What's beautiful about Thomas More--and rare in this day and age--was his incorruptibility. As a public servant under England's King Henry VIII, he gave up not only his career, but also his life, to defend his ethical beliefs.[1] Would that we had a few more of this type of civil servant today in our government, particularly in certain government agencies regulating healthcare and finance.
Utopia uses the device of "telling a story someone else told you" and thus installing a degree or two of separation between you and what your actual opinions actually are. The words are obviously the author's, but the author can just say "it's not really my story, I'm just telling you what someone else said."
The idea, of course, is to have a layer (or two) of plausible deniability about anything that might be questionable to your era's "authorities." Combine this device with satire, and the author can distance himself from any specific opinions in the work that might later become objectionable or politically dangerous. This was a common technique in the pre-free speech era (Don Quixote is another standard example likely familiar to many lit students), and I have a feeling this device will reappear, increasingly, in our current post-free speech era.[2]
This is a book worth reading, but it oscillates between bad, boring satire and tremendously biting, effective satire. At times the book fails to hold the reader's attention as it wanders and drifts, as if the author didn't quite have enough ideas to really carry the work off.
Notes:
1) Finished in 1516, 19 years before More was beheaded for his refusal to make the "oath of allegiance" to King Henry VIII (which acknowledged Henry as England's supreme religious leader). More considered it in conflict with moral responsibility to God. "I die the King's good servant, and God's first."
2) "Utopia" literally means "not place" or "noplace"
3) "Examples of wise social planning... several regulations which suggested possible methods of reforming European society." Note there was plenty of ridiculously shitty (and thus easily satirized) stuff done in Europe at the time: governments holding absolute power over subjects, capital punishment imposed for trivial crimes like theft, Hunter Biden-like behavior of kings and statesman without consequences, etc.
4) Per the footnotes, the character "Raphael" as a metaphor for More himself: "a cloak slung carelessly over one shoulder" is likely a clear self-referential description. This kind of adds some recursion to the nesting stories: "I am only telling you a story that someone else told me, but let me stick in a subtle self-reference here so you can see who is really telling the story after all."
5) "I then proceed to tell them about a system they have in Happiland, a country not far from Utopia. There the King has to swear a solemn oath at his coronation that he'll never keep more than a thousand pounds of gold in his treasury, or an equivalent amount of silver. Apparently the system was started by an excellent king of theirs, who cared more about his country's welfare than his own. He thought it would prevent the accumulation of royal wealth on such a scale as to cause national poverty, and chose that particular figure because he reckoned it would be enough to suppress a revolution or repel an invasion, but not enough to inspire a king with thoughts of foreign conquest."
6) Life at court in those days was no different from life in modern government: there's no room for genuinely sensible ideas if they're not also in the interests of other courtiers (or today in the interests of other cantillon insiders).
7) The "Thomas More" character in this nested story is the more morally ambiguous person, whereas Rafael is playing Thomas More's more idealized character of a truth-teller.
8) Rafael character describes Utopia's idealized, classless, communist-style society,with no private property, and the "Thomas More" character and Raphael debate the plausibility of such a system.
9) In the land of Utopia, all the towns are the same, the same language, the same customs and institutions, all the towns are built in the same plan, etc., with Stalin-era-like apartment blocks, collectivized agriculture, "you simply ask an official for what you want, and he hands it over, without any sort of payment" and so on.
10) It's like the Soviets/Marx read this satire and took it literally. Of course everything works perfectly in a place where "there obviously can't be any poor people or beggars."
11) "So the Utopians consider hunting below the dignity of free men, and leave it entirely to butchers, who are, as I told you, slaves." This idealized culture outsources distasteful labors and distasteful responsibilities to a slave class, a type of lumpenproletariat. I can't help but be reminded of the phrase "all are equal but some are more equal than others."
12) The Utopians are surprisingly aggressive in enslaving criminals, even killing them if they're in any way recalcitrant.
13) Utopian's labor code is perfect, simple, short, easy to understand by everyone, and never used in ways other than intended.
14) The Utopians also outsource their warmaking and violence to mercenaries, a people called the "Venalians," a violent, bloody, squalid people; the Utopians pay them the most of any other country and thus maintain a sort of indirect monopoly on hard power in the region.
15) An extended discussion of military strategy of the Utopians, their armor, their weapons, their fortifications, etc. This is a good example of "bad satire" that should have been tightened down to a couple of sentences--or tightened right out of the work entirely. I'm reading along and wondering "What the heck?How can a 'great book' be so poorly sidetracked?"
16) Very interesting how the Utopians take so quickly and easily and enthusiastically to Christianity, particularly Catholic Christianity... What interesting here is a form of nested satires: aspects of the society are satirically right or satirically wrong, you can't always tell which; this makes the author's intent just a little harder to pin down, which makes the author that much more difficult to be executed (or fired, or deplatformed to use today's control mechanisms) for wrongthink.
17) The translator also has issues with More's "intolerance," alleging that More "burned heretics"... there seems to be a debate as to the truth of this assertion; it was an aspect of the propaganda battles fought over More's legacy after his execution.
18) "Priests are also responsible for the education of children and adolescents, in which quite as much stress is laid on moral as on academic training. They do their utmost to ensure that, while children are still at an impressionable age, they're given the right ideas about things--the sort of ideas best calculated to preserve the structure of their society." I read this passage today with a much different set of lenses than I read this as a college student, I think there's a legitimate argument that our education system actually threatens the fabric of our society in the modern era; of course whether this is a good or a bad thing is not for me or my generation to say, it's for the forthcoming generations to decide...
19) The church and priests and religious elements of Utopia look like thinly veiled satire of Lutheranism.
20) In Utopia, "nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich."
21) Maybe this is a better satire than I realize: again, you can't really tell what the author intends to say, which may be by design, and it does keep the reader off-balance in a good way. See for example this quote:
"Now, will anyone venture to compare these fair arrangements in Utopia with the so-called justice of other countries?--in which I'm damned if I can see the slightest trace of justice or fairness. For what sort of justice do you call this? People like aristocrats, goldsmiths, or money-lenders, who either do no work at all, or do work that's really not essential, are rewarded for their laziness or their unnecessary activities by a splendid life of luxury. But laborers, coachmen, carpenters, and farmhands, who never stop working like cart-horses, a job so essential that, if they did stop working, they bring any country to a standstill within twelve months--what happens to them? They get so little to eat, and have such a wretched time, that they'd be almost better off if they were cart-horses."
22) I think one central element of the satire here is of the idea that we can somehow eliminate the fallen nature of man; that we can create some idealized society predicated on man not being fallen; a civilization that assumes man is perfect or can be perfected if he were only subject to the right influences, the right laws, the right social structure... when this is absolutely not true: no matter how idealized a civilization, there will be men to take advantage of it, subvert it, extract wealth from it, or exploit it etc.
23) Finally, at the end, the "More" character had tremendous doubts about Utopia, about its systems and other various aspects of its culture and the government, but instead of debating the subject at all with Raphael, he simply smiles, agrees, nods and deflects!
Footnotes:
[1] Readers interested in more about More can watch the surprisingly good 1966 film A Man for all Seasons.
[2] An interesting example of this type of nested plausible deniability happened recently in Dave Chappelle's intro monologue about Kanye West on Saturday Night Live. Note the examples of saying things other people said, referring to words that shouldn't be said, etc.
To Read/Resources:
Raymond Wilson Chambers: Thomas More
William Roper: A Life of St. Thomas More
Sallust: Bellum Catalina; The Jugurthine War
A Man for all Seasons (1966 film)
Octavia (play, attributed to Seneca)
Horace: Satires
See also the Ralph Robinson translation of Utopia from 1551