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

About the Text

Structure and Style

Thomas More divided his work into two books. In the first, he establishes the fiction that the text is a factual report, pretending to be the chronicler of a story told by another. He describes how he meets his real-life friend Peter Giles and the fictitious Portuguese seafarer Raphael Hythloday in Flanders. They engage in a lively discussion with the sharp-tongued Portuguese, who serves as a mouthpiece for fierce and forthright criticism of the European ruling systems. While showing great interest, More objects to some of Hythloday’s ideas about the nature of a just state and questions whether it is even possible to achieve. Those same questions inspire the second book, which contains a lively travelogue about the Island of Utopia – where Hythloday believes to have found the ideal state – and addresses the questions raised in the first book. More’s writing style is clear, witty and always to the point, and he plays artfully with the fictitious names: Utopia’s capital Amaurot is modeled after London and contains the Greek word for “fog,” while the name Hythloday could mean both “buffoon” and “enemy to buffoonery.”

Interpretation

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  According to More’s friend Erasmus of Rotterdam, More wrote Utopia in order to describe why England was in such bad shape. The text contains veiled advice to the English king Henry VIII.
  
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  More voices criticism without risking a direct confrontation with the powerful, because he purports to be nothing but a reporter of events. His dialogue with the fictitious Hythloday gives him the chance to take a radical stance while distancing himself from it at the same time. The text form of a fictitious travelogue allows him to portray a theory of the state in a lively and imaginative way.
  
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  As a Renaissance philosopher, More takes up the ancient philosophical movement of Epicureanism. The Greek philosopher Epicurus had elevated the pleasure principle to being the ultimate goal in life. More expanded this concept to the “pleasure to perform one’s duties,” that is, the pleasure of a reasonable life and the willing submission to the common good.
  
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  More doesn’t advocate the return to an idealized early human condition (“back to nature” a la Rousseau) but presents a highly developed society with an advanced understanding of technology and science.
  
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  More has Hythloday express early socialist ideas. Much like Karl Marx more than 300 years later, the voyager assumes that beingness determines consciousness: Once everyone has what they need, greed, envy and the race for profit come to an end. Comprehensive provision would be achieved through renouncing private property, making everybody work and providing free access to education and knowledge for every member of that society.
  
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  There is no privacy or individual freedom on Utopia. Individualism, which many regard as the foundation and engine of modern societies, is considered unnecessary and possibly even harmful.
  
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  More may have intended all or part of his descriptions of Utopia as satire, with the expectation that readers would have seen many of the Utopians’ “ideal” solutions as laughable. While the tone of Utopia seems earnest, many of More’s actions and policies as a statesman seem more in keeping with Tudor brutality and cynicism than Utopian common sense.