More, Thomas (1478-1535)

An English politician and humanist, who was born and died in London . Having become the Chancellor of England in 1529, under the reign of Henry VIII, as a Catholic he disapproved of the divorce of his sovereign and was first imprisoned and then executed. He is the author of Utopia, a well known work published in Louvain 1516: it is a socio-political novel in which, after a sever critique of private property and monarchy, he describes the organisation of the island of ‘Utopia,’ where an ideal communism is practiced, a perspective which is not without recalling Plato’s The Republic.