Utopia definition free#

“There is nothing within the houses that is private or any man’s own,” writes More. In Utopia, private property is abolished. Like Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia is the creation of a well-meaning member of the upper classes with a plan, rather than the live-for-the-moment dream of a peasant or worker. Everyone has his eye on you, so you’re practically forced to get on with your job, and make proper use of your spare time.” There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places. More writes: “You see how it is – wherever you are, you always have to work. Instead, in Utopia, there is a class of bosses – called the Syphograuntes – who look out for work-shy slackers.Īnd citizens are constantly being watched.

Utopia definition free#

Forget free love and lying around doing nothing. His vision of a perfect society was a long way from the sensual self-indulgence dreamt of by the peasants in Cockagyne. More writes of the Utopians: “They think that the contemplation of nature, and the praise thereof coming, is to God a very acceptable honour.” However, like a good modern politician, More also emphasises that Utopia is a land of hard-working families: “idleness they utterly forsake and eschew, thinking felicity after this life to be gotten and obtained by busy labours and good exercise.” First published in Latin in 1517, the book Utopia means “no place” in Greek some scholars have said that it may also be a pun on “happy place”. More coined the word to describe an island community with an ideal mode of government.

This concept would shape books, philosophies and political movements as varied as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Mahatma Gandhi’s doctrine of passive resistance and the founding of the state of Pennsylvania.

Today, though, we may know More best for his invention of a word – and for his development of an idea that would be exported around the world. An establishment figure, he was also an enemy of the Protestant Reformation and is known today as a Catholic martyr, having been beheaded by King Henry VIII. Born in 1478, he was progressive in some ways (he educated his daughters to a very high level) while also clinging to archaic customs (he wore hair shirts). An English lawyer, statesman, writer and saint, Thomas More was a strange character.