Take-Aways Preface on an Allegedly True Story from the Island of Utopia What It’s About Ideal Society and Ideal State

About the Difficulty of Just Policymaking

More speaks about his diplomatic mission to Flanders on behalf of the English king Henry VIII. There, Giles introduces him to Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese with whom Amerigo Vespucci, the explorer of the New World, traveled to unknown territories. Hythloday tells of peoples and nations south of the equator. He is critical of the European countries’ states and social orders, and he believes that the newly discovered societies could indeed serve Europe as an example.

This leads to a discussion about why Hythloday wouldn’t enter into a king’s service in order to counsel him on reforms, thus being of use to the people. Yet the Portuguese doesn’t want to make himself a slave, and he doesn’t believe that kings care one bit about the welfare of the people. He suspects the kings’ counsels of being flatterers, relating an experience in England that underpins this belief.

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?

At the dining table of Cardinal John Morton, Chancellor of England, whom Thomas More knows as well, a lawyer wonders why so many thieves and robbers continue to engage in their nefarious deeds despite the Draconian punishments leveled upon them. Hythloday answers that teaching usually beats punishing. Many people steal out of fatal necessity, such as farmers and craftsmen who return mutilated from wars and are unable to work. Or their greedy lords squeeze the very blood out of them, so they must leave their homes and try their luck as vagabonds. Moreover, princes and abbots deprive peasants of their livelihoods by turning farmland into pasture for sheep. In order to stop making people into thieves, Hythloday advises the rebuilding of farming villages to prevent land purchases by the rich and to fight the general corruption of morals.

The magistrates never engage the people in unnecessary labour, since the chief end of the constitution is to regulate labor by the necessities of the public and to allow the people as much time as is necessary for the improvement of their minds, in which they think the happiness of life consists.

Moreover, he speaks out against capital punishment, for God has commanded men not to kill. He cites the punishment method of the Polylerits as an example, a people that he claims to have met in Persia. There the thief must give back stolen goods to their owners. In case there is nothing left to give back, he must serve in the public works. Every convict thus makes up for the damage he caused. The Portuguese recommends this method for England, causing considerable indignation at the dinner table. Only the cardinal proposes to give it a try, since all the existing methods have hardly yielded satisfactory results. Now the dinner party suddenly praises Hythloday’s idea. For Hythloday, it’s a perfect example of toadyism and a sign that he’s not the right sort to serve at a king’s court.