Summary of Thomas
More's Utopia
More, T. (1516/1997). Utopia. New York, NY: Dover Thrift Edition.
Utopia (published in 1516)
attempts to offer a practical response to the crises of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries by carefully defining an ideal republic. Unlike
Plato's Republic, a largely abstract dialogue about justice, Utopia
focuses on politics and social organization in stark detail. The books
begin a conversation between Thomas More and Raphael (Hebrew for 'God
has healed'). Raphael is a traveler who has seen much of the world yet
is impressed by little of it. Even monsters are hardly worthy of
concern. After all, "There is never any shortage of horrible creatures
who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole
populations; but examples of wise social planning are not so easy to
find" (p. 40). [Note: throughout this essay, I cite from the Turner translation.]
Before long, it becomes clear that Raphael offers shrewd analysis of
various communities around the globe - and that he finds most of them
to be faulty in some way. Even Tudor England offers little in the form
of civilization. Raphael illustrates this rebuke by noting that thieves
in English society are executed when, instead, they should be pitied
and helped. The seizure of land by oligarchs, the maintenance of a
wasteful standing army, the practice of gambling and gratuitous
ornamentation - all of these social ills lead to a sick society,
according to Raphael. Moreover, these ills produce a subjugated people:
"you create thieves, and then punish them for stealing" (p. 49)!
Of course,
Raphael remains an outsider to civilization - despite his wisdom. When
More asks if he might serve as counselor to some king, Raphael responds
that no king or court would tolerate a counselor who might challenge
their strongly (and wrongly) held assumptions. Referring to Plato's Republic,
Raphael notes that the likelihood of a king acting as a philosopher, or
merely tolerating one, is coincidental at best: "I'd be promptly thrown
out, or merely treated as a figure of fun" (p. 57). More responds that
social reform is a pleasant ideal, but that conservatism is more
appropriate to these precarious days: "what you can't put right you
must try to make as little wrong as possible. For things will never be
perfect, until human beings are perfect - which I don't expect them to
be for quite a number of years" (p. 64)! Raphael concludes Book One of Utopia
by responding that cures for social ills demand systematic healing of
the body politic. No improvement in public life can occur without the
elimination of social illness at its deepest level. This is not mere
fancy, Raphael reminds his friend; the good life can be realized, if it
can be visualized. Throughout the second book, Raphael helps More
visualize the perfected story by sketching his recollection of a
distant island: Utopia. I've chosen to organize his narrative according
to four principles:
• elimination of private property
• universal labor
• moderated pleasure
• family as microcosm of state
This primary
organizing principle of Utopia is the elimination of private property.
All goods are held in common and dispensed freely. The implications of
this form of public life are significant:
In
other 'republics' practically everyone knows that, if he doesn't look
out for himself, he'll starve to death, however prosperous his country
may be. He's therefore compelled to give his own interests priority
over those of the public; that is, of other people. But in Utopia,
where everything's under public ownership, no one has any fear of going
short, as long as the public storehouses are full. Everyone gets a fair
share, so there are never any poor men or beggars. Nobody owns
anything, but everyone is rich - for what greater wealth can there be
than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety? (p. 128)
There are no
shortages in this community because so few things have value, as
compared to English society in which valued things are necessarily in
short supply. Gold and silver, prized among English possessions, are
used in chamber pots and slave fetters in Utopia. Because everyone has
a job producing basic staples of society, there is little reason for
long workdays. Utopians produce only what the community needs to
survive.
This leads to a second key principle: the universal nature of labor. In this way, Utopia is different from Plato's Republic.
All people (with the exception of a handful of scholars and officials)
must work - and all must benefit from their communal labor. Sullivan
(1983) illuminates this key distinction: "Whereas the common life is
led only by the soldiers and guardians of the Republic who are also
exempt from manual labor, all the Utopians share in the goods produced
and all [with those exceptions noted above] work as farmers or
craftsmen" (p. 33). In contrast to the Republic, More's Utopia seeks to
create a largely classless society (with the key exception of slaves),
rather than a society in which many work to sustain public life for a
few.
In More's ideal
community, labor serves as a means of social cohesion and control.
Someone who leaves his or her town and workplace without permission
will be severely punished. Even when a person visits another town on
the island, s/he must work in order to eat:
Wherever
you are, you always have to work. There's never any excuse for
idleness. There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels,
no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places. Everyone has
his eye on you, so you're practically forced to get on with your job,
and make some proper use of your spare time. (p. 84)
Despite this
constant surveillance, utopian ethics and religion emphasize that a
good life is spent in pleasurable pursuits - and that work is
pleasurable. When not at labor, utopians read, enjoy conversations,
play games, or attend public lectures.
This leads to the third principle of society in More's Utopia:
the role of moderated pleasure in social life. Public life is organized
around the principle that one can be happy on this earth insofar as one
is moderate in one's pleasures and doesn't seek to limit the pleasures
of others. Indeed, the highest pleasures follow those who willingly
sacrifice their own happiness for the happiness of others. Religious
tolerance follows this principle - people may believe in God however
they wish, as long as they don't foist their views on other people who
may believe differently. Most Utopians believe in some sort of God, but
none are forced to follow a specific manner of faith. While this notion
might seem common to the contemporary reader, one should remember that
More wrote his philosophy in a age when the desires of individuals were
easily thwarted by church and state. More, himself, was executed for
his unwillingness to bow to a religious edict made by his king, Henry
VIII. In Utopia, one may practice any religion because, right or wrong,
faith in some manner of God serves to unite the community. Only an
atheist who does not fear judgement in the afterlife is ostracized from
the Utopian community.
A fourth principle of Utopia
is the role of family as the microcosm of state. Family life is
organized around the needs of the state, patterned according to trades
more than biological lineage. Thus, a child who prefers to be a
woodworker would be moved to a family of woodworkers. Families are
patriarchal: "When a girl grows up and gets married, she joins her
husband's household, but the boys of each generation stay at home,
under the control of their oldest male relative" (p. 79). This
patriarchy manifests itself in utopian religion where women must admit
their sins to their husbands even before attending church. As Hertzler
(1965) notes: "More departed from Plato and most communist writers who
have held the family as the complement or bulwark of property. They
held that the abandonment of property meant the destruction of the
family. But More was satisfied with a supervised mating and family
life" (p. 139). In contrast to book five of The Republic, More's Utopian family represents the state at its smallest level in the individual lives of its citizens.
Utopia, like all
fanciful works about public life, is really about the contemporary
times of its author. The setting for public life, as in Plato's
Republic, is the city - in this case a not-too veiled description of
London as it might have appeared in the early sixteenth century. Of
course, this London-that-isn't is improved and perfected by the Utopian
social order:
The
streets are well designed, both for traffic and for protection against
the wind. The buildings are far from unimpressive, for they take the
form of terraces, facing one another and running the whole length of
the street. The fronts of the houses are separated by a twenty-foot
carriageway. Behind them is a large garden, also as long as the street
itself, and completely enclosed by the backs of other streets. Each
house has a front door leading into the street, and a back door into
the garden. In both cases, they're double swing-doors, which open at a
touch, and close automatically behind you. So anyone can go in and out
- for there's no such thing as private property. (p. 73)
In this way, Utopia is a sort of Gernsback Continuum
- an ideal community that exists just slightly beyond the world of
Thomas More and contemporary readers. This community exists through the
communal longing of its readers to create it. Their artifacts - books,
speeches, drawings, and the like - allow us to pass from the real to
the ideal, even if just for a moment.
References
Hertzler, J.O. (1965). The history of utopian thought. New York: Cooper Square Publishers.
More, T. (1516/1965). Utopia (P. Turner, Trans.). New York: Penguin Books.
Sullivan, E.D.S. (1983). Place and no place: Examples of the ordered society in literature. In E.D.S. Sullivan's (ed.)., The utopian vision. San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press.
