In the Utopia, More describes in captivating detail an alternative to the systematic greed and brutality of his own society, depicting a land without kings, religious persecution, inequality, hunger or exploitation. But at what human cost? And with what degree of plausibility?
More wrote during a period of profound upheaval in European society in which we can see, in retrospect, the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world. Sovereign states and a mercantile economy were rapidly emerging in the place of earlier, feudal institutions. The new humanist learning of the Renaissance had taken hold in Italy and was rapidly spreading to other countries, including England. With these changes came profound challenges to existing political and religious ideas and practices.
More himself was one of the most admired intellectuals of his time, rising through his talents to become a minister of Henry VIII, before being executed for his principled stand against Henry’s separation of the English church from the universal authority of Rome. Yet before he became either a royal servant or a celebrated martyr of the Catholic church, he was already known as the writer of a brilliant work of the imagination, the Utopia, in which he described a nation living virtuously and happily without either a king or an institutional Christian church, and scathingly described the hypocrisy of royal and religious authorities in his own society.
We will look closely at this great and enigmatic work, examining its significance in relation to its historical moment at large and in More’s own life. We will consider its status as one of the great works of the new humanist learning, consider in some detail its classical heritage in Plato’s Republic, and place its penetrating critical vision of its own time in relation to other important contemporary works including Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Finally, we will consider its importance in the history of modern European thought, as a great and lasting commentary on the nature of power and its relation to human happiness and misery.
