"J.H. Hexter's book, in which he rescues a great man from his modern interpreters, is a brilliant example of how historical imagination can be persuasively used.…Hexter's main contention is that More really meant what he said, and did not say what Aquinas or Marx or anyone else would have meant. More was no social revolutionary in the modern sense, but his contemporaries, including Erasmus, had no doubt about his intention to use the ideal of Utopia, with its elaborate presentation of a community of property and goods, as the most powerful kind of criticism of 16-century society.
"[Hexter's book] deserves to be regarded, I think, as the definitive interpretation of Utopia."
-- Willson H. Coates
Note: The Torchbooks edition contains a new Epilogue and some corrections by the author to the first edition of 1952.