THOMAS MORE
THOMAS MORE
He was an English lawyer, social philosopher,author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist.
He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life,Lord Chancellor.
He opposed the king's separation from the Catholic Church and refused to accept the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England, a status the king had been given by a compliant parliament through the Act of Supremacy of 1534.
He was imprisoned in 1534 for his refusal to take the oath
required by the First Succession Act, because the act
disparaged the power of the Pope and Henry’s marriage to
Catherine of Aragon. In 1535, he was tried for treason,
convicted on perjured testimony, and beheaded.
THOMAS MORE UTOPIA (1516)
UTOPIA
The word ‘utopia’ comes from the Greek: ("not") and τόπος ("place") and means "no place".
-Signifies something visionary and unpractical -Utopia is depicted as a sternly righteous and
puritanical State, where few people would feel happy; yet the word is used to signify an easy- going paradise, whose only fault is that it is too happy and ideal to be realized.
-An ideal Commonwealths
• What good can I do as an honorable man in a society of power-hungry individuals?
• Can a community be organized for the benefit of all, and not satisfy the greed,
lust, and appatite for domination of a few?
• How mush repression is a good society justified in exercising in order to retain its goodness?
• Can we really stand a society in which
everybody watches everyone?
The book describes a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect social-political-legal system.
The term has has been used to describe both
international communities that attempt to create an ideal
society, and fictional societies portrayed in literature.
The characters of More, Giles, and Morton all correspond in biographical background to actual historical people, Sir
Thomas More (author of Utopia), the Humanist thinker Peter Giles, and former Chancellor of England Cardinal John
Morton.
More travels to Antwerp as an ambassador for England and King Henry VIII. While not engaged in his official duties, More spends time conversing about intellectual matters with his friend, Peter Giles.
One day, More sees Giles speaking to a bearded man whom More
assumes to be a ship's captain. Giles soon introduces More to
this new man, Raphael Hythloday, who turns out to be a
philosopher and world traveler. The three men retire to Giles's
house for supper and conversation, and Hythloday begins to
speak about his travels.
Amerigo Vespucci
Hythloday has been on many voyages with the noted
explorer Amerigo Vespucci, traveling to the New World,
south of the Equator, through Asia, and eventually landing
on the island of Utopia.
Scyllas
Celanos
Lestrygonians
Geography of Utopia
• Utopia occupies a crescent-shaped island that curves in on itself, enclosing a large bay and protecting it from the ocean and wind. The bay functions as a huge harbor. Access to the bay is impeded by submerged rocks, the
locations of which are known only to Utopians. The bay allows for easy internal shipping and travel, but makes any sort of external attack or
unwanted contact unlikely. This allows the Utopians to remain as isolated as they want to be.
• At one time in its history Utopia was called Abraxa. Filled with uncouth and fractious inhabitants, the land that is now an island was then connected to the mainland by an isthmus. The great General Utopus conquered the land, and then set his army and the conquered inhabitants to destroying the
isthmus. Utopus inspired great loyalty and effort, and the work was finished remarkably fast.
• The present-day island has fifty-four cities, all with the same basic structure, architecture, language, customs, and laws. All citizens are within once day's walk of their nearest neighbor. The city of Amaurot is the political center of the island, simply because it is the city most accessible to all the other cities. Each year, three representatives from each city meet in Amaurot to make island-wide policy.
AGRICULTURE IN UTOPIA
Agriculture, cities, government
• Each city is surrounded by farmland, and every member of each city spends occasional two-year stints in the
country doing agricultural work. Cities do not attempt to expand their frontiers; they think of the surrounding
areas as land to be worked rather than as estates to be owned. When one city has an agricultural surplus, it
exports with no charge to its neighbors. Those neighbors
do the same in return. When it is time to harvest, extra
men are sent from the city to help out. Harvesting usually
takes little more than a day.
• Cities are distinguishable from each other only by those differences imposed by geographical location and topography. Hythloday describes them all by describing the capital city, Amaurot. Amaurot is spread along a tidal river that is bridged only at its farthest point from the sea, so that ships can access all of the city quays. A second fresh water stream runs through the city. The source of this stream is enclosed within the city walls, so that the city will never be without a source of drinking water.
• The city is surrounded by a thick wall. Its streets are rationally planned to allow for easy movement of traffic. Buildings are well maintained. Every house has a front door that opens on a street and a back door that opens onto a garden. No doors can be locked; there is no private space. Houses are all well built and three stories high, with brick or flint facades.
• Households are split into groups of thirty, and every year each of these groups chooses an administrator, called a phylarch. Every ten phylarches operate under a higher official, called a senior phylarch. Senior phylarches meet in a committee chaired by the chief executive. Under pain of death, no person may discuss issues of state outside of the committee, so as to insure no one can conspire against the government and install tyrannical rule. They operate under the rule that no issue brought to committee can be decided upon until the next day, so as to remove any chance of over-hasty action.
Commentary on Agriculture, Cities, Government
• The communal method of agricultural work was a revolutionary idea for its time for a variety of reasons. In England and Europe agricultural work was an occupation of the poor, disdained by those with any wealth or station. In
Utopia, those class distinctions are broken down; working on the land is made a necessary part of life, and the stigma of that work is removed.
• Utopians think of the land as something to be worked rather than to be owned (an attack on enclosure) The enclosure movement in Britain
transformed the wool and agricultural market into an oligopoly (An oligopoly is a market form in which a market or industry is dominated by a small
number of sellers) that simultaneously drove up prices and deprived small landholders of their livelihood.
Utopian agriculture, for that matter, does not operate on any market system whatsoever. Instead of selling off its surplus, a city freely gives it away. As can be seen in its agricultural policy, the economic structures of markets and money simply do not exist in Utopia. Utopian productivity can't possibly
match that of a market-based economy.
Thomas More in creating Amaurot as a likeness to London, it is almost as if he wishes the two to be compared in the reader's mind.
Utopian politics seems a strange mixture of freedom and repression. Utopia employs a democratic government, its people represented by two layers of
elected public officials, the higher level selected by the lower level. However, the rule abolishing on pain of death any discussion of politics outside of the political arena seems incredibly repressive. This repression, though, is a fair repression in the sense that all citizens of Utopia are equally bound by it. This is a very different repression than those in place in Europe, where the poor and weak were
repressed by the rich and powerful. Utopia is operating under a rule of law, with all citizens subject to that law, even if the law itself strikes modern readers as
excessive.
Hythloday trumpets the lack of private space as a wonderful idea promoting friendship and stifling pettiness and gossip. Again, though, in the loss of private space is a correspondent loss of privacy and autonomy. Utopia is a society in which everyone watches everyone else, much as everyone does in George Orwell's nightmare world of 1984. There is often little differentiating one man's Utopia from another's dystopia.
GOLD AND SILVER
MARRIAGE
CUSTOMS
DINING
EDUCATION IN UTOPIA
RELIGION
• A number of religions exist in Utopia. They all are similar in that they believe in a single god, but the nature of that god is very different, ranging from a sort of
animism, to worship of an ancient hero, to worship of the sun or moon, to belief in a single omnipotent, ineffable god. This last religion, according to Hythloday, is in the process of becoming dominant, though all the religions practice complete tolerance of all the other religions. After Hythloday and his fellows spoke to the Utopians about Christ, a good number converted and began to learn as much as they could. These converts also were treated with the utmost respect by the
faithful of other Utopian religions. In fact, the only belief that is not tolerated is atheism, as it is seen as immoral. If someone believes there is no afterlife, according to the Utopians, then that person will act selfishly in search of
immediate physical and mental pleasure and not act virtuously in hope of future reward.
Religion 2
• The different religions meet in the same churches run by the same
priests, and services emphasize the similarities between the religions. If some religion demands a rite or prayer that might be offensive to another, then that rite must be performed in a home in private, not in the church.
• Utopian priests are men of the highest moral and religious caliber, and, accordingly, there are very few of them. Almost no women are priests, but it is allowed that a woman could become a priest. Priests maintain the religious centers, educate the children, and praise good behavior while criticizing bad. The priests hold the highest power in the land; even the chief executive must listen to them. Before major religious holidays,
women prostrate themselves before there husbands, and children before their parents, and all admit their wrongdoings. It is only with a clear
conscience that people may attend services. At services all are attentive and incredibly respectful of the priests, and all acknowledge God to be their maker and ruler.
Commentary about Religion
The religious toleration described in Utopia has a corollary in the writings of Erasmus, who went so far as to claim a sort of brotherhood with Muslims,
claiming them as half-Christians and seeing in them less corruption than he often saw in Christians.
The Utopian priests are quite obviously meant to criticize European priests.
Utopia gives two related reasons why there are so few Utopian priest; keeping up
respect for the office and they did not believe many people were moral or just
enough to fulfill the priestly role. In Europe, the venality, corruption, and often
poor education of priests was a matter of public knowledge, humor, and criticism.
The religious treatment of women: the practice in which women must prostrate themselves to their husbands and admit their failings while the husbands must do nothing in return but forgive seems highly unfair, and demonstrates an
assumption of superiority in the men. (In the 16th C women were subservient to first their father, then their husband. However, women in Utopia can become priests while this would have been shocking to Sir Thomas More's
contemporaries. Even today, the Catholic Church does not allow female priests.
At once, Utopia holds an implicit disregard for women, and offers them the
chance at equality.
“The End Justifies the
Means”
•Utopia is, in part, a protest against the New Statesmanship: against the new idea of the autocratic prince to whom everything is allowed.The perfect
Commonwealth must unite ‘Wisdom in the ruler, Fortitute (courage) in the soldiers, Temperance (self-control) in private individuals”
•Protest against new economics: the enclosures of the great landowners,
breaking down old law and custom, destroying the old common field-agriculture.
•The Utopians may pocess nothing, wear common clothes (color of natural wool, 2 varieties for married and unmarried women/men)
•Their hours of work, of recreation, the games they may play (2 games, one to teach math the other morals), eat in refectories (reading something relating to good manners and virtue before eating, boys under 21/girls under 18 serve and do not talk, married couples sit with the elders and go through an oral
examination).
•The ideal of Utopia is discipline not freedom/liberty.
•It is a state where “all things in common do rest”. (used as a textbook b-for Socialist propaganda)
