Utopia

Summary

Utopia is a dialogue in two books, written in Latin and presented as a true report. In Book I More, writing in his own person, recalls his embassy to Flanders in 1515 with Cuthbert Tunstall. At Antwerp his friend Peter Giles introduces him to Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese scholar-traveller who sailed with Amerigo Vespucci and stayed on in the New World. Giles and More urge Raphael to put his learning at the service of a king. He refuses, arguing that princes care for war and money, not good counsel, and illustrates with a dinner he once attended at the table of Cardinal John Morton. There, when a lawyer praised England's hanging of thieves, Raphael replied that hanging does not prevent theft when men have no other way to live, that discharged soldiers, idle retainers and tenants driven off the land by enclosure for sheep-pasture are forced to steal, and that England first makes thieves and then punishes them. He proposed penal labour instead. Raphael then imagines advising the French king against conquest and debased coinage, and concludes that no court would hear him. More answers that a wise man should not desert the commonwealth, any more than a ship in a storm, but should use a more pliable philosophy. Raphael replies that at court one must approve wicked counsels or be ignored, and declares that while property remains and money is the measure of all things, no nation can be governed justly or happily. Book II, given after dinner, describes the crescent-shaped island of Utopia, made an island by its founder Utopus. Its fifty-four cities share the same laws; the capital is Amaurot. Elected Syphogrants and Tranibors serve under a prince chosen for life. All citizens farm in turn, learn a trade and work six hours a day. There is no private property and no money in internal use; goods are taken freely from common storehouses, and meals are eaten in common halls. The sick are nursed in four large public hospitals outside each city. Gold and silver are made into chamber-pots and the fetters of slaves, so that the visiting Anemolian ambassadors, dressed in gold, are mistaken for servants. The Utopians hold that a rightly ordered pleasure, above all health and the pleasures of the mind, is the end of life, and believe in the immortality of the soul and divine providence. Marriage is monogamous; the incurably and painfully ill may be counselled toward voluntary death. They hate war, fight by hired mercenaries and bribery when they must, and allow freedom of religion under a law of Utopus, punishing only those who preach with violence. Raphael closes by calling other states a conspiracy of the rich, and More, unconvinced on several points, says he rather wishes than hopes to see many Utopian customs adopted. The book was printed at Louvain in 1516 under Erasmus's care; the first English translation, by Ralph Robinson, appeared in 1551, and the library text is Gilbert Burnet's 1684 translation in Henry Morley's edition.

Top Lessons

• Justice must look at causes

  At Cardinal Morton's table Raphael argues that hanging thieves while the poor are driven from their land punishes the effect and ignores the cause. More presents justice as including the prevention of crime through work, education and fair use of land, not only severe penalties.

• The duty and danger of counsel

  Raphael refuses to serve kings because, he says, a good man at court must either approve wicked counsels or be ignored. More replies that one should not abandon the ship in a storm but steer it as well as one can. Their debate frames a question More himself faced when he entered Henry VIII's service and later refused the oath.

• Seeing through false value

  Utopians make chamber-pots of gold and laugh at the ambassadors who arrive dressed in it. They class gambling, hunting and pride in rank as false pleasures. By making the reader's values look strange, More asks what wealth and honour are really worth.

• Reading a serious joke

  The island is called No-place, the traveller's name suggests nonsense, and More ends by doubting much of what he has heard. Readers must decide which Utopian customs More admires, which he mocks and which he offers as a challenge to Christian Europe, where Christians themselves fall short of what pagans achieve by reason alone.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Utopia contains some of the most cited early modern passages on public health and the ethics of dying. Each city has four public hospitals outside its walls, large enough to isolate infectious patients, staffed by skilful physicians and so well kept that citizens prefer them to being sick at home; the hospital steward has first choice of the market for the sick. Slaughter and the washing of carcasses are done by slaves at places outside the town, lest the air be infected by ill smells, a precaution consistent with the miasmatic and humoral thinking of More's age. Health is ranked as the chief bodily pleasure, and the Utopians prize the Hippocratic writings and Galen brought by Raphael's companion, counting medicine one of the most pleasant and useful parts of philosophy. Most discussed is the counsel given to those with incurable and torturing disease: after every comfort has been given, priests and magistrates may urge voluntary death by fasting or by opium, never by force, while self-killing without public approval is denied burial honours. Old age is described as a disease in itself. Readers have long debated whether these passages state More's own views, since he was a devout Catholic who ends the book by distancing himself from many Utopian customs; they are best read as the reasoning of a pagan commonwealth without revelation, not as More's endorsement. More's friend Thomas Linacre, founder of the College of Physicians, is named in Morley's introduction.

• Book II, Of Their Traffic

  The four public hospitals outside each city, isolation of infectious patients, attendance by physicians, and the steward's priority in the market.

• Book II, Of Their Traffic

  Butchering and washing of beasts done outside the town so the air is not corrupted.

• Book II, Of the Travelling of the Utopians

  Health as the foundation of bodily pleasure, and the Utopians' esteem for Hippocrates, Galen and the study of medicine.

• Book II, Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages

  Care of the incurable, counselled voluntary death by fasting or opium, refusal of honours to unsanctioned suicide, and old age called a disease of itself.