lth, individualism and privacy are threats to the state. I suspect that we see as clearly as anywhere in Utopia just why communism did not work. The weight of human depravity was simply too much to be balanced by eliminating private property. Yet it is worth saying that More did not ignore that depravity. Utopia is full of it.I mentioned earlier J. W. Allen's likening of Utopia's view of human nature to that of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It is a To me it is rather like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn where the river carrying Huck and Jim along passes through a human jungle of evil where the innocents on the raft must always be wary.Dominic Baker Smith has pointed out that Utopia from the beginning was an artificial construct. Some 1760 years before,[12] Utopus had dug a channel to separate Utopia from the corrupting lands nearby. As the wise law-giver he imposed laws on people who could not or would not create those laws themselves.[13] He is much like the prince in the thought of More's contemporary Niccolo Machiavelli whom Machiavelli calls upon to unite and pacify the warring Italian peninsula. Utopus did for Utopia what Machiavelli wanted a prince to do for Italy. Yet the Utopian commonwealth, like the raft of Huck and Jim floating apart in the serene river, is endangered whenever it touches the shores of the real world.The attention the Utopians give to military affairs is based on a sound practical consideration: The world out there is not Utopia. A virtuous nation unarmed amid a world of tigers goes quickly to its death. More startling, when we think of it, are the massive walls the Utopians build around their towns on their island. Yes, these ways may be primarily to ward off invasion from beyond the channel Utopus has dug to separate them. But given the history of England and popular uprisings, including the Wat Tyler revolt of 1381 and the later revolt of the peasants of Cornwall mentioned in Utopia itself,[14] it seems that on...
