 Brilliant book that is well formatted.
There are a lot of free versions of Utopia, but this one is easy to read and well-formatted. The book itself is one of the most important works in English literature, and it always makes me fight the urge to be materialistic. It's really brilliant.
 Incomplete, Poor Transliteration
If you need to read Utopia quickly and don't care about reading the dedicatory letters or having explanatory notes, or maybe if you only have $2.00 and change to spend, this is a good book for you. Otherwise, look elsewhere. Utopia was created partly for fun, as the Penguin edition makes clear by including the Utopian alphabet. Clever puns are lost here: you might never guess that the river "Anidrus" in this edition comes from More's own "Anydrus", meaning "no water" in Greek. And of course there are no notes in this edition to tell you what you're missing.
Utopia: An Ambiguously Important Classic
Notes drawn mostly from this edition's great intro by Mishtooni Bose--she lectures at Oxford U. Have included some of my own impressions:
--Utopia fits definition of a classic, something that everyone discusses but few people read. More coined the term. Utopia is an ambiguous title and reflects the ambiguous nature of the book. Made of a pun on two Greek words: outopia (no place) and eutopia (good or fortunate place). Ambiguity reflected in the way we use the word today--it can connote both an ideal societal structure and a hopelessly unreal scheme for improving society.
--Book not meant to be prescriptive but rather to stimulate independent thought and perhaps get England to innovate its political ideas. There was a lot of corruption in English gov't at the time -- "A Man for All Season's" depicts Cardinal Wolsey's governance and Henry VIII's excess.
--Book originally written in Latin employing classical literary devices--dialogues, aphorisms, anecdotes--to stimulate independent thought and provide a comprehensive view of an issue from different angles. English translations don't do full justice to original as they leave out the allusions that are packed into the text--from Plato, Aristotle, many others. Its style is a mix of traditions and it's both pragmatic and ascetic. It's a unique genre--political fiction.
--Hythloday is a mariner from Utopia who comments on England's polity and compares it with his own. His name is a combo of Greek and Hebrew that means "purveyor of nonsense." He is an "uncompromising idealist whose principles will not allow him to participate in public life." He says that even if his ideas were better and that if he found a place at a king's court, it would all be for naught b/c men typically dismiss ideas that they don't invent--simply because they didn't think of them!
-- Things that struck me--contemplation of the proper punishment for thievery. In England it was punishable by death, which Hythloday says is too harsh and anyway doesn't deter the crime. His solution was based on the model of Persia where thieves are forced to make restitution and then are sentenced to be laborers for the state. They wear distinctive clothing/badges and have unique haircuts, plus the tip of an ear is cut off. They leave the "shire" they're assigned to only on pain of death.
--Hythloday uses the concepts of "majesty" and "dignity" when evaluating the legitimacy of a ruler. "If any king were so smally regarded...that other ways he could not keep them in awe, but only by open wrongs...surely it were better for him to forsake his kingdom, than to hold it by this means; whereby though the name of a king be kept, yet the majesty is lost."
--Those that work to sustain the foundations of society, do the manual labor and agriculture, get the least wages. Whereas crafts like goldsmithing yield high wages. This is seen as unjust.
--War is waged craftily and by wit first. Brute force is a last resort as it's seen to be the preserve of beasts, not humans.
--Free practice of any religion is allowed, so long as one does not denigrate another's faith
--In Utopia all possessions are held in common
thought provoking book
Utopia by Thomas More. Published by MobileReference (mobi)
This translation from More's original Latin is modern and smoothly readable. The book casts an interesting shadow into 20th century communism, theocracy, and ideas of the good life. A great story and an important work of literature!
Literary Garden of Eden
This was required reading for a graduate course in the Humanities. A great story and important historical work in literature. History of Utopia begins with Thomas Moore's book in 1516 he coins the phrase Utopia. Ideal societies have been around before like Garden of Eden, city on a hill. For Moore the idea of utopia was intended to be an ironic one. One of the problems you are faced with when reading his utopia is that you cannot really tell when he is serious and when he is being satirical. He writes on the border of the lyrical and satirical, you cannot really tell when he is trying to be funny or serious. The other problem is the Thomas Moore who speaks to us in the story is not the Thomas Moore who actually lived. He wrote himself into a character. He is intending it to be ironic. Utopia is Greek for "Good Place, and "no place." He is punning an ironic two-sided term he clearly intended irony when he wrote this text, which provided the foundation for a new genre for social representation. Now, according to Lewis Mumford, who wrote the book "The Story of Utopia" 1922, one of the first comprehensive studies of Utopian representation in Western Civilization, the word Utopia signifies human folly or human hope, the vain hope of perfection. The vain hope of remaking our own imperfect natures, so that we can establish the blissful harmonious communal life. On one hand, he is entirely playful and paradoxical. Thomas Moore could be bigoted (against Protestants), small minded, not a saint as portrayed. Among all the things, he was a great wit, great sense of humor. On the other hand, it seems that Utopia could be a reflection of his devout Catholicism. He has been represented as a Roman Catholic martyr. In which case you want to take him seriously, altering the model of menses a set of new aims for moral and social objectives. Of course, Moore's death is important to consider in this life he is glorified in the film, "A Man for All Seasons." He was a Renaissance man, he was a lawyer, statesman, Christian humanist a classical scholar an advocate for women's rights he was also Henry 8's Lord Chancellor.
In 1514, he was sent to Flanders to negotiate a wool treaty and while there, he meets and befriends Peter Giles who is the town clerk of Antwerp, and allegedly tells him "It is my intention to write a book about the way a country should be governed according to my principals. But, it is dangerous to write about those things in England while king Henry the 8 wrath is so easily encouraged, I could perhaps write that I met an old sailor in your house and introduce that man as a globetrotter, who had traveled all over the world and had seen places that we don't even know the existence of. What he had seen there was so unbelievable as compared to the life in Europe that the islands the countries he had visited would seem to belong to another world. Therefore, the title of my book will be "Utopia" a word that means "no where." That sailor will have traveled all over Europe and lived sometime in France Germany, and England. That is why he could compare the ideal community he got acquainted with in Utopia, to the ones he got to know in our countries, and that way I would keep myself out of the matter." After he returned to London, he wrote the fist chapter. Now, what would that tell us about the Utopian imagination, the creation the public presentation of a Utopia? Moore was beheaded in 1535; he would not recognize marriage to Ann Boleyn as lawful to the church. In 1534, Henry becomes head of the church, but Moore remains loyal to pope. In 1935, Moore is canonized. We have to take Moore's religion very seriously. Moore thought Protestants should be burned, he was greedy and proud, not a perfect man. Yet he had this wish for a Utopia.
All utopian fictional ideas of mythic proportion occupy kind of distant realm of the afterlife, myth, faith that unite all of these elements in a matter that is so rich and potentially illuminating and invaluable for scholars students that are interested in working across boundaries and in understanding and exploring the value of working across boundaries. Societies woven and inhabited by populations some of them very select, the exceptionally virtuous or blessed in some cases getting there requires a metaphysical transformation, in other cases it requires a harrowing journey that has to be understood as some ways metaphorical and some ways literal. There is always a sense that to reach Utopia requires a transformation of the human self how do we get away from our flaws, how do we get away from our seemingly inevitable and invariable nature of our being.
These places offer anecdotes to painful and tragic realities to human existence. They are historical in nature you cannot understand any utopia, whether it is represented in a sci-fi movie, or novel or feminist utopia; they must be placed in some kind of a historical context. A fascinating proposition to explore, all utopias all acts of the utopian imagination strike us as constituting in one manner or another statements, critiques or observations about the world we occupy at that given moment. Therefore, any utopia is a reflection and study of the world that we are occupying at that given moment and what we wish it were rather than what it is at that moment. Therefore, utopia is a deeply and inescapably a historical manner organizing the human imagination. I don't think any utopia works in a fixed and eternal way because for every generation and every age they have to imagine their own utopia. Of course utopian experiments were not just talking about fiction or wishing it were so, were talking about actual Soviet Revolution of 1917, were looking at movements looking to bring about radical profound social and political changes that are so deeply utopian in nature. So utopians are aesthetic, philosophical, sociological, they are imagined and fictional, but you can look a history and find attempts most of which failed to bring about these kind of communities that Emerson, Thoreau, these 19th century American egalitarian attempts to create the ideal agrarian society. 1960 hippies reawakening movement of going back to the natural and living off the land. Even today's green and ecological revolution you find in them utopian aspects that resonate so richly with the history of envisioning the ideal society, an ideal place.
Oscar Wilde once said "A map of the world that does not include Utopia, is not even worth glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which humanity has always landed, and when humanity lands there it looks out sees a better country set sail. Progress is the realization of utopias." So when we talk about utopias we are not only talking about a desire or a wish or a longing for perfection, we are talking about an order of progress, a way in which we intend to advance, a way in which we envision or imagine improvement and progress. A progress narrative, psychoanalysis is utopian. Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is a scientific expression of the utopian imagination. The idea that where id was, the ego shall be. The idea of a talking story, the idea that we can master our neurosis that we can harness them that we can move from unconscious behavior to conscious behavior. Marxism and all the grand philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries are grand utopian narratives. Feminism is a grand utopian narrative in and of itself.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, and literature.
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