiction to cliche' to sap the vigour, and to

L level the subtlety of his thought.

,c •

,1 Blair Worden is a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.