“Utopia turns five hundred this year. Thomas More — lawyer, author, theorist, radical, martyr, saint — gave us the word with his 1516 book Utopia.”
“In many ways More merely described the contours of an imagined land that had always existed, from the coasts of Plato’s Republic to the hills of medieval Cockaigne. Yet in painting a picture of that aspirational place, More bequeathed to radicals one of our most potent concepts.”
“But while the missionary’s program of emancipation, economic self-sufficiency, equality, and social services was undeniably progressive (if not radical), it was indelibly tainted by the sins of colonialism.”
“Only a year after Utopia first ran off the English presses, a rude monk nailed a German pamphlet to the cathedral door in Wittenberg. The Protestant Reformation was born. A horrified More decamped to the Catholic side. He was zealous in his support, overseeing six executions and reportedly torturing Protestant agitators.”
“It is this later More, rather than the idealistic author of Utopia, who is most often celebrated today. Witness the Thomas More Society, a sort of right-wing American Civil Liberties Union, whose rallying cry of “Religious Liberty!” is associated with the man who torched heretics rather than the figure who envisioned true freedom of conscience as a basic principle of social organization.”
“And yet, after the Russian Revolution the same More was memorialized alongside Marx, Engels, and others — in a collection personally approved by Lenin — as one of the “Prominent Thinkers and Leaders of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working People.” Two decades later, More was canonized as a saint by Pope Pius XI.”
“This wide embrace can be disorienting. For those on the Left, what is to be done with Thomas More, the knighted communist, the canonized radical? To what More, and to what version of utopia, should we orient ourselves? Has “utopia” become at best an empty signifier, an outmoded concept in a time of legislative horse-trading? Or can it still be a universal homeland to which we set sail?”
“As literary critic Susan Bruce writes, “For critics of the right it is irksome that one of the most canonical texts in English literature appears to express so profound and explicit a critique of the economic system underlying all Western societies.” They square the circle by simply arguing More didn’t believe what he wrote.”
“Moreover, the multivocal aspect of the text is not necessarily evidence of disingenuousness, nor does it prove Utopia is a straightforward satire (even if it shares some aspects of that mode). These qualities merely categorize Utopia as a precursor to the novel, and speak to its narrative complexity.”
“The politics of Utopia are also undeniably radical. More wastes no time in launching a scathing critique of the increasingly unequal distribution of economic power in England and the consolidation of state power in London.”
“The process of enclosure epitomized this disruption: the common lands the medieval proletariat had freely shared for agriculture, lodging, livelihood, and recreation for half a millennium were rapidly privatized so the nobility could use them for sheep grazing, generating capital in the increasingly lucrative wool and textile export trade.”
“Carried out through the early modern period, enclosure (whose contemporary analog is arguably privatization) created a massive vagrant class that flooded into London. With traditional means of support wiped away, former peasants were forced into petty crime.”
“Elites responded by erecting a severely punitive police state. Theft, for instance, was punishable by death. And prisons like plague-ridden Newgate made the contemporary slur “medieval” appear much more applicable to the Renaissance.”
“For the Utopians, the “only way to wealth is of a commonality” where “equality of all things” is maintained. Of the fifty-four polities that constitute the nation, “none of the cities desire to enlarge the bounds and limits of their shires, for they count themselves rather the good husbands than the owners of their lands.” And within the homes of Utopia, “there is nothing with the houses that is private or any man’s own.””
“More anticipated one common critique of Utopia (and indeed, socialism): that it’s a boring, colorless, utilitarian society. But it’s quite the opposite, More claims.”
“The Utopians work just a nine-hour day (a considerable advancement for the period), and time not used for “work, sleep, and meat” is spent by “every man as he liketh best himself” — prefiguring the nineteenth-century radical motto “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!””
“Far from erasing distinctions or creating a monochromatic world, Utopia is a place where every individual is able to fully fashion herself. Rather than being a dreary, boring place, it is a land where no “supper is passed without music”; in Utopia one has bread, but also roses. Because its inhabitants are liberated from economic deprivation, they alone are truly free.”
“The Utopians also have the right to play, a right that More would have associated with a rapidly disappearing “Merry Old England” — a common trope in radical English literature that saw pre-Norman England as a kind of pastoral Eden, an Anglo-Saxon Arcadia.”
“While it’s important not to romanticize “Merry Old England,” it’s also important not to simply cheer its demise as a victory for progress. For whatever (considerable) advances were made in historical terms, they came at the immediate expense of those in the English countryside.”
“Read in this light, More’s Utopia can be seen as a condemnation of particular injustices at a particular time. And the idea of utopianism, so often dismissed, can be re-grounded and resuscitated for different injustices at a different time.”
“As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism,
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”
“Utopianism, then, is a means of holding in our mind’s eye the possibility of a world free of oppression and domination and charting an ever-closer course towards its shore.”
“Less a blueprint than a direction, Utopia is an ideal against which we can compare our own society — a fiction that can help us understand where we fall short and where we can go from here.”