Political Philosophy and Ethics discussion

I have reviewed Thomas More's Utopia here.

In the course of this dialogue, one of More's characters made a statement that has created a firestorm of controversy in the academic community during recent decades:

"[I]f the population throughout the entire island exceeds the quota, they enrol citizens out of every city and plant a colony under their own laws on the mainland near them, wherever the natives have plenty of unoccupied and uncultivated land. Those natives who want to live with the Utopians are adopted by them. When such a merger occurs, the two peoples gradually and easily blend together, sharing the same way of life and customs, much to the advantage of both. For by their policies the Utopians make the land yield an abundance for all, though previously it had seemed too poor and barren even to support the natives. But those who refuse to live under their laws they drive out of the land they claim for themselves; and against those who resist them, they wage war. They think it is perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle and waste yet forbid the use and possession of it to others who, by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it."

Thomas More, Thomas More: Utopia , rev. ed., ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 54 (emphasis added).

The foregoing excerpt has recently been considered a source text for the appropriation of Native American land by seventeenth-century English colonists and for John Locke's later analysis of property in chapter 5 of his Second Treatise of Government. As discussed at some length in my recent book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience, Roger Williams opposed this entire model of English colonialism. However, I was unaware at the time I wrote my book that Thomas More had mentioned this theory in Utopia during the sixteenth century. Although I first read Utopia in 1966, that apparently offhand passage made no lasting impression on my mind, and I had no recollection of it when I wrote my book almost fifty years later. Needless to say, I was unaware until after the publication of my book of all the scholarly controversy about the passage and its alleged influence on the New England Puritans as well as on Locke.

I am now immersed in studying the primary and secondary literature regarding More. I am also restudying Locke's Second Treatise and reading for the first time much of the substantial scholarly literature on Locke's views of land ownership and slavery. I am preparing a paper with the working title "Thomas More, Roger Williams, and John Locke on Freedom of Conscience, Land Ownership, and Slavery." As a result of the indicated research, it will probably be at least a few weeks before this paper is completed and published. Stay tuned.

I have reviewed Thomas More's Dialogue Concerning Heresies here.

Alan wrote (post 1): "I am preparing a paper with the working title "Thomas More, Roger Williams, and John Locke on Freedom of Conscience, Land Ownership, and Slavery.""

See my post 12 in the John Locke (1632-1704) topic of this Goodreads group.