Ideological Perspectives of More & Burke

Sir Thomas More, also known as Saint Thomas More (because of sanctification by the Catholic Church) is probably best known for his confrontation with King Henry VIII, for which he lost his life. He was a statesman as well as a political and social philosopher. His most famous work is his Utopia, a book in which he created his version of a perfect society and gave his name to such conceptions ever after as "utopias." The word is of Greek origin, a play on the Greek word eutopos, meaning good place. In the book, More describes a pagan and communist city-state in which the institutions and policies are governed entirely by reason. The order and dignity of the state in this book contrasted sharply with the reality of statecraft in Christian Europe at the time, a region divided by self-interest and greed for power and riches. In this book, More included discussions of a large number of topics covering the institutions of society, including penology, state-controlled education, religious pluralism, divorce, euthanasia, and women's rights. This book helped establish More as one of the foremost Humanists (Encyclopedia Britannica, 313-314).

The Humanism of the era is described by Maynard (1947) in terms of the different elements that went together to f

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a the various reforming concepts of the statesman, the lawyer, the merchant, the humanist, and the man of religion, purposes that were intertwined and indistinguishable. Many of the Utopian customs and ordinances directly reflected More's views of problems then current, especially religious problems. It is also believed that More often made his Utopians do things which are not approved because they followed reason rather than the imperatives of the Christian religion. The attitude can be phrased as follows, according to Ames: "The Utopians, guided by reason and also by their basically sound religion, have almost achieved a truly Christian ideal which they live by while we Christians do not" (in Adams, 1975: 160). More lived in the fifteenth century, while Edmund Burke was born in the eighteenth century in a very different England. He was also a statesman and a political thinker, and he was also involved in a dispute over the powers of the crown, though the outcome was quite different. Burke was closely involved in the constitutional controversy over George III's reign. The King was seeking to assert a more active role for the crown, which had lost influence in earlier times, and to do so without infringing on the limitatio
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