In Plato's Republic communism is -- to speak anachronistically -- a communism of Janissaries. Its function is to separate from the base ruled mass, among whom private ownership prevails, the governing warrior elite. Moreover, it is too readily forgotten that in the Republic what gave the initial impetus to Plato's excursus into the construction of an imaginary commonwealth with its ruling-class communism of goods, wives, and children, was his quest for a canon for the proper ordering of the individual human psyche; and it is to this problem that the Republic ultimately returns. In More's Utopia communism is not a means of separating out a warrior elite from the lumpish mass. Utopian communism applies to all Utopians. And in the economy of the book it is not peripheral but central. The concern of Utopia is with the optimo reipublicae statu, the best ordering of a civil society; and it is again and again made clear that Utopian communism provides the institutional array indispensable to that best ordering.

To derive Utopian communism from the Jerusalem Christian community of the apostolic age or from its medieval successors in spirit, the monastic communities, is with an appropriate shift of adjectives, misleading in the same way as to derive it from Plato's Republic: in the Republic we have to do with an elite of physical and intellectual athletes, in the apostolic and monastic communities with an elite of spiritual and religious athletes. The apostolic community was literally an elite: chosen by Christ himself. And the monastic communities were supposed to be made up of volunteers selected only after a novitiate which would test their religious aptitude for monastic rigors, their spiritual athleticism.