St. Thomas More’s Utopian Soul
a presentation by MHC Undergraduate Fellow Helen Walter
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
7:00 PM
7:00 PM
Newman Center
University of Maine, Orono, ME
Helen Walter is a Political Science and History double major whose project St. Thomas More’s Utopian Soul probes Thomas More’s혻book혻Utopia and the works it draws on in order to understand More’s answer to the question: how does human desire relate to justice? For this research, Walter worked with faculty mentor Robert Ballingall, Associate Professor of Political Science. Walter’s Fellowship is supported by the Liam Riordan Humanities Fellowship Fund.
Info:
A four-part lecture which compares the esoteric reading of Plato’s Republic and the Laws to More’s imitation of them, reading More’s Utopian city as an analogy for the soul and his dialogue in Book I as a discussion of the philosophical political problem. The first section will use textual evidence to justify the claim that혻Utopia혻ought to be read esoterically (in the Straussian sense). I will go through the various places in the text where More distances himself from the explicit meaning of the words of both the character of More and the character of Hythloday. In the second section, I will examine how, if we read between the lines of Book I, it becomes clear that More and Hythloday are not just discussing the problem of counsel, but the deeper question of the Socratic political problem and the limits of pure rationality. The next sections will focus on Book II and will interpret the society of the Utopians as a Platonic city in speech and metaphor for the soul, arguing that More intends to demonstrate the limitations of a soul like Hythloday’s and the limitations of rational inquiry without Socratic eros or Christian caritas. The lecture will end with an exposition of what this interpretation means for the reader and the history of political philosophy in general.
For more details, email mhc@maine.edu