Rhetoric and anti-rhetoric in Thomas More's Utopia: from literary inventio to philosophical conversion

Abstract

Thomas More’s Utopia presents several rhetorical architectures which can be traced back, more or less coherently, to the models of the ancient rhetoric, in particular to those of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. One of the fundamental aims that guided ancient rhetoric, persuasion, emerges in a decisive way, in particular. If the reader is not presented with a philosophical treatise, but a composition which claims, through a story, to modify some political and philosophical opinions, or to question the legitimacy of others, this happens through a careful recovery of rhetorical tools and of that aspect of the ancient ars rhetorica consisting in the inventio. Both the parts of the text are in fact entirely drawn by the author’s imagination, although he takes care to link his material to likely contents of reality. Precisely through the use of the inventio, Utopia seems to be able to inscribe itself, in this way, in the ancient protreptic model, placing it in the new conditions of humanism of the Sixteenth Century. However, the instrumental use of rhetoric seems to contradict its programmatic refusal by More, justified by the need to guarantee an access to the truth which, just as happened in the Platonic model, must expunge figures other than those of philosophy as much as possible. The analysis of the relationship between utopia and rhetoric allows us, in this way, to approach some of the historically detectable contradictions of the utopian genre, between the use of literary matter and philosophical loyalty, or between a truthful concept and its communication through figures of pure invention, between persuasion and conversion. Finally, this analysis allows us to understand the utopian tale as a “compromise formation” between repressed instances and linguistic codes, thus revealing the forms by which the ultimate goal of Utopia is determined: a utopian conversion.