Utopia
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Average rating3.2
First published in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most important works of European humanism. Through the voice of the mysterious traveler Raphael Hythloday, More describes a pagan, communist city-state governed by reason. Addressing such issues as religious pluralism, women's rights, state-sponsored education, colonialism, and justified warfare, Utopia seems remarkably contemporary nearly five centuries after it was written, and it remains a foundational text in philosophy and political theory.
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As is often the case, I really love the Norton Critical Editions with their inclusion of supplementary texts and criticism both from the time and contemporary.
Books like this are great to make you realise “damn these ideas I thought were fresh are hella old” and “how the hell did they predict that back then?”
I didn't realise going in how communist this vision of Utopia would be, for good and for ill. Don't know if that's intentional but I hope Engels gives some props to old Thomas More somewhere in his writings.
What's most interesting to me are the ideas that More assumes as default (slavery, capital punishment, men as the head of the family) which nowadays we would probably not include as part of our description of utopia.
What assumptions do we make about ‘the natural order of things' or ‘human nature' that will one day be considered barbaric?
