Le pauvre et le mendiant dans l’Utopie de Thomas More

Contrary to the legislation on public assistance in operation in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Thomas More does not assimilate poverty, and its corollary, vagabondage, to a moral fault. He inaugurates a move from morality to sociology and from sociology to economics by applying the notion of vice – limited until this point to an exclusively individual context – to the state of an inhuman society and economy, and proposes remedies, the reach and originality of which we analyse here.