vigilant watch. The individual is almost continuously subjected to scrutiny in every waking hour, but even so, some commit crimes for which they are harshly punished to encourage the others to conform.Yet the magistrates in Utopia are supposed to have an almost infallible selflessness. Rule of each family clan is given to the oldest man. These men elect officers over them, and those officers elect in turn other officers and a mayor to rule each city. Utopia has no king, and indeed in the Latin text More wrote, Utopus himself is never called king.[45]More mistrusted kings, and he had reason; his experience with them was almost universally bad. Born in the reign of Edward IV, he probably retained a childhood memory of Richard III the usurper riding through the streets of London, and when Henry VII overcame Richard at Bosworth Field, in More's later view it was only to exchange one tyrant for another. More's son-in-law William Roper tells us that More opposed Henry VII in Parliament and almost had to flee the country to avoid the king's wrath.[46] When Henry VII died, More wrote rejoicing poems.[47] I surmise that the More of 1516 could read well enough the character of King Henry VIII who would later send him to the block. And so he had every reason to have no king in Utopia.I might add that he never wanted to give too much authority to any single person, no matter how exalted the office. He never exalted papal authority; he thought popes could err; and he believed that the general council was superior to the pope and could depose a pope for any reason that the council saw fit.But was he wise to place such complete faith in the wisdom, the apparent infallibility of patriarchal magistrates in Utopia? Is a nation naturally more moral than people taken as individuals?Reinhold Niebuhr addressed this issue in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society published first in 1932. He argued cogently that people acting in masses are inevitably less mor...
