In all the respects just indicated Utopian communism differs from previous conceptions in which community of possessions and living plays a role. Neither from one of these conceptions nor from a combination of them can it be deduced. We do not deny originality to the Agamemnon because Aeschylus found the tales of the house of Atreus among the folk lore of the Greeks. In a like sense whatever bits or shreds of previous conceptions one may find in it, Utopian communism remains, as an integral whole, original -- a new thing. It is not merely a new thing; it is one of the very few new things in Utopia; most of the rest is medieval or humanist or part of an old tradition of social criticism. But to say that at a moment in history something is new is not necessarily to say that it is modern; and for this statement the best evidence comes within the five years following the publication of Utopia, when Martin Luther elaborates a new perception of the nature of the Divine's encounter with man. New, indeed, is Luther's perception, but not modern, as anyone knows who has ever tried to make intelligible to modern students what Luther was getting at.

Although Utopian communism is both new in 1516 and also modern, it is not modern communism or even modern socialism, as they exist or have ever existed in theory or in practice. Consider the features of Utopian communism: generous public provision for the infirm; democratic and secret elections of all officers including priests, meals taken publicly in common refectories; a common habit or uniform prescribed for all citizens; even houses changed once a decade; six hours of manual labor a day for all but a handful of magistrates and scholars, and careful measures to prevent anyone from shirking; no private property, no money; no sort of pricing at all for any goods or services, and therefore no market in the economic sense of the term. Whatever the merits of its intent, Utopian communism is far too naive, far too crude, to suit any modern socialist or communist. It is not the details of Utopian communism that make Utopia modern, it is the spirit, the attitude of mind that informs those details. What that spirit and attitude were we can best understand if we see more precisely how it contrasts with the communist tradition with the longest continuous history, the one which reached Christianity by the way of Stoicism through the Church Fathers of Late Antiquity.