Ms. Andrea Solomon, Ms. Mary Edsall
Colloquium F2003x
Assignment #9 – Thomas More
19 October 1999
Travels to Utopia
Thomas More’s Utopia is probably the most famous description of an ideal society and government since Plato’s Republic. I think that what makes More’s book more effective is the device of the traveler’s tale. Unlike The Republic, in which Plato recounts several philosophers sitting around and building up an imaginary society in their imagination, Utopia is written as a description of a land and people whom a character actually met and lived among. More invents a fictional narrator, but his narrator claims to have been on Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages and he weaves together actual and fictional references. For example, he sets Utopia in the recently discovered New World and he provides some believable information about where it is, what surrounds it, and who lives there. The book is also structured like a travel narrative, such as Vespucci’s: He begins Book 2 (the actual book about Utopia) by describing the physical layout of the island and its cities, then the economic and political structures of the island, and finally the customs of the people.
Within the frame of the traveler’s tale, however, Utopia is very definitely a treatise on and critique of political economy, often even more extreme than Plato’s Republic. In Book 1, More’s fictional narrator criticizes the farming conditions in England which are causing thousands to starve. He therefore argues that it is cruel and immoral to execute these thieves. To prove that theft is not inherent to all society, he describes the political and legal systems of other (fictional) kingdoms he has visited in the New World, building up to the ideal but bizarre island Utopia. In Utopia there is no money and so much surplus that everyone takes all the food and items they want. Because everyone works, it is only necessary to work six hours a day. Everyone takes their turn farming so that each city has plenty of food. Jobs are passed from parent to child, and there are strict laws regulating how husbands govern their wives and children. In this society, everyone is egalitarian – they dress the same, they work and play the same amount, etc. They place no value on gold or silver except for hiring foreigners. First-time violators of Utopia’s laws are made slaves, second-time offenders are executed. Of course, unlike England, no one ever steals anything because there is completely equal distribution of wealth. More suggests that this moneyless and greedless society is possible because “no living creature is naturally greedy except from fear or want, or in the case of human beings, from vanity,” (81) none of which exist in Utopia.