Thomas More

Thomas More

Thomas More gave the world a word and a dream. Utopia, the book he published in 1516, coined the name for an imaginary perfect society and founded a whole genre of political imagination; its island commonwealth, with no private property, no money, religious toleration, and a working day of only six hours, has haunted political thought ever since. Yet the book is a sly and many-sided thing. Its traveler-narrator's name means dispenser of nonsense, the very word "Utopia" means no place, and More leaves his reader forever uncertain whether he is offering a blueprint, a satire, or a mirror.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. More wrote Utopia in Latin, and this room reads it in the standard public-domain English of Gilbert Burnet's 1684 translation, by way of Project Gutenberg. His later Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation stands behind the discussion. The chat cites Utopia by its two books. Expect citations of the form Utopia, Book I, or Book II.

Life. More was born in 1478 in London, trained as a lawyer, and became the foremost English humanist of his generation, a master of Greek and the New Learning and the intimate friend of Erasmus. He was famous for the learned household he kept, where he educated his daughters to a level that astonished all of Europe, and for a wit that never deserted him. He rose through royal service under Henry VIII to become Lord Chancellor of England, the first layman ever to hold the office. Learning, law, public service, and a deep Catholic faith met in him, though the same faith made him a hard adversary of the early Protestants. His Utopia and his humanism secured his place in European letters long before his public career reached its height.

Where to begin. Read Utopia in both its parts: Book I, the dialogue that holds up a mirror to England, and Book II, the description of the commonwealth itself. Then turn to the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation for the devotional writer and to the unfinished History of King Richard III, which gave Shakespeare much of his villain.

Utopia, Book I: the mirror of England. The first book is a conversation in which the traveler Raphael Hythloday indicts the England of More's day. He attacks the savagery of punishing theft with death while the conditions that breed thieves are left untouched, and above all the enclosure of the common fields for sheep pasture, which drives farmers off the land into beggary and crime. In the book's most famous image the once gentle sheep have become devourers of men, eating up fields and houses and whole towns. It is some of the sharpest social criticism of the age, a sustained attack on greed, injustice, and the corruption of those who counsel kings.

Utopia, Book II: the commonwealth of nowhere. The second book describes the island of Utopia itself, a society built throughout on reason. Property is held in common and money has been abolished; everyone works, but only six hours a day, since no labor is squandered on luxury and idleness; the cities are planned and alike; there is toleration of religions and freedom of thought, free hospitals, and education for all; and gold is held in contempt, made into chamber-pots and the chains of slaves so that the people are cured of avarice. Many of its features, the toleration, the public provision, the war on idleness and inequality, anticipate later reform; others, its rigid uniformity, its bondsmen, its mercy-killing, trouble the modern reader. It is the founding text of utopian writing.

The puzzle of Utopia. What does More actually mean by it? The whole book is wrapped in irony. Its name puns on the Greek for both a good place and no place at all; the narrator Hythloday's name means a speaker of nonsense; and the character called More, within the dialogue, politely doubts much of what Hythloday so admires. Is this communist, divorcing, mercy-killing, pagan commonwealth More's true ideal, or a provocation, or a mirror held up to a Christian Europe that fails to live as reasonably as these imagined heathens do? More never resolves the question, and that deliberate open-endedness is part of the work's genius: Utopia is not a blueprint but a thought-experiment that compels its readers to judge their own world.

The Christian humanist. More belongs, with Erasmus and with John Colet, to the very center of Northern humanism, the movement that joined the recovered learning of Greece and Rome to the reform of Christian life and education. He learned Greek, championed the New Learning, and brought a humanist's wit and a lawyer's precision to all he wrote. His friendship with Erasmus is one of the great intellectual partnerships of the Renaissance: Erasmus composed The Praise of Folly under More's roof and named it with a pun on More's name, Moria, the Greek for folly.

Conscience against the state. The last act of More's public life made him a lasting symbol of the rights of conscience. When Henry VIII broke with Rome and required his subjects to swear to the King's supremacy over the Church in England, More could not in conscience take the oath. He resigned the chancellorship, withdrew into a careful silence, and held to his refusal under every pressure, calling himself the King's good servant, but God's first. His insistence that there is a boundary fixed by conscience beyond which no power of the state may rightly compel a person became one of the most resonant stands in Western history. It made him, four centuries on, a saint to his own Church and, to many far beyond it, the very image of the individual conscience holding firm against authority, a man, as the phrase has it, for all seasons.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Utopia founded a tradition that runs through Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and on into every later dream and nightmare of the perfect society, and its assault on inequality made it a touchstone for socialism. Read now, More is the maker of the most fertile thought-experiment in the history of political imagination and a landmark in the history of conscience. He built his ideal commonwealth on the model of Plato's Republic, raising again the question whether justice requires the abolition of private property; he shared the humanist project and the deepest friendship of his life with Erasmus; his Utopia of 1516 stands as the great counter-image to the Prince that Machiavelli wrote three years before, idealism set against realism, the best commonwealth against the most effective ruler; his community of common property was claimed long afterward by Marx and the socialist tradition as a distant ancestor; and his book gave Bacon the very form of the scientific utopia. The island of nowhere has never stopped holding up its mirror.