Re: Sir Thomas Moore

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 14/08/01 20:00 +0000, you wrote:
> Question on the differential ownership of the means of production, the law of
> value and the logical priority of the level of production over that of
> distribution:
>
> Author, text and year, please:
>
> "... wheresoever possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke,
> it is hard and almost impossible that there the public weal may justly be
> governed and prosperously flourish ... the rich men be covetous, crafty, and
> unprofitable: on the other part, the poor be lowly, simple, and by their daily
> labour more profitable to the common wealth than to themselves ... no equal
> and just distribution of things can be made; nor that perfect wealth shall
> ever be among men; unless this property be exiled and banished."
>
> Cheers,
> Rob


Although the ideas could have been there in the middle ages, I was going to
guess 17th century from the intricacy of the concepts, 100 or more years
later than Ian correctly identified.

Moore is an idealised figure in history, and his Utopia is an attractive
read. However he was a very shrewd, at at times ruthless, opponent of the
new bourgeois ideas (there is some evidence that he interrogated
protestants under duress/torture in his own house).

He therefore writes as some sort of learned intellectual aristocrat who was
defending what was virtuous in the old prebourgeois society. The battle was
fought out in terms of whether he could reconcile arguments about defending
the authority of the Roman Catholic Church while allowing the king his
divorce and he was outmanouevred on that. But perhaps this symbolised
something wider.

Rob's quote raises the question of whether Moore could be re-analysed more
fully in terms of a critic of deloping capitalism, upholding precapitalist
forms of collective social production, while having an idealised picture of
how social conflict was to be regulated.

Chris Burford

London