Utopia

Overview

Utopia is a hundred and forty pages, written in Latin and published at Louvain in 1516, when More was a rising London lawyer and diplomat and Henry VIII had been on the throne seven years. Nineteen years later Henry had him beheaded for refusing the oath of supremacy.

It is in two parts, written in reverse order. More drafted the description of the island first, while on an embassy in the Netherlands, and added the conversation that precedes it after he got home. That matters, because Book One is much the more radical.

The form is a dialogue with More himself in it, and the reader should not identify the character with the author. A traveller called Raphael Hythloday, who has sailed with Vespucci and stayed behind, tells the character More and his real friend Peter Giles about a commonwealth he lived in for five years. The character More argues with him and refuses at the end to agree.

The names are all jokes and they are all in Greek. Utopia is no-place, with eu-topos, good place, audible behind it. Hythloday’s first name is the archangel’s and his surname means something like peddler of nonsense. The river Anyder is the waterless, the capital Amaurot is the shadowy, and the ruler is the Ademus, the ruler of no people. A book that names its narrator Nonsense is telling you something about how to read it.

The argument

Book One: England. The conversation opens on whether a philosopher should enter the service of kings. Giles thinks Hythloday should; his knowledge would do good. Hythloday refuses, saying that counsel is useless where a king’s mind is already made up and courts reward flattery.

To illustrate, he describes a dinner at the table of Cardinal Morton, where he argued against the hanging of thieves. The argument is the best thing in the book. Executing thieves is unjust, since no theft is worth a life, and it is ineffective, since a man who must eat will steal anyway and now has a reason to kill the witness as well. Then the causes: soldiers discharged after wars and fit for nothing else; noblemen keeping crowds of idle retainers; and above all enclosure, landlords fencing arable land for pasture because wool pays better, turning whole villages out. Hence the image that made the book famous, of sheep that have become so greedy and wild that they eat up men and swallow down whole fields and houses.

The book ends with Hythloday’s radical claim: wherever there is private property and money is the measure of everything, a commonwealth cannot be governed justly or happily. The character More objects that without property nobody would work and the whole thing would collapse in idleness. Hythloday answers that he has seen otherwise, and is asked to describe it.

Book Two: the island. A crescent-shaped island with fifty-four identical cities, none more than a day’s walk apart.

The institutions: no private property and no money. Goods are taken from common storehouses as needed. Everyone learns agriculture and rotates into the countryside for two-year terms. Everyone has a trade. The working day is six hours, which suffices because nobody is idle, and there is no class of people producing luxuries. Meals are eaten in common halls. Houses are allotted and the households swap every ten years. Clothing is uniform and plain. Gold and silver, having no use, are made into chamber pots and the fetters of slaves, so that children may play with jewels and grow out of them.

Government is by elected household representatives, with the principal officer chosen for life and removable for tyranny. Deliberation outside the council is a capital offence, which is one of several details that catch a modern reader short.

The darker features are there in full. Travel requires a passport and an unauthorised traveller is enslaved on a second offence. Slavery exists and is the standard punishment for crime, along with prisoners of war and volunteers from other countries. The incurably ill are urged, gently and repeatedly, to end their lives, though refusal is respected. Adultery is punished with slavery and repeat offenders are killed. Wars are fought where possible by hiring mercenaries and by offering rewards for the assassination of enemy leaders.

On religion, the Utopians believe in one god they call Mithra and tolerate every sect, on the ground that truth will prevail if left alone and that violence over religion produces only strife. The two exceptions are those who deny the immortality of the soul or providence, who are not persecuted but are barred from office and not treated as citizens.

Hythloday ends with a summation: every existing commonwealth is a conspiracy of the rich, procuring their own advantage under the name and title of the commonwealth. Then the character More says, in the last paragraph, that he cannot agree with everything and that there is much in Utopia he would wish for rather than expect, and takes Hythloday in to dinner.

How to read it

Read Book One first and slowly. It is the part that gets skipped and it contains the analysis and the anger.

Then read Book Two with a list of the arrangements you find attractive and those you find alarming. Most readers produce both lists, which is very likely the design.

Keep the joke in view. The names, the impossible geography, the character More’s refusal, and the prefatory letters that pretend to worry about the exact width of a bridge all work against taking the island as a blueprint.

Then decide what the satire is aimed at. The two standard readings are that the island is an ideal More could not openly advocate, and that it is a mirror held up to England so that the criticism in Book One lands. A third possibility is that More is genuinely uncertain and has built a machine for staying uncertain.

Read it against Plato’s Republic, which More knew intimately and which shares the common property, the elite, and the willingness to regiment, and against Bacon’s New Atlantis, which drops the politics and keeps only the research institute.

Hold the biography beside it without letting it settle anything. The man who wrote that religious coercion produces only strife later, as Lord Chancellor, pursued Protestants and saw several burned. He was also executed himself for a conscience he would not surrender.

Questions it raises

• Is Utopia a proposal or a satire? What in the text would settle it, and does More want it settled?
• Hythloday says justice is impossible while property is private. The character More says nobody would work. Which argument does the book leave standing?
• A six-hour working day sustained by abolishing idleness and luxury: is the arithmetic plausible, and what does it assume about wants?
• The island has slavery, internal passports, and a death penalty for unauthorised political discussion. Can a good society need those, or is the book showing what a good society would cost?
• Toleration is extended to every belief except atheism. What work is that exception doing?
• Enclosure, unemployment and hanging the poor: how much of Book One’s diagnosis applies to any society, and how much is specific to 1516?