Book Review: Utopia

I've been reading quite a few books lately, and one of them is Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Prompted by a presentation by a classmate in Shakespeare's class where she took Thomas More's story of a fictitious perfect country named Utopia as a serious prescription for social ills, I had remembered learning in another class that he was actually being sarcastic and endeavored to find out myself.

Utopia is divided up into two books, actually. The first short "book" describes a conversation More and his friend Peter Giles had with a traveler named Raphael. This traveler describes previous conversations he's had with the Archbishop of Canterbury, contentious lawyers and the like. Reading this is somewhat like watching a man have a schizophrenic conversation with himself. More argues with his creation, Raphael, about the benefits of communism and capitalism. Back and forth they go, and I can't shake the feeling that he's genuinely arguing with himself and we, as readers, are witness to this strange spectacle. Both give good, if not shallow, explanations of their point, and then move on to the meat of the book, which is the description of Utopia's society.

More contends, perhaps very tongue-in-cheek, that a "Utopia" can only occur if we abandon all emotion and only use reason. Life in Utopia is austere, appears incredibly unpleasant to the average American and virtually totalitarian - there is no privacy whatsoever: "Everyone has his eye on you, so you're practically forced to get on with your job, and make some proper use of your spare time." It's not a very pleasant place to live, and perhaps that is what More is getting at; after all, Utopia in crude mishmash Greek literally means "No place." This joke continues throughout the book, with a river named Anydrus ("No water"), the title of a chief magistrate called Ademus ("Not people"), and even Raphael's last name as Hythloday, derived from Hythlodaeus ("Dispenser of nonesense").

The popularity of this tract by More probably stems from the fact that it's so contradictory and vague. Some take this as a piece of writing extolling the Catholic monastic life; communists love to use this as examples of pre-Marxist communist propaganda. But scholars aren't sure if this is true either, since More seems so anti-communist in his other writings. Of course, some scholars also believe More secretly was communist and that Utopia counts in satire as he attacks British social ills and recommends a communist society under the guise of Raphael, redirecting all criticism to him, for did not the More character in Utopia defend the virtues of capitalism? It's somewhat of an entertaining mental puzzle to grapple with as I read through the book, deciding whether More was a prototype pinko commie, or if he was a straight-laced capitalist poking fun at our idea of an ideal society. The truth is, as it always is, he most likely was a little bit of both.