Impact: Utopia

The Man Who Wore a Hair Shirt to Work

Thomas More is one of those historical figures who resists easy summary. He was a devoted Catholic who wore a hair shirt under his chancellor's robes and whipped himself on Fridays. He was also a sharp-tongued wit whose friend Erasmus called him 'a man for all seasons' — the phrase that later became a play and a film. He learned Greek at Oxford from the scholars who first brought it to England. He chose to marry the elder daughter of a country gentleman, rather than the younger one he preferred, because he didn't want to embarrass her by passing her over.

He rose through Tudor England on sheer ability and an almost reckless honesty. As a young lawyer, we're told he refused to plead cases he considered unjust and took no fees from widows, orphans, or the poor. As a member of Parliament, still in his early twenties, he opposed Henry VII's tax proposal so effectively that the king's revenue was blocked entirely. One courtier went to the king to report that 'a beardless boy' had ruined everything. More spent the rest of Henry VII's reign under royal displeasure, quietly considering whether to leave England altogether. Then Henry VII died, and everything changed.

It was during a diplomatic mission to the Low Countries in 1515 — a trade negotiation with the ambassadors of the future Charles V — that More found the time and the inspiration to begin writing Utopia. He was thirty-seven, newly acquainted with Peter Giles, the cultured young secretary of Antwerp, and in close contact with Erasmus, the greatest humanist scholar of the age. The second and more famous part of the book, describing the island itself, was probably written during those six months abroad. The framing first part came later, early in 1516, and the whole thing was published at Louvain before the year was out, edited by Erasmus and Giles themselves.

A Sensation Printed Everywhere Except England

Utopia was an immediate success among the European intellectual class — which in 1516 largely meant men who read Latin. It was reprinted at Paris, at Basel, at Vienna. Erasmus, the most famous scholar in Europe, shepherded it into print and lent it his prestige. Peter Giles, More's Antwerp friend, appeared in the book as a character. The whole apparatus of humanist approval surrounded it from the start. Within a few years it was being discussed from England to Italy.

And yet it was not printed in England during More's lifetime. The first English edition appeared in 1551, sixteen years after More's execution, translated by a man named Ralph Robinson during the reign of Edward VI. There's something fitting about that delay: the book was cosmopolitan before England was ready for it, written in the international language of scholars for an international audience of reformers, and only later domesticated into English. By then, More himself had been declared a traitor, and the England he'd served had become something he would not have recognized.

What the Book Actually Says

Utopia is structured as a framed dialogue. More himself appears as a character, meeting in Antwerp a world-traveled sailor named Raphael Hythloday — whose surname, in Greek, means roughly 'dispenser of nonsense.' This is either a joke at the utopian dreamer's expense or a layer of ironic insulation protecting More from his own ideas. Scholars have argued about it ever since. Hythloday describes at length a society on a distant island called Utopia, where all property is held in common, gold is used to make chamber pots and slave chains (to teach contempt for wealth), citizens work six hours a day, wars are preferred to be won by bribery and assassination rather than bloodshed, and priests may be women.

The Utopians practice a form of natural religion tolerant of all faiths, on the logic that no one can be certain which religion is correct. They keep slaves — mostly criminals and prisoners of war — but treat them humanely. They permit divorce and allow the terminally ill to choose euthanasia. They elect their officials. They despise lawyers, a profession More himself had mastered, which is either another joke or a genuine grievance. The frame character 'More' pushes back on much of what Hythloday says, arguing for the importance of working within existing systems rather than demanding perfection. Whether this represents More's real view or a diplomatic hedge is the book's central interpretive puzzle, and it has never been resolved.

What's striking is how many of these ideas remained explosive for centuries afterward. Common ownership of property. Religious tolerance. Elected leadership. A six-hour workday. More wasn't just speculating abstractly — he was writing in a Europe convulsed by inequality, enclosures, and the early tremors of the Reformation. The book is a diagnosis dressed as a fantasy.

The Word That Outlasted Everything

More coined the word 'utopia' for his imaginary island, from the Greek ou-topos, meaning 'no place.' He also played with the near-homophone eu-topos, meaning 'good place.' The pun is built into the title: this good place is no place, this ideal society does not exist. Whether that was melancholy or satirical or both probably depends on which passage of the book you're reading at the time.

What's extraordinary is how completely the word escaped its origin. 'Utopia' and 'utopian' are now used in languages worldwide, by people who have never read More, to describe any vision of an ideal society. Its shadow-word 'dystopia' — coined much later, in the nineteenth century — depends entirely on More's coinage to make its meaning. Every time someone describes a political program as 'utopian thinking,' they are, at some remove, engaging with a book written in Latin by a Tudor lawyer on a diplomatic mission to Antwerp. Few acts of naming have had longer legs.

Five Centuries of Arguments

The afterlife of Utopia is essentially the history of Western political imagination. Socialist thinkers claimed More as a forerunner — Karl Kautsky wrote an entire book arguing More was an early communist. Catholic thinkers claimed him as a martyr and humanist saint; he was canonized in 1935, four hundred years after his execution. Liberals pointed to the religious tolerance. Anarchists liked the critique of private property. Conservatives pointed to the slavery and the strict social order. The book has been pressed into service by nearly every political tradition because it is genuinely, structurally ambiguous — More made sure of that.

Later writers who built on the tradition More founded include Francis Bacon (New Atlantis), Tommaso Campanella (The City of the Sun), Jonathan Swift (who inverted the form savagely in Gulliver's Travels), and eventually the full genre of utopian and dystopian fiction: Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell. The dystopian novel — arguably the dominant serious genre of the twentieth century — is in a direct line of descent from More's little Latin book. Every Brave New World and 1984 is, among other things, a reply to Utopia.

Why It Still Matters

There's a version of reading Utopia as a historical curiosity — a Tudor artifact interesting mainly to specialists. That version is wrong. The book is alive in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable. Its central argument, that the misery of the poor is a direct result of choices made by the powerful rather than an unfortunate fact of nature, was radical in 1516 and remains contested today. Its structural question — whether it is better to engage with a corrupt system in hope of improving it, or to refuse compromise and demand something entirely different — is the permanent tension of political life, and More stages it without resolving it.

More himself lived out the tragic version of that tension. He rose to become Lord Chancellor of England, the highest legal office in the kingdom. He used his position conscientiously. And then he drew a line — at Henry VIII's divorce, at the Act of Supremacy, at the king's demand to be named head of the English Church — and refused to cross it. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London for over a year, tried on what was almost certainly perjured testimony, and beheaded on Tower Hill in July 1535. He was fifty-seven.

The man who imagined a society built on reason and tolerance was killed by a king who tolerated no dissent. That irony is not incidental to Utopia — it is the final, biographical chapter of the book. Reading it now, you are reading the work of a man who thought seriously about what a just society would look like, and then paid the full price for living in an unjust one. That combination of intellectual ambition and personal courage is rarer than either alone, and it is why this book, five centuries old, still has the power to unsettle.

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