To examine the theoretical questions advanced at the end of Book I of Utopia, More employed the original and central exercise of Greek political philosophy, the determination of the best form of the commonwealth. [In a footnote, the author adds: "To preclude misunderstanding, let me say at once that this statement does not imply that Utopia must be More's ideal commonwealth. The exercise can … be undertaken for reasons other than elaborating one's own ideal."] This exercise, which has its ancestry in the inveterate Greek practice of comparing polities, and its literary antecedents in such passages as the debate among spokesmen for monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in Herodotus' Histories, entered political philosophy in Plato's Republic. In their attempt to specify the nature of the perfectly just man, Socrates and his companions are led into discussion of the perfectly just polis. The resulting exchanges delineate in effect the Idea of the polis. "Perhaps," Socrates suggests, the Republic "is laid up as a pattern in heaven, where those who wish can see it and found it in their own hearts." Although there is small chance that this polis will ever actually exist, the determination of its form has practical value. Like the image of the just man, the Republic provides a model to guide action: "By looking at these perfect patterns and the measure of happiness … they would enjoy, we force ourselves to admit that the nearer we approximate to them the more nearly we share their lot."

In the Republic, Plato's earliest political work, speculative development is untrammeled by practical considerations. In particular, Plato does not acknowledge that the recalcitrance of human nature imposes constraints on the realization of political ideals. The most important reflection of this fact is found in the circumstance that the Republic is a government of men—the philosopher-rulers—rather than of law. Indeed, Plato always regarded government by wise men as preferable to even the best government by law. In the Laws, however, a late work, he takes account of the fact that it is in practice extremely difficult to assure a supply of wise men and elaborates the optimal pattern for a polis governed by law—his "second-best state." It is this work rather than the Republic that provided, as [George H.] Sabine says [in A History of Political Theory, 1961], the "point of departure" for the third and last of the great best-commonwealth exercises of Greek theory, the discussion of the ideal polis in the seventh and unfinished eighth books of Aristotle's Politics. For Aristotle is acutely aware of the constraints that empirical fact places upon theory. According to Aristotle, Plato erred in the Republic by not considering "the teaching of actual experience." Even in discussing a nonexistent, ideal polis "it cannot be right to make anyassumption which is plainly impossible," since in order for a pattern of an ideal polis to be useful, the ideal conditions "must be capable of fulfilment as well as being ideal."

It is crucial to understand that the best-commonwealth exercise is not, for Plato and Aristotle, simply a matter of piling together seemingly ideal features of a polis. As the quintessential manifestation of the rationalistic and holistic character of Greek political theory, the exercise has at its core the conception of the polis as a system of reciprocally-affecting parts. Since the polis aims at self-sufficiency, its ideal form is a structure of just those elements that will constitute a self-sufficient unit. Plato's pronouncement that "society originates … because the individual is not self-sufficient" leads immediately to the specification of the human needs—food, shelter, clothing—that must be supplied within the polis, and this list, in turn, leads to the development of a list of essential occupations. Superfluity in any component of the polis is as harmful as deficiency. One manifestation of social pathology is "a multitude of occupations none of which is concerned with necessaries." The provision of the luxuries produced by these professions means that "the territory which was formerly enough to support us will now be too small," a circumstance that fosters aggression: "If we are to have enough for pasture and plough, we shall have to cut a slice off our neighbours' territory. And if they too are no longer confining themselves to necessities and have embarked on the pursuit of unlimited material possessions, they will want a slice of ours too." By contrast, in the ideal polis "the land must be extensive enough to support a given number of people in modest comfort, and not a foot more is needed."

The method of Aristotle's best-commonwealth exercise is essentially the same as that of the Republic and Laws, but Aristotle characteristically articulates the principles of this method in a much more explicit and systematic fashion. Book VII of the Politics opens, as I pointed out earlier, with a statement of the relation between ethics and politics: "Before we can undertake properly the investigation of our next theme—the nature of an ideal constitution—it is necessary for us first to determine the nature of the most desirable way of life [for the individual]. As long as that is obscure, the nature of the ideal constitution must also remain obscure." There follows a recapitulation of Aristotle's views on the best life. Axiomatically, the end of life is happiness. The constituent elements of the best life, then, are "external goods; goods of the body; and goods of the soul," for "no one would call a man happy" who was seriously deficient in respectof any of these classes of goods. But "differences begin to arise when we ask, 'How much of each good should men have? And what is the relative superiority of one good over another?'" The truth is that external goods and goods of the body are merely instrumental. Thus, "like all other instruments, [they] have a necessary limit of size": "any excessive amount of such things must either cause its possessor some injury or, at any rate, bring him no benefit." On the contrary, "the greater the amount of each of the goods of the soul, the greater is its utility."

It is evident that the goal of the polis is to facilitate the achievement of happiness by its citizens: "There is one thing clear about the best constitution: it must be a political organization which will enable all sorts of men to be at their best and live happily." There follows an argument against the idea that the happiness of the polis lies in war and conquest, which concludes with a restatement of the view that the goal of the polis is to secure the good life for its citizens:

if military pursuits are … to be counted good, they are good in a qualified sense. They are not the chief end of man, transcending all other ends: they are means to his chief end. The true end which good law-givers should keep in view, for any stateor stock or society with which they may be concerned, is the enjoyment of partnership in a good life and the felicity thereby attainable.

The formulation of the goal of the polis leads in turn to discussion of the physical and institutional components necessary to secure the attainment of this goal. It is made clear early in the discussion that the governing principle is, as in Plato, self-sufficiency, which implies certain demographic and geographic requirements and the fulfillment of a specific list of occupational functions. The polis requires "such an initial amount of population as will be self-sufficient for the purpose of achieving a good way of life in the shape and form of a political association." Population may exceed this number, but not by so much that the citizens are unable to "know one another's characters," something that is necessary "both in order to give decisions in matters of disputed rights, and to distribute the offices of government according to the merit of candidates." Thus the "optimum standard of population … is, in a word, 'the greatest surveyable number required for achieving a life of self-sufficiency.'" Similarly, the territory of the polis must be such as to ensure "the maximum of self-sufficiency":

and as that consists in having everything, and needing nothing, such a territory must be one which produces all kinds of crops. In point of extent and size, the territory should be large enough to enable its inhabitants to live a life of leisure which combines liberality with temperance…. What was said above of the population—that it should be such as to be surveyable—is equally true of the territory.

In addition to having an appropriate population and territory, the polis must provide six "services": food, the required arts and crafts, arms, "a certain supply of property, alike for domestic use and for military purposes," "an establishment for the service of the gods," and "a method of deciding what is demanded by the public interest and what is just in men's private dealing." Thus the polis must include specific occupational groups: "a body of farmers to produce the necessary food; craftsmen; a military force; a propertied class; priests; and a body for deciding necessary issues and determining what is the public interest." Discussion of the best arrangements for fulfilling and maintaining these requirements (including a long discussion of the proper education of citizens) occupies the remainder of Aristotle's treatment of the ideal polis.

The best-commonwealth exercise, then, is made up of four sequential steps, which underlie the design of the Republic and Laws are clearly articulated in the Politics. On the basis of a conception of man's nature (both Plato and Aristotle devote some space to this topic, which properly belongs to psychology and physiology), one first determines the best life of the individual (the principal subject of ethics and the starting point of politics). The second step involves the determination, given these conclusions about the individual, of the overall goal of the commonwealth and of the contributory goals the joint attainment of which will result in the attainment of the overall goal. The third step constitutes the elaboration of the required components of a self-sufficient polis. Finally, the theorist must determine the particular form that each of these components should be given in order to assure that, collectively, they will constitute the best polis, that truly self-sufficient entity that achieves all the contributory goals, and thus the overall goal, of the polis.

It has always been recognized that Utopia is related to Plato's and Aristotle's accounts of the ideal polis. But treatments of the relation, when they have gone beyond general statements that More was inspired by these works, have usually been restricted to the enumeration of particular geographic, demographic, andinstitutional parallels between Utopia and the ideal poleis of Greek theory (especially that of the Republic). More is thought, that is, simply to have appropriated a selection of desirable-sounding features from the Greek works, a view of the relation that fits comfortably with the common notion that the Utopian construct is a collection of randomly-chosen and whimsically-ordered features that seemed (for the most part) ideal to More. [Edward L.] Surtz, for example, writes that More goes to the Republic "for the broad bases of the Utopia, e.g. the search for justice … [and] the introduction of communism into the best state," while "for many of his details he turns to the more realistic and practical Laws." The Politics "may be the ultimate, though remote, source for such items as the following: condemnation of wars of conquest and dedication to peacetime pursuits, … the end of government as the good of the citizens, … the objections to communism, the traditional case for democracy, and education as the foundation of the state because of the importance of early impressions." In his Commentary, Surtz annotates numerous specific parallels (and differences) between More and Plato, as well as a good many between More and Aristotle.

Among his annotations of Aristotelian parallels, however, is a scattered series of notes that suggests that the choice of topicsin the account of Utopia reflects, and follows roughly the order of, Aristotle's list of the six necessary services of the polis—a fact that should have made Surtz wonder whether Utopia might owe an underlying constructional schema, as well as some materials that flesh it out, to Greek theory. And indeed [Thomas I.] White has recently shown [in "Aristotle and Utopia," Rensaissance Quarterly, 1976] not only that More's debts to the Politics are direct and extensive but also that many of them reflect the fact that the design of the Utopian construct is fundamentally informed by the concept of self-sufficiency:

Self-sufficiency is not an explicitly avowed goal of Utopia, but it should be clear that simply because of Utopia's avowedly ideal, or at least superior, nature, self-sufficiency is a necessary aim of the society. That is, it seeks both the end (full human development) and the means (self-reliance and a static culture) implied by [aularkeia]. More has at least implicitly and quite possibly consciously adopted Aristotle's idea as the basis of Utopia. And there are a number of similarities between specific institutions or practices described by these two thinkers which demonstrate their general agreement on self-sufficiency as the fundamental goal of the state.

One can in fact go a good deal further and say simply that More's Utopian construct embodies the results of a best-commonwealth exercise performed in strict accordance with the Greek rules. The construct includes all the parts of the exercise, and it includes nothing of substance that is not either a part of it or of More's comments on his results. This fact, which provides the quietus for the view of the account of Utopia as whimsical mélange, would be obvious were it not that More decided to present his best-commonwealth exercise in a form that doubly disguised it. First, unlike Plato and Aristotle, he offers not dialectics but a model that embodies the end-product of dialectics. Second, the model is presented as a fictional travelogue. The choice of this mode of presentation entailed suppressing or disguising the various components of the dialectical substructure of the model—its generative postulates and the arguments involved in the four steps of the best-commonwealth exercise—and a partial abandonment of the logical order of topics in the exercise for the rather different order (or disorder) of the traveler's tale—geography, and then any number of topics in any associative order. The crucial arguments deducing the best life of the individual from human nature are presented out of their logical place and attributed not to the author (nor to Hythloday, who is only recording what he saw and heard) but to the Utopian moral philosophers, and they are offered not as a step in the generation of the Utopian construct but simply as supposedly interesting incidental information about Utopian philosophy. The conclusion about the goal of the commonwealth that follows from this view of the best life of the individual is presented in one sentence at the end of the account of Utopian occupations: "the constitution of their commonwealth looks in the first place to this sole object: that for all the citizens, as far as the public needs permit, as much time as possible should be withdrawn from the service of the body and devoted to the freedom and culture of the mind." The contributory goals of the commonwealth, and the arguments about the array of features calculated to facilitate the attainment and maintenance of these goals, can for the most part be inferred only by examining the individual features of Utopia and their interrelations.

It is clear that the best-commonwealth exercise offered a perfect way of exploring the questions raised in Book I. The question whether social justice necessitates communism had been the most conspicuous concern of the original best-commonwealth exercises. Moreover, the degree of compatibility between the politically expedient and the imperatives of morality and religion can be precisely determined by examining the institutions and policies of an ideal commonwealth constructed according to Greek principles, since by definition such a commonwealth is characterized by perfect expediency: the best-commonwealth exercise is designed to generate the constitution of a polis that acts with perfect rationality to assure that its citizens individually and collectively pursue their real interests.

These considerations suggest the solution to the muchdiscussed problem of why More made Utopia non-Christian. More and all his contemporaries—including Machiavelli and Guicciardini—knew that moral, and Christian, behavior is advisable on suprarational, religious grounds. The liveliest question in early (pre-Reformation) sixteenth-century political thought, however, is that raised in Book I of Utopia: how far, in political life, is this kind of behavior advisable, or unadvisable, on purely prudential grounds? More realized that this question could be answered by seeing what a society pursuing perfect expediency through perfectly rational calculations would be like. This realization was doubtless prompted by the fact that, as I noted above, the political works of Plato and Aristotle in which the best-commonwealth exercise originates also provide the most authoritative bases for the claim that the expedient sometimes differs from the moral. If one wants to refute or modify these conclusions, then, a most effective way is to show that thebest-commonwealth exercise, if performed more correctly, does not in fact lead to them.

It is also clear why More chose to present his results as a fictionalized model. He presents them as a model because he feels, as he indicates in Book I, that this form of presentation represents an important methodological advance in the systemic approach to social analysis. He disguises the model as a fiction for the same reason that Utopia as a whole is presented as a fiction. Fictional dialogue is conventional in humanist philosophical writing; underlying this convention is the valid observation that the appeal, hence the utility, of a learned work is enhanced if its lessons are dressed in the sugar-coat of fiction. Sidney's later description of the poet's calculations applies to the humanist tradition as a whole:

he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it. … He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulness; but…with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you…. And, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue….for even those hard-hearted evil men who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, and therefore despise the austere admonitions of the philosopher, … yet will be content to be delighted—which is all the good-fellow poet seemeth to promise—and so steal to see the form of goodness (which seen they cannot but love) ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of cherries. (An Apology for Poetry)

In his second letter to Giles More acknowledges that such considerations underlie the mode of presentation of the Utopian construct: "I do not pretend that if I had determined to write about the commonwealth and had thought of such a story as I have recounted, I should have perhaps shrunk from a fiction [fictio] whereby the truth, as if smeared with honey, might a little more pleasantly slide into men's minds."