Utopia: Thomas More’s Communal Vision and Influences

Utopia: Thomas More’s Communal Vision

Utopia displays the strong influence of Plato's Republic, with its radically communal reimagining of society, but it is also shaped by more contemporary influences:

Influences on Utopia

• Monastic communities, which forbade private property and required everyone to labor;
• Emerging market societies, with their emphasis on education and social mobility over hereditary privilege, and their dislike of the old warrior aristocracy;
• Recurrent peasant outcries demanding a more just distribution of wealth;
• Amerigo Vespucci's published accounts of his voyages to the newly discovered lands across the Atlantic Ocean.

These voyages seemed to reveal a part of the world that was very different from what was found in Europe at the time. The inequality and economic arguments concerning hereditary privilege were largely absent in this new world. Vespucci’s letters—part report, part fantasy—helped More shape the "new world" theme in Utopia.

Vespucci and the New World

Vespucci’s accounts suggested societies where the rigid class divisions and hereditary economic claims common in Europe did not dominate daily life. Those narratives gave More material and imaginative permission to construct a political model markedly unlike contemporary England.

Book II: Laws and Customs

In Book II (which was actually the first part More wrote), More describes in acute detail the laws and customs of a country that shares some physical resemblance to England. However, when we examine its laws, we find a very different place:

• The abolition of money and private property has prevented any neurotic attachment to goods and status, and the parasitic classes have disappeared.
• In Utopia, education is free and universal.
• Peasants are replaced with prosperous farmers.
• Cities are gleaming, rational, and clean, instead of dirty and crowded.
• Health care and child care are free.
• Everybody works, eliminating overburdening and allowing people more leisure time.

Book I: England and the Political Debate

The picture of England presented in Book I is a clear contrast to the country described in Book II. We see beggars on the streets, petty thieves convicted to death still hanging, hungry farmers, and cynical flatterers (peloteros cínicos) who convince the king to pursue imperialistic wars. However, Book I is not entirely a call to revolution. It is a meditation and dialogue on whether intellectuals should get involved with politics.

The two speakers in this dialogue are Hythloday and More (probably not the real More, but a fictionalized version). More believes that Hythloday, with his knowledge and experience, would be an excellent councillor to any monarch of Europe. Hythloday, by contrast, argues that kings do not want councillors who will advise them against ill-advised policies or wars; they prefer flatterers and are not genuinely interested in progressing society. Hythloday adopts a more idealist stance and is not concerned with fighting for a lost cause. More is more pragmatic: he is prepared to compromise and work within the system to achieve change, and he will not abandon efforts to improve society.