Thomas More was known first and foremost as a statesman, a humanist thinker, and a Catholic martyr throughout much of modern history. It was only in the late nineteenth century, as utopian thinking came to dominate the western zeitgeist to an unprecedented extent, that his historical image was primarily identified with his tract known today as Utopia. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both Britain and the continent saw the creation and consolidation of the public sphere through the book industry as well as newspapers, journals, and magazines. At the same time, European thought was modernizing, increasingly viewing humans themselves and their institutions – as opposed to the will of God – as active agents in history-making. This latter trend reached a sort of apotheosis in the late nineteenth century, with the visionary utopian literature of H.G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, and Samuel Butler, among others. The transformation of More’s public image from statesman to visionary author is highly demonstrative of these trends in Western political and literary culture.

This paper begins with the problem of interpretation, illuminating how Utopia has been perceived through the ages, paying attention in particular to the question of citizenship, duty, and social change. Here, the contradictions and paradoxical aspects of the book will come sharply into focus: Was More himself a proponent of the Utopian way of life, spelled out by the book’s narrator Rafael Hythloday? Did he conceive of utopia as an end-point of social progress, as the Victorians later did? Or was it merely a meditation on societal power structures and the state? The true belief system of More has in itself been a subject of endless speculation, and, as Elizabeth Bruce points out, “there remains no consensus” on the subject.[i] More relevant, however, is the location of the book within the broader trajectory of the Western utopian genre.

The protagonist of the book, Hythloday, is a Portuguese explorer who had spent four years living in Utopia and who encounters More’s personification of himself (Morus) in Antwerp, where he and a few others engage in a protracted discussion of his travels, and the nature of human civilization. Throughout the dialogue, Hythloday undoubtedly presents us with an idealized vision of a modern civilization – one that in many respects was more modern than England at the time. But certain tenets of Utopian society – its religious diversity, for instance – are directly at odds with those that More espoused throughout his professional years. (The most parsimonious example of this is probably at the very end of the volumes, as Morus assists Hythloday out of the tavern, and thinks to himself that “I cannot agree with everything he said.”[ii])

More, as both statesman and author, in many ways seems to have subscribed to the idea that humanity is incapable of achieving the perfect society, and that society may only strive toward the vision of perfection along an asymptotic trajectory of progress at best. In this sense, the reading of Utopia as a kind of thought experiment by Elisabeth Hansot and several other scholars goes far in reconciling these contradictions. The book’s rather radical discussions on the topics of property, citizenship, identity, and religion, among others, should thus be tempered by a reading of Utopia not as a manifesto, but a series of musings. The most important teleological implication that is made by the book, however, is its suggestion that institutions of the modern state are capable of having a broad and significant impact in shaping the dynamics of society towards a system of moral justice.

Utopia thus holds a status that is extremely unique in sixteenth-century literature. Of central importance here is the secularism of the book. It marks a significant break from tradition in the history of European moral thought in that it presented an idealized world that was neither Edenic nor millenarian, but based upon a positivist understanding of social power and utility. Writes Susan Bruce, “the utopian solution to the problems of reality…is to idealize neither man nor nature, but organization.”[iii] While many, such as Karl Kautsky, have focused on the fact that private property did not exist in Utopia and as such have exalted More as a early communist thinker, it is of far greater significance that More envisioned a state that did not operate along the lines of feudalism, that had strong and cohesive public institutions, and that enforced a rigorous doctrine of equality. Writes J.H. Hexter:

In effect Utopia affords a new kind of take-off point for criticism of existing society, for criticism based no on the provisional acceptance of the fundamental institutions of that society, but on a rejection of many of those institutions. To the best of my knowledge such a take-off point had never existed before in the history of the Western World.[iv]

That Utopia is in so many ways an unprecedented book in the modern era, and that its influence has therefore been so great, makes it virtually impossible to extricate the text and the author from the idea of utopia throughout the centuries since it was published. Just as most scholars who address the issue of utopian thought are almost always inclined to at least acknowledge More’s contribution to the genre, it is virtually impossible to construct a historical biography of Utopia without some discussion of its successors. Seventeenth-century Renaissance thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Campanella certainly owed a debt to More, but it was not until the nineteenth century that Utopia, and perhaps utopianism, started to have an identifiable relationship to active political movements. As the historical relevance of More the statesman has declined, the importance of More the utopianist author has simultaneously grown. In some ways, this signifies an abandonment of the author in favour of the book.

Thomas More emerged from the growing demographic of middle-class professionals in late fifteenth-century London. Born in 1478 as the son of a prominent lawyer and judge, More was educated at St. Anthony’s School, then served as a page for John Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury before pursuing his studies at Oxford.[v] He was first elected to the English Parliament in 1504, and went on to hold several prominent positions with the English political establishment, including the highly influential position of Privy Councillor to King Henry IIX. During this time period, More became acquainted with a number of prominent European humanists – most notably Desiderius Erasmus, whose thought inspired much of More’s own writings.

Beyond the emergence of humanist thought, the most important political circumstance surrounding More in his time was the slow collapse of the feudal economy alongside a rising capitalist one – especially in rural areas, where a private wool industry was gaining control of growing tracts of land, thus dispossessing their previous peasant occupants, who in turn came to London to join the ranks of the urban poor.[vi] More’s own identification of this process significantly distinguishes himself from many of his peers, both among humanist thinkers as well as the English political establishment.

The growth of British towns during this time period had created a sizable market for commodities such as corn, meat, dairy, wool, wood, and so on. “Agriculture then became a source of money,”[vii] writes Karl Kautsky, who has paid far more attention to the socioeconomic transformation of England and its impact on More than any other scholar or biographer of More. The generation of surplus from this land, the monetization of its product, and the early implementation of industrial-style labour meant that fewer peasants were desired to live on that land. Its purpose was no longer to simply sustain the population. “The feudal lords now began to treat as private property the common meadows and common forests from their use. … The peasant was therefore deprives of important means of industry…and at the same time was ruined by the money taxes.”[viii] The peasants were then pushed off their land, often violently, leading to widespread impoverishment and vagrancy.

Hythloday himself describes this process toward the beginning of Book I, thus establishing an important framework for his endorsement of Utopia’s communism:

The nobility and gentry, yes, and even some abbots – holy men – are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury, without doing any good to society, no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive evil. … Thus one greedy, insatiable glutton, a frightful plague to his native country, may enclose many thousand acres of land within a single hedge. The tenants are dismissed and compelled, by trickery or brute force or constant harassment, to sell their belongings. By hook or by crook these miserable people…are forced to move out.[ix]

These circumstances establish the basis not only for Hythloday’s communism but also for the more tolerant Utopian approach to crime. Continuing his eulogy of the peasant class, he says, “what remains but for them to steal, and so be hanged – justly you’d say! – or to wander and beg? And yet if they go tramping, they are jailed as study beggars. They would be glad to work, but they can find no one who will hire them.”[x] Social ills thus need to be understood within a broader framework of class and privilege, says Hythloday. “Wherever you have private property, and money is the measure of all things, it is hardly possible for a commonwealth to be just or prosperous – unless you think that justice can exist where all the best things are held by the worst citizens.”[xi] For Elizabeth Bruce, Utopia’s engagement of its readership in a debate about the eradication of private property, is the “single most important aspect” of the book.[xii]

More’s approach was indeed novel, and came in response to a novel circumstance. The problems associated with the rise of bourgeois and proletarian class mark an important break from the static nature of medieval social relations, which itself was associated with medieval modes of thinking that did not explicitly favour or address social change, idolized the Church, and constructed vague theological narratives of humanity, focusing primarily of course on the Fall of Man and the Second Coming of Christ.[xiii]

A far more secular teleological narrative is conveyed in Utopia. The Utopians themselves had formerly been a “rude and rustic” people, living in relative barbarity, inhabiting “mere cabins and huts, haphazardly made with any wood at hand, with mudplastered walls.”[xiv] They were delivered from their lives of squalor by their leader King Utopus, who assumes a sort of messianic position in their civilization. Having led them to settle a peninsula somewhere on the coast, Utopus ordered that a giant moat be dug, separating their land from the mainland, thus creating a space of segregation that facilitated their construction of a perfect society. Though it is true that this narrative bears some parallels to that of the Promised Land, it is also a significant break from the medieval views maintained by Martin Luther, Augustine, and Aquinas. Writes Hexter: “In the older perspective men through their misdoings had lost the capacity for a rational ordering of their affairs, so that for their present scarcely civil condition there was no real remedy on earth.”[xv] Within this religious paradigm, private property was considered a necessary evil, both the “result and the corrective sin after humanity had fallen.”[xvi] For Hexter, this is what distinguishes Utopia as historically seminal, and moreover what distinguishes More himself as “the first modern radical.”[xvii]

More had first started planning the book during a diplomatic visit to Antwerp in 1510.[xviii] It was published by Thierry Martin in Louvain in 1516, and would be published twice to four times more before the author’s death in 1535.[xix] As to who the audience More had in mind for the work were, the scholarship of Peter Allen makes abundantly clear that it was written almost exclusively for the emergent class of humanist thinkers, most of whom were on the continent.[xx] Latin was, of course, the linga franca of this class of thinkers; given the inchoate status of the publishing industry, it is moreover clear that a public sphere as we understand the term today simply did not exist anywhere in Europe at that time, although the emergent “republic of letters” among these thinkers did mark the beginnings of an important intellectual forum.[xxi] Moreover, More himself ironically vests little faith in the ability of the masses to comprehend such ideas. In a letter written to Peter Giles concerning Utopia, More had written, “Very many men are ignorant of learning; many despise it. The barbarian rejects as harsh whatever is not positively barbarian. … This fellow is so grim that he will not hear of a joke; that fellow is so insipid that he cannot endure wit. Some are so dull-minded that they fear all satire as much as a man bitten by a mad dog fears water.”[xxii] To be fair, however, it is also true that a book like Utopia would have been literally impossible for the English lower classes to comprehend; over eighty percent of the country was illiterate.[xxiii]

The book did become a little more popular than More might have imagined in the sixteenth century, though not by leaps and bounds. In one letter he expressed extreme scepticism about the intellectual value of the book, proposing that it ought to “be left forever on the same island,” in a fictional location on the other side of the Atlantic.[xxiv] Indeed, at the time of his death the book by no means appeared to have been the historically definitive book it is today; William Roper, his first biographer, did not even mention that he had written the book.[xxv] Yet it did circulate among the humanist community in the original Latin in the first half of the sixteenth century, in particular in France, Belgium, and Italy.[xxvi] It had first made its way to Italy in 1535,[xxvii] and it was there, in 1548, that it was first translated and published into a vernacular language. [xxviii]

To return to the political themes of the book, its orientation towards the public interest and thus towards a positivist, rather than natural or theological, conception of governance and law did distinguish it in its time. Hexter writes that the book’s only contemporary analogue in this particular sense was probably Macciavelli’s The Prince, which was first published in 1532.[xxix]His reference to Italian Rennaissance humanism points to an important political discourse within sixteenth-century European humanism. The Italian humanists of the time were also moving toward a more positivist philosophy regarding the public interest, but did so in a manner that explicitly repudiated the communitarian thinking espoused by Hythloday.  The northern Italian city-states at the time “strove to free themselves from feudalism,”[xxx] and were embracing modern governance with an alacrity that far exceeded the British or any other European nation at this time. Humanist thinking simultaneously promoted this political transformation by turning to classical Roman thought, and in particular, the writings of Cicero.

The neo-Ciceronians[1], as Eric Nelson refers to them, were ardent fans of emergent capitalist enterprise: indeed, it was their growing mercantile connections that had made the northern city-states – and Venice in particular – so extravagantly wealthy in the previous decades. “Let us then leave behind the opinion of those who seek to bring about equality in pre-existing Republics by appropriating the goods of others,” wrote Cicero in his De officiis, “when they should be preserving for each man what belongs to him, in order to establish natural justice.”[xxxi] In some ways, the notion among the Italians that the stability and sustenance of society is contingent upon the harnessing of individual self-interest and the protection of contracts had given rise to a sort of capitalist social contract theory. Jean Bodin, a French scholar who was among the first to respond to Utopia in a 1576 published tract, leaned toward the Ciceronian perspective: “One could argue that the equality of goods is very pernicious for Republics, which have no support or foundation more sound than mutual trust, without which neither justice nor any kind of society can prove durable.”[xxxii]

The communitarian and capitalist modes of thinking were both associated with two extremely divergent conceptions of modern citizenship. That espoused by Hythloday decisively located itself within a Grecian tradition, encapsulated in particular by Plato’s Republic, which Utopia explicitly acknowledges as its own inspiration.  Within this civic and philosophical paradigm, the ego is subordinated to the state, and the identity and desires of the individual take a back seat to the public interest. The Romans, by contrast, held a view that was far more amenable to the individual, and thus to a system of private property. In Nelson’s reading, the fundamental schism concerns More’s emphasis on the Greek concept of eudaimonia (wisdom), whereas the Italians emphasized the virtues of the vita activa – an understanding of citizenship that promotes active participation in the public sphere, enterprise, and patronage – as well as its closely affiliated idea of gloria.[xxxiii]

Utopia’s draws directly from the tradition established by The Republic, a society ruled by a class of philosopher kings, defended by a class of warriors, and otherwise consisting of the masses of labourers and artisans.[xxxiv] In Utopia, the laws established by the mythical Utopus remain firmly in place. They are never altered, and there is no need for litigators because “the commonwealth’s laws are immediately accessible and comprehensible to all,” [xxxv] and the “most obvious”[xxxvi] interpretation of the laws thus inevitably wins out. The absence of lawyers or a judiciary – in effect an anarchistic circumstance – is maintained by a rigorous program of indoctrination, which takes the form of an educational system run entirely by priests.[xxxvii] Democracy takes on an exclusively technocratic character, and one that, like the Platonic system, is contingent upon caste. Citizens elect a council of sygophants – in Greek, the term means either silly or wise old men – who have all been relinquished from manual labour so that they may pursue their scholarly activities, and, once elected, themselves elect a governor.[xxxviii] This system is possibly best described as a sort of totalitarian democracy: individual liberties and identities are curtailed to the extent that none may choose what they wear or what they do, but the system is maintained and adhered to by all.

Thus, a further similarity between The Republic and Utopia concerns the static nature of their invented civilizations. In describing societies that are definitively perfect, they must be static to remain so. Yet, as such, democracy is effectively erased or at least made somewhat redundant. Like so many other aspects of More’s Utopia, the book’s successors within the utopian genre have found it difficult to shake this paradox. So too with the monastic uniformity of the place, the improbable political consensus, the monolithic public institutions, and so forth.[xxxix] Regarding governance, as in Plato’s civic paradise, the masses are governed by an “elite which rules over the commonwealth like parents over their children – an image no Roman writer would ever use to describe citizens, because children are not considered to be sui iuris (under the guidance of their own sovereign will.)”[xl]

Despite the tremendous similarities between The Republic and Utopia, one nuance that is slightly lost by Nelson’s analysis here is that More concerned himself primarily with happiness and justice, whereas Plato’s utopia was primarily dedicated to the pursuit of an ultimate and elusive notion of “truth”. In that particular sense, it bears noting that Plato’s philosophy possessed a slightly more religious dimension (which no doubt enabled it to persist throughout the middle ages,) while Utopia signifies a more radical departure into positivist thought. Nevertheless, both philosophical postions encompass a repudiation of the Roman exaltation of gloria.

While these debates took place among continental humanists, however, Utopia was finally introduced to England in the mid-sixteenth century, with the translation into vernacular English by Ralph Robynson.[2] As Reed Edwin Peggram notes, it was a less than impressive volume: “the words are so close together that at times one sentence can hardly be separated from another,”[xli] he writes, adding that the lexicon of the text “disposes itself with a kind of capriciousness that is almost incredible.”[xlii] Nevertheless, it was here that the book started to make its way into the business of politics.

Here, some interesting dimensions of the book arise. Although More certainly had not intended to write a tract explaining why and how England should transform itself into Utopia, it is also true that its break from the transcendentalism of The Republic carried an important message: that great changes to society could be wrought through the construction of modern state institutions. Never before had anyone publicly mused about the wonders of human civilization that lay just beyond the horizon as More did; and never had there ever been a more appropriate time for it. Whereas The Republic was extravagantly idealized, and as such offered few concrete suggestions by way of policy, Utopia stationed itself within a convenient liminal space between fact and fiction, but what it describes is clearly a society existing here on earth – one that has been shaped by various historical contingencies. Bruce writes that More was so significant precisely because “the utopian solution to the problems of reality…is to idealize neither man nor nature, but organization.”[xliii] This capability of the text is largely a function of a broader trend in early popular literature at this time, whereby fact and fiction were conventionally blended – and this was especially the case with the genre of travel literature.[xliv] It is certainly the case with Utopia – in which most of the characters engaged in the discourse did in fact exist as friends of More’s. Yet the fictional dimension of the book scarcely undermines the validity of its political messages. (If anything does, it is Morus’s own scepticism.) It’s fiction and its ambiguity keep it in the realm of the thought experiment, but it is sufficiently realistic to be taken seriously by active citizens and policymakers.

This aspect of Utopia – its down-to-earthness – marks an important step in what E.L. Chertkova has identified as “the gradual erosion of the metaphysical boundary between the two worlds”[xlv] of reality and ideal in utopian literature. If one traces the trajectory of the genre from its beginnings through to the Victorian period, she writes, it becomes clear that utopian discourses (in spite of their inherent alter-reality) increasingly located themselves within the political discourses of their time. Largely because the public sphere had no yet come into existence during More’s time, he had the luxury of avoiding such difficult questions. He could thus make radical suggestions without serious fear of reprisal; communism was not a threatening idea at the time because its philosophy and attendant political movement simply did not exist. Likewise, where a strong public sphere does exist, there is a greater expectation that utopian literature locate itself within that sphere’s dialogues, lest it be rendered totally irrelevant. Thus, with the emergence of the public sphere, the utopian genre moves further away from the thought experiment, and increasingly toward a sort of millenarian manifesto. Chertkova describes the process:

When the metaphysical and then the spatiotemporal barriers are dismantled or when the distances between the worlds are greatly reduced, and the task of embodying this valuational alternative in the “here and now” arises, we finally leave the field of the speculative or esthetic work of utopian thought and enter the sphere of utopianism as a special type of consciousness and attitude to the world.[xlvi]

The implications of this pattern already started to become visible around the time of Utopia’s first English edition in the mid-1500s. Though More’s work cannot be credited with having been responsible for the changes taking place in English politics at that time, the history does indicate that he was to a certain degree tapping into an emergent school of thought regarding modern statecraft. It is also true, however, that the connection between Utopia and some of these drivers of modernization were astonishingly close. George Tadlowe, a London gentleman and cultural patron had himself commissioned Robynson’s edition of the book four years into his term as a member of Parliament. As a politician he had supported such initiatives as the emergent publicly-sponsored hospitals, and as well as the Vagrancy Act, which “effectively legalized the enslavement of idle vagabonds by individuals, a parish, or a corporation.”[xlvii] William Cecil represents another such figure who was close to the publication of the first English translation and also a powerful modernizer in government. The 1551 edition was dedicated to Cecil – a move that “has generally been viewed as an attempt by its translator, Ralph Robynson, to enhance his social standing and to ensure that Utopia’s publication would be afforded some level of legitimacy and protection.”[xlviii] Like Tadlowe, Cecil was elected to Parliament in 1547; by 1551 was rapidly climbing the ranks of public service, and within a few years he would be the chief adviser to Elizabeth I.[xlix] And, also like Tadlowe, Cecil was a strong proponent of the construction of major public institutions such as schools and hospitals.

All of these major legislative transformations have strong parallels in Utopia. “Consider the features of Utopian communism,” writes Hexter: “generous public provision for the infirm; democratic and secret elections of all officers including priests; meals taken publicly in common refectories; a common habit or uniform prescribed for all citizens; even houses changed once a decade; six hours of manual labor a day for all but a handful of magistrates and scholars, and careful measures to prevent anyone from shirking.”[l] (And to this I might add a comprehensive education system.) Hexter adds that Utopian communism is his own time was seen as “far too naïve, far too crude” to fit any definition of “modern socialism,”[li] but these institutions are, inherently, only capable of being accomplished by a modern state. In many ways, these parallels should strike us as unsurprising given that the premise of the book – the problem from which its sets out – concerns the real political problem of mass vagrancy; by the time of Tadlowe’s term in Parliament, the problem had only gotten worse, resulting at times in widespread revolts.[lii]

The utopian genre remained largely in the same vein as More’s Utopia throughout the seventeenth century. Virtually all of them were similar to Utopia in their statisticity, uniformity, monasticism, caste systems, and their emphasis on large public institutions. Notable examples include Thomas Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624), Johannes Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), and James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656).[liii] The process described by Chertkova – whereby utopias emerge from thought experimentation to engage in contemporary political realities – would only fully come to fruition, however, with “the massive outpouring of utopian fiction during the late Victorian period.”[liv] By that point, such works became more identifiably socialist, fascist, anarchist or capitalist. They became didactic political tracts, often less nuanced and ambiguous than Utopia. Such was the case with books like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), William Morris’s  News from Nowhere (1890), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Edward Bulwer-Lytton ́s The Coming Race (1871), and HG Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods (1923).[lv]

In the centuries since More, the utopian genre has taken on new and important forms, and – coupled with its relative, science-fiction – has arguably come to define each successive cultural zeitgeist. It would be nearly impossible to argue that More did so with his own cultural milieu, but as the genre has risen in tandem with the public sphere, the importance of More as an author and a historical figure has tremendously grown. It is clear that biographical interest in More has dwindled, but interest in the subject and the idea of utopia has clearly grown over the course of the past two hundred years. Our memory of More the author, then, is today primarily as the founder of an important literary genre, rather than the Catholic ideologue and statesman he was primarily known as until the genre picked up in the latter half of the 19^th century.[3] The relevance of his ideas is not so much because they were pragmatic – some were, some were not – but rather because of the integral role he played in defining utopianism itself.