Suchergebnisse

Chester G. Starr's recent article in the Journal (March 1958), "An Overdose of Slavery," does a fine job of showing that people other than slaves worked in antiquity, but it leaves hanging the crucial question regarding the place of slavery in the economy of the ancient world. Moreover, Starr enters a strong plea against comparing ancient and modern slavery. These two aspects of his paper I think merit some further comment.

When one compares ancient and modern economic institutions, the differences are many and deep. One of the most obvious is the appearance of slavery virtually everywhere among those societies that rose from simple village life to civilization. Social and economic specialization, the resulting necessity for interchange of goods, and a higher political organization in a firm, consciously organized state—these are aspects of the appearance of civilization, and with them one usually finds a spectrum of social classes from aristrocrats to slaves.

The formal structure of Thomas More'sUtopiais simple and well known. It consists of two books, the first of which contains, in the form of a dialogue between More and an imaginary traveller, Raphael Hythloday, a sharp criticism of English social conditions, the enclosure movement, the penal code and the existing pattern of international relations. The second, in the form of a lengthy tale related by Hythloday, is a description of the social, economic, political and religious conditions of the Isle of Nowhere, Utopia.