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What is new about it??

To that question the answer is simple ; ;

it can be made in two words, Utopian communism.

But it is an answer which opens the door wide to an onrush of objections and denials.

Surely there is nothing new about communism.

We find it in Plato's Republic, and in Utopia More acknowledges his debt to that book.

We find it in that `` common way of life pleasing to Christ and still in use among the truest societies of Christians '', that is, the better monasteries which made it easier to convert the Utopians to Christianity.

We find it in the later Stoic conception of man's natural condition which included the community of all possessions.

This conception was taken up by the early Church Fathers and by canon lawyers and theologians in the Middle Ages ; ;

and More was far too well read not to have come across it in one or several of the forms thus given it.