ABSTRACT
It has been said that the ‘discovery’ of America was the cause of the greatest liberation of the European imagination. Thomas More’s Utopia was the first mature reflection in the Old World on the potential of the New. The general idealism in Europe that mankind could begin again was widely shared, in both secular and religious circles (Evans 1979). America was to be more than a nation; it was to be an experiment in the possibilities of humankind, both the religious and secular hope of the world (cf. de Tocqueville 1835).
