More on Utopia

Abstract

J. H. Hexter's brilliant analysis of More's Utopia in the Introduction to the Yale edition of the text in 1965 was favoured by a resounding endorsement from Quentin Skinner in a no-less-brilliant analysis of the Yale edition in Past and Present in 1967. Given the status of both scholars as interpreters of the political thought of the early modern period, Skinner's prediction that Hexter's analysis would ‘cause a reorientation of [the] entire historiography’ of the subject was bound to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Skinner, in any case, clearly considers the claim to have been justified in the event. In his recent masterly study of the history of political thought in the early modern period his treatment of Utopia is especially-and avowedly-indebted to Hexter's work. Meanwhile, the most stimulating challenge presented to Hexter's thesis-by Dermot Fenlon in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society in 1975-serves in its way to vindicate Skinner's prediction. Fenlon is concerned not to contradict Hexter's basic hypothesis but to stand it on its head. Fenlon's thesis in turn was assimilated into the survey literature when it was adapted by G. R. Elton to hammer Christian humanism in his Reform and Reformation in 1977.