al than individuals. I believe Niebuhr's thinking on this issue is sound. It is one of the reasons why throughout their history, the American people have been continually angry with their Congress.The collapse of communism with its patriarchal and supposedly infallible magistrates is sign enough that too much faith in assemblies claiming to represent the people is, well, Utopian. I would say in addition that the spirit of hatred alive in our own country, particularly after the last election, does not seem to me at least to indicate that a political majority united under the flag of moral reform is likely to surmount the evils that we see in individuals.At the More Project at Yale where so many of us toiled so happily and for so long editing More's work for publication, our great mentor Richard S. Sylvester used to have pinned up a quotation from the English wit Max Beerbohm: "Utopia? Excuse me. I thought it was hell."But did More intend it to be a bad place? My late mentor and friend Richard S. Sylvester loved Thomas More. He could not bear the thought that More could have created an ideal society with so many flaws that affronted the liberal imagination. In an article published in 1958, he argued that More had intended to cast Utopia as a dystopia, not a good place but a bad place, one where the rule of reason had obliterated the gentler human virtues.[48]You will be relieved to know that I do not intend to argue in detail against Sylvester's position. I will make only two points against it. It does injustice to all the good qualities that we find in Utopia, many of which I have mentioned already, including the virtues of Utopian worship that I have not dwelled upon. If More intended his work to be as ironic as Sylvester imagined it to be, the book was an utter failure, for no one took it in that spirit for more than four centuries after More wrote it. My other point is simply to say that reading Utopia as an intentionally bad place se...
