When was utopia first published

The later s saw a marked decline in utopian writings and utopian experiments. But toward the end of the century came both a revolution in France and a Romantic backlash against the Industrial Revolution.

He imagined a utopia called Jerusalem:. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for his part, hatched plans to sail away from England to America and create what he called a Pantisocracy: a place on the banks of the Susquehanna, Pennsylvania where he and his friends would combine buffalo hunting with philosophising. All property would be in common.

One significant, and more successful, utopian figure of the 19th Century was Robert Owen. Eight hours recreation. Eight hours rest. Owen launched a more ambitious scheme, though, in , buying a school and ballroom with a group of Quakers in New Lanark, Scotland. The Victorian period was filled with earnest discussion among do-gooders and intellectuals on how to alleviate the conditions of the poor.

Most of these schemes failed — or at least did not last long. Also still with us are the model communities of Bournville near Birmingham and Port Sunlight near Liverpool, the first built with chocolate money by the Cadbury family, the second with soap money by Lord Leverhulme, founder of Sunlight Soap now owned by Unilever.

Both were capitalist attempts to build comfortable environments for workers. Less successful was a town called Pullman near Chicago, Illinois. In , railroad entrepreneur George Pullman of Pullman Palace Car fame launched the ambitious model village, named after himself. He aimed for the town to run as a business and return a profit to investors. Second, there were no public gatherings of any size.

Third, workers had to buy goods in the over-priced Pullman shops. And fourth, no blacks were allowed. In short, it was a disastrous mixture of the worst of centrally-controlled socialism and grasping capitalism — with racism thrown in for good measure.

Following the great market collapse of , Pullman hiked rents. In , 4, Pullman residents, like thousands of workers across the US at that time, went on strike. The situation got violent; troops went in to quell the uprising. The government forced Pullman to sell his town. He died in so widely loathed, he had to be buried 12 feet underground for fear that his body would be dug up and desecrated by disgruntled employees.

And since most utopias are inflexible, what happens to your ideal community when market conditions — which are outside your control — change? At around the same time in England, William Morris was concocting a far gentler version of paradise. The generously bearded Victorian hero wrote one of the great utopian fantasies, News from Nowhere — a book full of charm, wit and good ideas.

Morris himself was absurdly energetic, managing to pursue simultaneous careers as a poet, artist, novelist, printer, pamphleteer, painter, designer, typesetter, business man, socialist pioneer and rabble-rouser he was thrown in jail for attending an anti-war rally.

Morris is dearly loved by the British left; the great Marxist historian EP Thompson wrote a long and adoring biography of him which emphasised his socialist principles. Unlike the big-headed Pullman, though, Morris never imposed his utopian visions on anyone else by actually creating a commune or village.

He was a romantic who became a revolutionary. As he wrote of himself:. Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked path straight? News from Nowhere was published in Really, Morris wanted all people to live what he called a refined life, to have the leisure time to read and play music and think and be poets.

John Ruskin, another medievalist and fan of the guild system, was outlining projects for ideal village communities, while the Arts and Crafts movement also was inspired by the Middle Ages. Morris was attacking the sordid utilitarianism which dominated his own age.

Money has been abolished. There is no private property. The inhabitants have a lot of fun: the narrator, for example, records with pleasure that dinner is served with a bottle of very good Bordeaux. Immediately following Morris came HG Wells, who wrote a dozen utopian and dystopian novels. Tolstoy, an anarchist and a Christian, held that the state was responsible for most of the bad stuff: taxes, wars and general irresponsibility.

Tolstoy counselled passive resistance and non-violence instead. The familiar elements were there: a return to handicrafts and small-scale agriculture, partial rejection of the gewgaws of the modern world, communal dining and shared expenditure. Two of these communes still exist today in the UK.

One is the Brotherhood Church of Stapleton, which, according to a recent New Yorker piece, is home to four humans, a deaf cat, a few hens and an enormous cow.

The other is the Whiteway Colony in the Cotswolds, formed in More village than commune, Whiteway is a collection of 68 houses loosely bound by a monthly meeting. In a young Indian philosopher started to correspond with Tolstoy. In , the young man — Gandhi —launched a cooperative colony in South Africa which he named Tolstoy Farm.

One of my favourite 20th-Century utopian societies, however, is the anarchist occupation of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. It is described without sentiment by George Orwell, who fought for the anarchists, in his account Homage to Catalonia. Meanwhile, utopias continued to hatch from the imaginations of novelists. Please enter the message. Please verify that you are not a robot. Would you also like to submit a review for this item?

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Save Cancel. Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item First published in , during a period of astonishing political and technological change, Sir Thomas More's utopia depicts an imaginary society free of private property, sexual discrimination and religious intolerance.

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Tags Add tags for "Utopia". View most popular tags as: tag list tag cloud. Literature -- latin. User lists with this item 4 Life Space Lending Library items by lifespace updated Thirteen years later, writing in his own defence to Thomas Cromwell, More would bitingly observe that his early doubts about the divine institution of papal primacy had been put at rest by the king himself SL: p.

Luther's response to the royal book was predictably offensive, and More was put forward to retaliate in kind; his Responsio ad Lutherum is a vigorous presentation of familiar arguments, without much evidence of engaging with Luther's thought.

Basic to his argument is the appeal to tradition, understood as the unwritten deposit of teaching which precedes the Gospel texts and provides the matrix within which they must be interpreted. After his appointment as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in , he was drawn directly into the campaign against the circulation of heretical books, and in his old colleague Tunstall, now bishop of London, commissioned him to respond to heretical books. This resulted in a daunting body of writings in the vernacular which extends from A Dialogue Concerning Heresies in to The Answer to a Poisoned Book in , and some of its aspects are discussed below.

More succeeded Wolsey as Chancellor in October , but he took on a less ambitious portfolio of duties, conceivably because of his inability in conscience to support the king's efforts to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Largely excluded from foreign affairs, he built instead on his predecessor's policy of legal reform, aiming for greater reliance on equity in the application of common law.

Roper describes his confrontation with the common law judges in which he upheld his use of injunctions to modify verdicts in the common law courts and urged the judges to mitigate the rigid application of precedent through their own discretion, according to conscience. In addition, he assumed responsibility for assisting the ecclesiastical authorities in the suppression of heresy, a direct consequence of the oath imposed on secular judges, requiring them to investigate and extirpate heresy, a survival of Henry V's anti-Lollard legislation CWM , ; , However, his position as Chancellor swiftly became untenable.

One irony was that More had ex officio to convey to Parliament the opinions of various European universities on the validity of the royal marriage, most of them favourable to the king. On 15 May , a depleted Convocation enacted the Submission by which the clerical estate surrendered their independent power to legislate, effectively bringing spiritual jurisdiction under secular control.

More resigned his office the following day. While it has been suggested that he acted as leader of a disaffected faction, there is little evidence for this; it seems more likely that he withdrew from an alien political landscape and focused on writing, in particular his dispute with Christopher St German over the discrepancy between common law practice and the inquisitorial procedures of church courts.

Unwilling to take the oath to the Act of Succession on account of its anti-papal preamble, he was sent to the Tower of London on 17 April , where he remained in confinement, though free to write. After a series of interrogations, which make it clear that More did not actively seek martyrdom, he was tried at Westminster Hall on 1 July , found guilty of treason, and executed five days later.

As his reported words to the court make clear, he considered himself to be dying for the sake of the unity of Christendom. One of the best known anecdotes about More concerns a visit paid by the king to his house at Chelsea: when Roper congratulated him on this favour, More—ever the realist—remarked that if his head could win the king a castle in France it would not fail to go Roper This moderate pessimism can be associated with his early study of St Augustine, the Church Father whom he knew most intimately.

When preparing his lectures on the City of God , he must have been struck by Augustine's words on the role of the wise judge: given the darkness that surrounds social life,. Clearly, he will take his seat; for the claims of human society, which he thinks it wicked to abandon, constrain him and draw him to this duty. City of God, His political instincts are corporate, something that would have been reinforced by his involvement in the civic government of London, and he is radically opposed to any form of absolutism.

There are signs of this as early as his translation of Lucian's Tyrannicida , and it provides a major theme in his Epigrams , which were printed with Utopia in Several of the poems deal with the tyrant, whose character is to exploit his subjects CWM , nos. This is not so much a paean for representative government as a tentative proposal to curb the darker passions which underlie the political world. It is just these passions which More dramatizes in Richard III , where the stately narrative is persistently qualified by the ironic perspective of the narrator.

In practice, More's pessimism was qualified by his Augustinian sense of social obligation. Humanism was founded on the philological ambition to recapture the legacy of classical literature, both by the retrieval of texts and by the imitation of classical style; but, equally, it implied the recognition of language as a persuasive medium, the province of rhetoric.

The revival of rhetoric is at the core of humanism: in its persuasive role, language is directed out to the social community in the effort to stimulate moral or political response. Dorp, a theologian with humanist interests, had expressed uneasiness with Erasmus's scurrilous treatment of scholastic theology, as well as his presumption in correcting Jerome's Vulgate New Testament in light of the Greek text. He also protests at his apparent subordination of the higher faculties, such as theology, to the rule of grammarians; for Erasmus, he implies, the worst heresy is linguistic barbarism.

More had seen the exchange of letters between Dorp and Erasmus during his stay in the Netherlands and intervened in defence of his friend. While Dorp's view of humanism is essentially cosmetic, a matter of vocabulary and style, More takes the argument to a deeper level. His complaint is about the way dialectic has usurped control of the arts course, the trivium , allowing scant attention to grammar and rhetoric. The later scholastics, in their quest for a meta-language purified of subjective reference, had reinvented Latin as a wholly artificial construction closed to outsiders.

It had ceased to be communicative speech. This tendency is then passed on to theology, where the Scriptures and the Fathers are fragmented into proof texts: More describes how his clash with an aged theologian about St Augustine's view on demons arose because he is citing the original work, while the theologian has picked up scraps of Augustine second-hand from Peter Lombard's Sentences CWM 15, 68—9.

This is the section of Peter of Spain's Summulae logicales devoted to supposition theory and, as such, it formed an integral part of most university courses on dialectic. This is because in their reasoning they use customary speech, the language of the community, and can make no sense of a technical language which deviates from the order of nature.

More is not opposed to dialectic, and he probably had experience of the trivium during his stay in Oxford, but he wants a return to the dialectic of Aristotle, especially as now made available by humanist scholarship. Both grammar and dialectic have their part in communication, grammar by clarifying established usage and dialectic by clarifying the structure of nature CWM 15, 34—35 ; they must be integrated with rhetoric in speech comprehensible to all who participate in the language community.

The quibbles of the logicians, by contrast, exclude those who, like the Utopians, have not been initiated into their artificial procedures. All this has implications for theology. Taken up with their abstruse questions and writing in a language which More characterizes as Latino-Gothic, scholastic theologians have increasingly forfeited their pastoral relevance. The letter is an endorsement of Erasmus' efforts to revive classical eloquence and patristic exegesis in the service of a theology which can both instruct and inspire.

At the centre of this shift lies the issue of Greek studies, which is much more than a curricular option. When More introduces Raphael, his witness to Utopia, he is described as more at home in Greek than Latin: being primarily interested in philosophy he finds little of value in Latin apart from some works by Cicero and Seneca. The Utopians themselves become passionate students of Greek, and for the very same reason.

As More reiterates in his aggressive championing of the humanist curriculum, Greek is the essential source both for secular wisdom and for the New Testament. While he admits translation as an aid, it cannot equal the impact of reading—say Aristotle—in the original CWM 15, As for those critics of Erasmus who allow the Latin Vulgate a sacrosanct status and regard his corrections from the Greek as unwarranted and even blasphemous, More counters with a pragmatic view of textual reception.

The church, whose sense of the Gospels precedes any written text, accepts the Greek original as the true Gospel and may extend its approval to Latin translations, but never to the extent of ruling out the human fallibility of the translator. Even one of the Fathers like Jerome can err CWM 15, 87, , so there is a vital need for philological engagement with the sources.

From More's perspective, Greek is the key element in a major cultural shift. One consequence of More's humanism was his advocacy of female education. In Utopian schools all children are introduced to literary studies, and in later life both sexes are free to attend the public lectures and pursue intellectual interests.

As in Utopia, the basic aim of education is not to prepare for some specific activity or profession but to enhance the possibilities of being human, regardless of gender.

More envisages a curriculum based on literary studies which will develop moral awareness, and he further recommends reading of the Church Fathers and of the Roman historians, specifically Sallust. Erasmus, an admiring witness of this novelty, reports that the girls all had Livy in their hands CWE 8: Ep. The opening of Utopia at once raises a fundamental issue: the relationship between imagination and experience. This merging of worlds, real and imaginary, prepares the reader for the Platonic tension between two cities—that of the philosopher's birth and the one which he creates with words Republic A—B.

As Raphael describes his travels, Gillis is prompted to suggest that he serve some prince. However, this would entail swapping cities, moving from the ideal to the actual, a compromise which Raphael rejects. As it is, he can live as he wishes CU: There is a deliberate echo here of Cicero's discussion of the retired life in his De officiis I.

On the one hand, there is the option of intellectual liberty, free of external constraints and, on the other, the career of public service, which inevitably demands a degree of accommodation to the status quo. The stage is set for the debate that follows. To make his point that by participation in the political world the intellectual risks either irrelevance or contamination, Raphael appeals to a series of models: first, there is the flashback to Cardinal Morton's household in , and this is followed by fly-on-the-wall accounts of the French Council as it debates foreign policy, and of another, which remains unidentified but is probably the English Council under Henry VII, as it reviews fiscal policy.

The odd one out is the Morton episode which may well date from the final stage of More's composition. In essence, it is about value: the setting of human life against property. Raphael's intervention raises two key issues: one asks what could be an appropriate penalty for theft, while the other looks—with astonishing originality—at the unjust conditions which encourage theft. To steal may be a personal moral failing, but social pressures which drive the malefactor to crime must share some of the guilt.

More would, in any case, have been familiar with the tradition in canon law which argued that in dire necessity to take what was required to support life was not theft. Raphael lists various causes for the prevalence of theft, among them discharged soldiers and cast-off retainers, but his most startling suggestion is sheep, which now seem to swallow up people and lay the country waste CU: More is pointing obliquely at the evil of enclosures by which peasants are driven from the land to make way for the more profitable returns of sheep farming, a clear instance of vested interests acting against the common good.

Uprooted and deprived of work, these people have little choice but to steal and to hang as a result. In each of the illustrative episodes which More includes in Book 1, Raphael appeals to some imaginary land which can provide an alternative to the established order.

In a sense, these episodes prepare us for his account of Utopia. For the Morton sequence, it is the land of the Polylerites CU: 71 , whose ingenious system of penal servitude, which may well owe something to Plato's Laws D , aims to destroy the vices but save the persons, providing in the process reparation for their crimes.

In discussing the French Council, with its focus on aggressive territorial expansion, Raphael appeals to the Achorians, who compel their prince to confine himself to a single kingdom. Similarly, the English Council is taken up with dubious schemes to help the prince augment his wealth, and the counter-example is that of the Macarians, who bind their ruler by oath to restrict the sums held in his treasury to a thousand pounds in gold, enough to contain rebels or to resist invaders.

The two royal councils are presented with satiric intent, though the policies proposed are all too real. However, if we take all three episodes together, one feature they share is the presence of courtiers. The role of courtiers should be to counsel the prince, but in each episode they are presented as amoral opportunists whose sole aim is to flatter him.

Raphael, who seems to overlook the fact that Morton had entertained his proposal for penal reform, declares that there is no place for philosophy at court, a claim which leads to one of the most important exchanges in the book CU: 95— Hence, his telling comparison with a stage play: you cannot mix comedy with tragedy; Raphael, he implies, is confusing his genres. In a perfect world, it seems, rhetoric would be redundant. The argument from expediency is rejected by Raphael, but his dismissal of all compromise leads him to make the first allusion to the Utopians and their holding of property in common, a practice he associates with Plato.

Yet, meanwhile, so intriguing are Raphael's references to the Utopians that he is persuaded to give a full account of the island. For much of its reception-history, Utopia has been treated as if it consisted exclusively of Book 2, and this impression was supported by some printed versions which omitted the first book.

In Book 2 More sets out to project a society which is radically different from European society, and he does this by drawing on the idea of a state of nature.

This idea, sometimes presented as the Golden Age, was familiar from classical sources, and it also coloured reports of those who had witnessed the native cultures of the New World. Essentially, it imagined a primeval state of human association, prior to the invention of property and the laws which protect it, when all could have access to nature's fruits as their needs dictated. Cicero, in De officiis 1. However, confronted by the Roman reality, he adds rather lamely that everything identified by statutes and civil law as private property must remain such; it seems that the primitive rights of the state of nature are now reduced to a kind of universal benevolence.

More was well aware, too, of Plato's doubts about ownership, and he applies to the whole population of Utopia the communality of possessions which Plato reserves for his Guardians Republic DB. It is precisely private property which defines European society, and along with it goes the legal code governing ownership, largely inherited from ancient Rome. By making his Utopians adopt a communality of possessions More liberates them from the passions generated by acquisition and loss; by the same token, they are relieved of the whole ideological burden which distorts European society.

It seems an obvious corollary that in a society where all is common money should be redundant, since it opens up a gap between conventional value, which is socially created, and the worth which derives from nature.

In Europe this leads to the sort of injustice by which those in essential tasks are cruelly exploited, while those luxury trades which cater to artificial desires flourish. There is a striking contrast between the oligopoly of those sheep traders who profit from enclosures in England and the Utopians' belief that they are the cultivators agricolae of their land rather than proprietors domini ; it echoes the scholastic distinction between usus , simple use, and dominium , the right of disposal which underlies European ideas of property.

Whatever is gathered or produced is cycled through the city markets to meet the requirements of each residential group, or syphograncy, of thirty households.

While the household is the basic unit, each with its own residence, the syphograncy binds them to the wider community; in its spacious hall, the household members meet daily to have their meals in common and annually to elect one of their number as syphogrant. This officer represents their interests in the wider affairs of the city and participates in the election of its governor; although the latter may serve for life, the constitution itself is carefully devised to block any shift towards tyranny or factional interest.

Thus, physical and political needs are well catered for. However, the central principle underlying the Utopians' way of life is that as much time as possible should be reserved for the cultivation of the mind, as it is in this that they consider true happiness can be found CU: This requirement is met by their extraordinary system of work in which all citizens, of either sex, and that could amount to about 60, in each city must labour at some essential trade, but only for six hours a day; this more than meets their needs, but still leaves ample leisure for intellectual pursuits.

While there is an elite class of scholars, carefully selected by the priests and approved by the syphogrants, who dedicate themselves to full-time study and are available to hold the higher offices, the lectures provided for them are equally open to all comers.

There is a vital cultural life, a direct consequence of their economic arrangements. One of the most vivid episodes in Utopia is the account of the Anemolian ambassadors: these dignitaries, determined to impress the Utopians, deck themselves out in conventional finery—cloth of gold, gold chains and rings, jewelled badges—only to find that the Utopians regard them as slaves or fools.

This is because of the Utopian value system, which uses such impractical metals for shackles or chamber pots: it is an essential part of their humanist education to recognize authentic values, not the pseudo-values imposed by social conspiracy but those deriving from nature itself.

The fact that they need very few laws comes from the effectiveness of this early formation CU: While the Utopians are baffled by scholastic logic, like good humanists they are keenly interested in moral philosophy and the nature of the happy life, which is one reason why they are so dedicated to learning Greek. Raphael provides an extended account of their views on pleasure CU: —79 , in their view, the most important ingredient of human happiness.

What he describes is, in effect, a classical synthesis: while their definition of virtue as a life in accord with nature has Stoic overtones, the emphasis which they lay on pleasure echoes Epicurean teachings. However, seeing that the theory of pleasure they adopt is based on the supremacy of spiritual pleasure, there is little in the discussion which might not have originated with Plato.

Certainly, the key to their thinking lies in the soul and its destiny; and to the rational arguments of philosophy they join certain religious axioms—that the soul is immortal and that after death it will receive reward for virtues and punishment for sins CU: Suicide is condemned, but their commitment to pleasure means that euthanasia is practised: there is no Christian concept of value in suffering, though those strange religious groups, the Buthrescas, put up with hardship now to win happiness after death CU: The psychic focus of their beliefs is one of the factors which makes the monotheistic religion of the Utopians into a prisca theologia or primitive anticipation of Christianity; and we learn that when they have been introduced to Christ's teachings by Raphael and his companions, many of them embrace these eagerly.

But, as Raphael points out, conversion is made easier for them by the discovery that Christ had endorsed the communal life led by his disciples and that this is still observed in monasteries CU: ; cf. Mark —9. The irony needs no comment. What is the reader to make of this newly discovered island and its strange institutions?