ABSTRACT
Thomas Starkey's analysis of England's failures as a commonweal went beyond those articulated by proponents of the body social, despite some themes they held in common. The aristocracy would be forced to cease frivolous games, to eschew private armies, and to live in towns. In identifying the ills of the commonweal in England, Starkey presented a mixed bag of political, economic, and social issues. Although the Dialogue has mainly attracted the interest of historians of political thought, it covered a wide range of subjects of interest to the social historian reforming the three estates, population levels, rural depopulation, labor and unemployment, poverty, crime, inheritance among the landed upper classes, overseas trade, luxury and morality, and education. Starkey's solutions were hardly less radical than Utopia's. Starkey's protagonists developed a number of points about the Church, many of which were subjects of contemporary debate. Starkey's discussion of unemployment among the populace combined economics and moral philosophy.
