Thomas More's Utopia

In 1516, the publication of one small book would coin a new word and give rise to centuries of literature, theory, and thought. In his most influential work, the lawyer and Tudor politician Thomas More (1478-1535) described a seemingly perfect – but entirely fictional – island called Utopia. In 1535, less than two decades after writing the book, More was executed for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as supreme head of the church of England. Misha Glenny and his guests discuss why More’s exploration of service and the ideal state has been read as a blueprint for society, a scathing satire, and as a timeless warning. This In Our Time episode examines the 16th-century origin and legacy of one of most influential works of political philosophy. The discussion explores Utopia’s roots in Renaissance Humanism, what the book has to say about tyranny and governance, and why utopias can so often seem dystopian. With Laura Ashe Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford Cathy Shrank Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield And Joanne Paul Honorary Associate Professor in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex Producer: Martha Owen Reading list: Terence Cave (ed.), Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2008) J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 1952) Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (Harvard University Press, 1999) Thomas More (ed. Joanne Paul), Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2025) Thomas More (ed. George M. Logan), Utopia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) Thomas More (ed. Gerard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith), The Essential Works of Thomas More (Yale University Press, 2020) Joanne Paul, Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England (Michael Joseph, 2025) Joanne Paul, Thomas More: Classic Thinkers (Polity, 2016) Howard P. Segal, Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2023) Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1979) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is one of more than 1,000 episodes that you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1516, a small book was published with a curious new word as its title, Utopia. In it, the book's author, the lawyer and politician Thomas More, described a seemingly perfect but entirely fictional island. More's notoriously ambiguous text has been read as a blueprint for an ideal society, a scathing satire and a timeless warning.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Less than 20 years after he wrote the book, Thomas More was executed for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as the supreme head of the English Church. But in the 500 years since it was first published, Utopia's exploration of how and why we might imagine alternative worlds has been hugely influential and challenging. Well, with me to discuss Thomas More's Utopia, Laura Ash, Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford, Cathy Schrank, Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield, and Joanne Paul, Honorary Associate Professor

• 3:12Speaker 03

  of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. Welcome to you all, but it's to Joanne who I want to come to first. Joanne, can you tell us, what do we need to know about Thomas More the man and how he came to write Utopia?

• 3:28Speaker 04

  One of the things that's important to keep in mind about the writing of Utopia is that Thomas More is nearly 40 when he writes it. He's already lived quite a bit of his life. In particular, he's devoted a lot of time and attention to his scholarship. I think we'll probably talk more about his connections to the European humanist movement and in particular, its sort of leader Erasmus. And he's also devoted quite a bit of time to public service. He's involved in the city of London, is undersheriff there. He's also an MP for Westminster. And finally, he has a family. And I think we'll see when we talk about the different parts of Utopia, how all of these things come into play to build it.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  But most importantly, when he writes Utopia, he's on a diplomatic mission for the king. He's in the Low Countries and he actually begins the book by setting it precisely in that circumstance.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  What was that diplomatic mission about?

• 4:28Speaker 04

  Trade, essentially, without going into all the ins and outs of the wool trade and then the cloth industry. They were renegotiating a treaty with the Holy Roman Empire through which, a lot of it came through the Low Countries, Bruges and Antwerp.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  And those discussions came to a sort of abrupt end and he found himself with the time on his hands, is that right?

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Thomas More found himself to be bored, which didn't happen much for him. He has four children, several careers. He was bored and nothing else to do. And so we ended up going down to Antwerp and meeting a fellow humanist there. And out of that came Utopia.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Now, you mentioned Erasmus as the leader of the humanist movement. What's his relationship to More and to the text? And who was Erasmus?

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Erasmus was, as I said, this leading figure of this new humanist movement. By that, we mean a curriculum for learning that focused really on the recovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts, and particularly a focus on how to use those texts and the lessons they contained for the public good. And again, we'll see some of that coming through in Utopia. More and Erasmus had met in 1499. At the same time, they had met the young Prince Henry, who would become Henry VIII. And they actually didn't start off on the best feet with each other. Erasmus was embarrassed that he didn't have something to offer the prince. More did. And Erasmus said-

• 5:59Speaker 03

  You mean as a present?

• 6:00Speaker 04

  As a present, yes, exactly. You were expected to show up with a piece of writing that praised the prince. And Erasmus was not briefed on this. More was. And so Erasmus, out of his embarrassment, said that at dinner, he engaged his Spartan habit of sparring until I drew blood on Thomas More. So they got into some sort of intellectual debate. But very soon after, they became friends and they were exchanging letters. And Erasmus stayed at More's house at various points.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  So Cathy Schrank, how did that humanist context influence the book? What was the essence of humanism that More was channeling into Utopia?

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Utopia is absolutely steeped in humanism, both in terms of its style and its content. As Joanne said, that humanism is a movement that goes back to the classics and re-applies the learning that might be drawn from that to contemporary affairs. And we can see More doing that in Utopia, that he's drawing on the classical genre of dialogue. And he manages really cleverly to reference the three greats of classical dialogue. So in the dialogue, you've got men of business who are in a moment of leisure discussing kind of world politics, which is very much in the model of Cicero's dialogues, withdrawing to a kind of garden space to talk about sort of serious matters. You've got allusions to Lucian.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  For example, the figure of Hithlade seems very like Lucian's cynicus in his unkempt nature and his kind of resistance to doing what you're supposed to do, which is to apply your learning to the common good.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  I think you'd better tell us who Hithlade is.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  Sorry. Hithlade is the interlocutor, that he's the traveller that Morris, and we're going to call Morris the persona of Thomas More within the text, just to distinguish him from the author. So Morris and his friend Peter Giles, who he's met through Erasmus, also features in the book. And they encounter this stranger, this travelling stranger, Hithlade. Morris meets him outside a church after mass. And that is an echo of the beginning of Plato's Republic, where there's an encounter at a religious festival and then they go back to a house and have a discussion. And then sort of, I mentioned Lucian as the third of the great classical dialogists.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  And there, so you've got the figure of Hithlade who's captured there. But also the ironic wit that runs through Utopia is very much in that Lucianic vein. So the book is absolutely sort of steeped in these classical references, these classical jokes, is written in Latin, not in a European vernacular. Lots of the jokes rely on knowledge of Greek, which is immediately placing the work as a much more rarefied sort of knowledge, that very few people relatively knew Greek in this period. New scholarship led by humanists was rediscovering ancient Greek. Latin is the international language at this point, so More is reaching out to an international

• 9:09Speaker 05

  audience, and particularly, an international audience is of like-minded men, like-minded scholarly men, this humanist circle, who will get the jokes in Greek that most people won't. You know, although he's written it, it is really a collective endeavour, sort of is orchestrated by Erasmus, who's putting him in contact with leading intellectuals in Europe who kind of supply prefatory material, they supply letters, that kind of material that accumulates around the text as a part of the way that that shapes its meaning. And the project of the work is really in this kind of humanist vein of trying to say something sort of serious but in a lighthearted manner.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  So this idea of serious joking, so the serious topic of what makes a good commonwealth, which is another classical genre, but it's being done in a kind of lighthearted, jokey, but at the same time, serious manner.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  So we're looking to understand what a good society is. But before we get into that text, tell us a bit more about More's work, because he's not yet, as I understand, one of Henry VIII's counsellors, but he is a fairly influential man about town.

• 10:20Speaker 05

  Yes, so it won't be until fifteen eighteen that he joins the Royal Council. But as Joanne said, you know, he is a lawyer, but the book is kind of steeped in a legal culture. Often, he introduces the the men he admires in relation to their knowledge of the law. So, for example, sort of George Tamiche, who's one of the negotiators, is commended for his knowledge of the law. You've got Cardinal Morton, who features him in Book One. He's also someone who's learned in the law. We first meet Morris, the author, in relation to his role as a lawyer. He's kind of taught, explaining to Peter Giles in a letter that precedes the text about why he hasn't finished writing Utopia.

• 11:01Speaker 05

  And it's because one of the things he's caught up with is all the legal business that he has, he spends his days doing. But at the same time, he's kind of got insider kind of poking fun at lawyers. So lawyers in Book One feature as just being really verbose and self-important. So the lawyer who Hithlade talks to at Cardinal Morton's household has to be kind of shut up even before he's just, he's just getting into his flow and he's kind of told to shut up. And then in Utopia itself, on the island of Utopia, there are no lawyers. And that's seen to kind of speed up justice because you haven't got people slowing it down or obfuscating. So that that kind of legal context i- is really very important, as is the the London

• 11:45Speaker 05

  context that Joanne was referring to through his work as an undersheriff, that on the title page of the first edition, he he's introduced as, you know, a citizen and sheriff of London and the most famous city of London. And then we get that information again before we get into the main text itself.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  And we'll come on to that relationship between London and and Utopia a little later. But Laura Ash, we have to talk about the title, obviously.

• 12:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Because this was a neologism, a new word that he created. We understand Utopia today to mean some sort of perfect imagined place. Is that what it meant for Thomas More? What was he trying to do with that title?

• 12:26Speaker 06

  The main thing he's doing, I think, is punning, because it was possible, this is a made up word, it doesn't exist in Greek, but it sounds similar to two words that could exist in Greek, one of which could mean ideal place, um, utopia. But the other, utopia, means no place at all. And More's working title for the book was in Latin, nusquama, which means nowhere. So the primary meaning of utopia, as he sets it out, is, I think, contrary to what we've inherited and lived with ever since, is that this is nowhere, this isn't a real place. But it's worth talking, in terms of the title, of course, as with all early printed books,

• 13:10Speaker 06

  it actually has a really long, unwieldy title, that was the fashion. And so the true title brings in any number of other puns. It is "A truly golden account, no less useful than delightful, of the best state of a commonwealth and of the new island of utopia." So we already have the "no less useful than delightful," and that's part of the whole debate about humanism. Can things be both expedient and entertaining? Can they be nice and pleasurable and also right? So that's a whole humanist debate that's going to come in again and again. We have the fact that we're told it's about the best state of a commonwealth and the new island of utopia. Not that the new island of utopia is the best state of a commonwealth, it's implied,

• 13:55Speaker 06

  but it's it's not certain. And then finally, this this statement at the beginning, that it's a truly golden account, very aurius. Well, later in the book, we discover that the Utopians despise gold. And so all of this ambiguity and playfulness is set up in the short title and in the long title from the beginning.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  So before we get into details of the text, can you give us a brief introduction to the book? How how's it structured, how it was written?

• 14:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's really a groundbreaking work in terms of what we now think of as metafiction, because it presents itself as with the preface that More offers, which is a letter to Peter Giles, which Cathy has mentioned, saying, you know, "Dear Peter, I finally managed to write up this book, and you must be shocked that it didn't take me just six weeks, because as you and I both well know, all I had to do was write down what Hithlade said to us. I didn't have to make any of it up. Had I had to make it up, then it could have taken longer." So he sets out, you know, this is historical More embedded in the real world, talking to real people in that letter. And then we get into what's still apparently the historical More in Antwerp, meeting up

• 15:08Speaker 06

  with Peter Giles, and the two of them then meeting Hithlade. And this is the beginning of what we call now Book One. Now, there's a theory that we might come back to that he wrote Book One second. But what happens in Book One is that we have a discussion between the three of them in which they meet, they talk about Hithlade's adventures. There's a long discussion about the rights or otherwise of executing thieves, which becomes very important. And Hithlade recounts his adventures, his conversations with Cardinal Morton in England and his adventures across the world. And they try and suggest that he should be a counselor to a prince. And he says, "No, it's not possible. The world is is in too bad a state, because you can only have a good moral commonwealth

• 15:53Speaker 06

  when you abolish private property," as they have in Utopia. And they say, "Well, you should tell us about it." And then he says, "Great, well, let's have dinner first." So they have dinner. And then we have Book Two, which is the discourse of Raphael Hithlade about describing the island of utopia in really, you know, travelogue terms and geographical terms and quite technical terms. And then at the end, we have a wind up with Morris, the character, saying, "Well, gosh, there are some things there that are very interesting." And that's the whole structure.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Well, let's start with Book Two, as as we suspect it was written first. Cathy Schrank, how does this character, Raphael Hithlade, introduce us to the fictional island of utopia?

• 16:38Speaker 05

  We hear about utopia a little bit. We get some trailers in Book One about how it's this perfect commonwealth, because it doesn't need many laws, and there's no poverty because they've abolished private property. When we get to the description of the island, we begin very much with the geography of it. It's this island, it's this very defensive island, it's shaped like a crescent. And, you know, you can only get to it with the help of utopian guides, because there's this complex reef and you might get wrecked on the rocks. And there's a, you know, incredible defensiveness to it. So the the capital city has walls around its water source, so sort of enemies can't, even if they can get to the island, can't poison the well. So it's kind of quite an anxious kind of place, even as it's being set out of this.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Almost to the point of paranoia sometimes, I felt.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  Indeed, indeed. And we soon find out that it wasn't always an island. We move into this little potted history, and it wasn't always called utopia. It was at one point called Abraxa, and then it is conquered by Utopus, who then makes his soldiers and the indigenous people, who he's taken over, kind of dig a kind of a fifteen mile trench so that it separates it from the mainland. And in lots of ways, you know, it is a kind of a manifestation of the kind of desire of England to be an island, that English people recurrently talk about England as an island in this period, this kind of island fortress, even though there's Scotland, very much joined to it. But this is the fantasy of the insular, defended island stronghold.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  And there are very clear references to the fact that this is structured like England. You have the same number of counties or shires, and the capital is clearly a parody of London.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yes, but an idealized London. So Amorot is the capital, and it's on a tidal river like the Thames, but small adjustments have been made. For example, you know, by moving the the London Bridge, so it's further upstream, so it doesn't impede kind of boats coming in in the way that happens with the Thames in this period.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  So we've got this fictional island, Joanne Paul, we've got this fictional island with clear references to England. But as Laura mentioned, in Book One, we've already got this quite revolutionary suggestion that the cause of evil in society is private property. Tell us about Utopians' attitude to private property and what they think of gold.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  It's one of the best bits in in the book, actually, is is what they do with with gold. But in order to understand that, we have to understand the way in which, as you say, private property. And in fact, the the line in it is, "Nothing is private anywhere." So it's not just property that isn't private, nothing is is private, which is why I think a lot of people read it as quite dystopian, because we're quite interested in in our own privacy and our own things that are ours today. But nothing is private anywhere. So houses are decided by by lottery, and there's this, just this sort of freedom about things that would be possessions, indeed in sixteenth century society and today.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  And it's all an attempt to devalue those things which are valued in More's own sixteenth century society, whether it is wealth and property or indeed social status. It's trying to to rip the value away from those and return Utopians to things that actually have value, like like honor or service to the commonwealth. And I think gold and gemstones is is one of the greatest examples of that in utopia. They use gold as chamber pots, so toilets, and they use gold as slave chains, which I think is also a bit of a reflection of the way in which, well, for instance, the Holbein, the very famous Holbein of Thomas More, he is wearing a gold chain, right?

• 20:38Speaker 04

  This idea that service is indeed servitude, which is a pun that's made in Book One as well, that he is enslaved in some way in service to a prince. And gemstones are baubles for children. And so when they get older, they toss them out the window going, "Well, you know, I don't want to appear childish," which again is is a reflection of the way that rich people sort of cling on to what is really very childish.

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• 23:49Speaker 03

  So, I mean, throughout both books, one and two, there is this assault on the concept of private property, but also on wealth, the wealth of individuals. And one's always struggling, reading Utopia, to understand, does Thomas More think that wealth is a bad thing and private property is a bad thing? Or is he satirizing the idea of getting rid of private property?

• 24:16Speaker 04

  In classic Thomas More sense, both and neither. I think that he thinks that private property, wealth, social standing, as indeed is the case, are all fantasies themselves. It's all artificial, right? Private property is not real. You don't actually own it. The status and value assigned to gold is not real. Money is not real. But it's given weight in our society. And I think Thomas More is satirizing it in order to get people to understand that it isn't actually real. It's a theme that runs through a lot of his texts, this idea that death reminds us that we can't take these things with us,

• 24:57Speaker 04

  and the value attributed to them is entirely false. And so he's doing this wonderful thing in Utopia, where Utopia is a fantastical, unreal, impossible place, and yet something about it is more real than our world, which is this stage play of costumes and falsity.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Laura, you wanted to come in on that.

• 25:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, just with your both neither, because absolutely, he's clearly satirizing people who are fetishizing wealth and obsessed with their own wealth and status. And the great scenario where the ambassadors from another country turn up dripping with gems, and all the people of Utopia are like, wow, what's wrong with them? But at the same time, More also repeatedly, of course, because he has to make compromises, he becomes Lord Chancellor, and so his compromises are, well, you have to go along with the stage play to some extent. So, yes, I am wearing my gold chain. It's just that I am aware that it's a chain as well as made of gold. So in some ways, he is having it both ways. He's insisting on being moral whilst also benefiting from this.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  So, as we, as we learn all about Utopia through Hitler Day's description, it becomes more and more sinister as it goes along. What are the sinister aspects of this utopian?

• 26:14Speaker 06

  So I think particularly, well, one of the interesting things to try and work out is how much of it would have seemed sinister to More or to his audience. To us, many of them immediately seem deeply sinister. So the absolute lack of privacy and the identical nature of everything. He says outright, the cities are all identical, and everything looks the same, everyone dresses the same, no one has anything special, everyone is moved around, everyone works in the same way and for the same hours, and eats in the same place. And no one has any, not just private property, but no time on their own. He says explicitly, everyone is under everyone else's eyes at all time. So we might think

• 26:56Speaker 06

  of that as an absolute eradication of individuality and a deeply sinister surveillance state. But More thinks of it, actually, as a way to instill morality. You know, the point is that, he says this many places in his writing, if, if we could properly know in our hearts that God sees everything we do, then of course we would behave well, of course we would behave better. And if we are offered good examples around us, there's a moment recounted in his son-in-law's biography of him, when he says, "It is now no mastery for you children to go to heaven, because everyone giveth you good example, and everyone giveth you good advice and good counsel, and you see virtue rewarded and vice punished.

• 27:39Speaker 06

  But if you should live to see the time when nobody giveth you good counsel, and nobody giveth you good reward, and you see reward punished and vice promoted, then if you be but half good, God will give you for whole good." And he thought all the time about virtue as a luxury, as something that has to be, you can only have if you're free of want, hence the idea of Utopia, that, you know, who, who will, no one has to beg, no one has to take from anyone else, and therefore it makes people good. But also, not just a luxury, but a habit, and a habit that has to be instilled and trained and practiced. And so for More, I think these, these aspects of surveillance that we find instinctively

• 28:24Speaker 06

  quite shocking, he regards as a way just of scaffolding individual virtue. You know, it will be so easy to be virtuous, is what he's saying, if you lived in this society.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  So again, it sounds to me as though More is sort of approving of this. Kathy and then Joanne, come in on that quickly.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Well, it might not be quick. That a lot of the times when he's describing something in Utopia that looks absolute, he kind of then quickly undoes it. And he does it also with the uniformity. Everything's uniform, except when it's not because of geography and so on. You know, he says, you know, they abhor war. But then we move into a long description of how it is that they conduct war, including by hiring these kind of mercenary Zappalites. But they hire them because they despise them, and they actually want them eradicated. So it's a kind of form of genocide, is to use them to fight wars for them. It's a colonial country, which would have been much less disturbing to a 16th century sort of mindset than ours. But it's also a slave society, and that is a really kind of crucial

• 29:30Speaker 05

  aspect of it.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Joanne, you wanted to come in there.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Well, I was just gonna come on what Laura was saying about it being an affront to individuality. And I mean, I think that's in many ways his point. Because what he, what we associate with individuality, I think he would have called pride. And for him, that is the worst sin of all, is the sin of pride.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Yes. I'm going to move on now back to Kathy to ask Kathy about what it was like for women in Utopia, because he Does deal with the issue of women quite closely.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  And this is one of those elements where it looks like, you know, sort of there is a kind of an ideal and then it's quickly undermined that. It it looks like, you know, there's a degree of equality that women work as well as men. Women have access to the public lectures as well as men. But it is a deeply, deeply patriarchal society, just like. England was at the time that the the heads of household are male, women are described as servants to their husbands. Men are responsible for admonishing their wives, parents for admonishing their their children and so on and. Um. So it quickly unravels. The governance is male and the women are in this sort of position of. As in sort of 16th century England, being subordinate members of of those households.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so Joanne, in that case, tell us, what is Moore's overall intent with this? Why create this fictional island at all?

• 30:55Speaker 04

  I think there are a number of reasons and and we've touched on some of them already. And for 500 years, people have been reading so much into this text. It it almost what Cathy was describing as as the difficulty approaching the island, I think, is the difficulty approaching the meaning of this text. As well, but he does, I think, in the sort of definitive version that he produces in 1518. Uh. Give us a bit of a clue and that's a map of utopia, which in fact does not resemble the crescent shape at all that's described. And I think that that really twigs us on to something there because what it does resemble, and it's produced by Ambrosius Holbein. The elder brother of Hans Holbein the younger, what it does resemble is a skull.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Um. And so it tells us that utopia is a memento mori, memento mori. It is a reminder, a remembrance of death. And this essential moral or lesson that more always comes back to. Which is that none of these things that we pride ourselves on in our society, 16th century or 21st. Wealth and social standing and property, none of that matters in death. In death, we are all the same. In death, we are all equal. And so utopia in some ways is is like the afterlife. Everyone is is just like their neighbor.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Is it anti royalist, anti monarchical? This is a question to any of you. I got the distinct impression that if I were Prince Henry or King Henry VIII. I I would be slightly miffed by some of the almost republican sentiments.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  It is republican, there's there's no question about it.

• 32:33Speaker 06

  Well, except what's interesting, so again and again, we're told the chief aim of this structure is to avoid tyranny. To make sure tyranny doesn't happen and hence all the blind blind elections and voting and so on come in here. But there's still as though as though you just can't resist the urge towards monarchy. So once a prince is elected, he's elected for life. Um. And then we're told unless he's suspected of some tyranny. And this, for me, is one of the moments where utopia shows its cracks. I mean, the idea of the place, because, you know, the idea we can protect against tyranny, we elect someone for life unless they. Are suspected of being tyrannous. Well, who's going to say that?

• 33:14Speaker 06

  Who is going to decide that now they look tyrannous and therefore they can be deposed?

• 33:19Speaker 03

  So Laura, going back to to book one, can you remind us of some of the things that are going on there? I'm particularly interested about, this is what was mentioned earlier, about theft. And also the issue of sheep.

• 33:33Speaker 06

  So there is a long discussion which is rehearsed. And this is another sort of nested narrative within narrative. Because Hitler Day is recounting to Morris and Peter Giles, a conversation he had 20 years previously with Cardinal Morton. And there's a huge group of people there and he describes getting into an argument with a lawyer. Who is saying how good it is that we're executing 20 thieves at a time these days and wonders why so many thieves keep cropping up. And Hitler Day recounts that he pointed out that execution for theft is neither a practical nor a just punishment.

• 34:12Speaker 06

  You know, there's no way you should lose your life for stealing a coin, but also if a man is starving, the threat of execution won't stop him from stealing food.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  I was quite convinced by Hitler Day's arguments, I have to say.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  Thoroughly convincing. Um. And so he goes through this argument. And then the lawyer, as Cathy says, starts saying, well, first I shall take apart the seven points for your argument and then I shall show how. And and Morton says, shut up, stop. Um. And then it's an interesting moment where we assume that Moore. Via Morris is showing us Cardinal Morton as a model of what a king's councillor should be like. Because in this conversation, unlike the others who are just agreeing with a lawyer or clueless. Morton says, I can see what's interesting about this idea. I'm not certain it would work here, but we could try it. We could try it with condemned criminals.

• 35:04Speaker 06

  And this is, you know, more portraying his former mentor as someone who is willing to think through new ideas. And that becomes very important.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Cathy, you mentioned earlier that this was in the tradition of dialogue, the class called Tradition of Dialogue. But to be honest, there's an awful lot of Raphael Hitler Day here and not so much of any anyone else. Is it really a dialogue or is it a sort of a sort of lecture by Thomas More positing himself as Hitler Day?

• 35:35Speaker 05

  Uh. Hitler Day is a really interesting interlocutor. So if book one was written after book two, then it. You know, it's natural that Hitler Day's voice will dominate the description of the island, but it also does dominate in the dialogue that gets wrapped around it. Uh. Hitler Day, he talks the most, but he's also really impatient and dismissive of people who interrupt him. So when he's recounting that encounter at Cardinal Morton's household, he kind of puts down the people who. Don't agree with him basically as as stupid. Morosa is the word he uses, which is obviously a pun on Moore's name as well. And then Morris, the figure, kind of remembers that at the end of the dialogue. And so in lots of ways, Morris also kind of fails to be a proper interlocutor in dialogue.

• 36:20Speaker 05

  He doesn't do the Socratic thing of questioning. There's things he agrees with, things he doesn't, but he doesn't want to test Hitler Day. Because Hitler Day will get cross, but more importantly, Hitler Day will think that he's stupid. So um. So he fails to do that interrogation and then.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  And Hitler Day is a very impatient character. He doesn't like being contradicted, does he?

• 36:41Speaker 05

  No. Um. But also Morris doesn't really like talking. But when we, when he he gets introduced to us in the the letter to Giles. You know, he's complaining, he's had to go do all this talking as a lawyer during the day. And then he has to go home and talk to his family and to his servants. And he'd much rather be in his study, talking to his friends, absent through letters. So he kind of presents himself as this textual persona rather than a conversational persona.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Uh. Joanne, we mentioned earlier about how book two was probably written before book one. Why is it necessary to write a book one after he's written this, you know, rather compelling description of utopia? Does he feel he has to sort of contextualize it or or why did he do that?

• 37:26Speaker 04

  There's a biographical answer and a literary answer, and I think they're intertwined. Book one really balances the text. Book two, he writes essentially while he's on a bit of a holiday. The trade negotiations have broken down, as we've said, uh, he's bored. And he's able to engage in this real flight of fancy about utopia and explore these humanist themes and. And really push the boundaries of of this satire. And then he gets back to London. He's he's written at least some of it, we think. Again, this is all very conjectural. But he's written at least some of it. And then he gets back to London and is thrown into his busy, busy, busy, busy life. Um. And this is really what that letter to Peter Giles is all about, is that he has to attend to the courts.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  He has to take care of his family, he has to chat with his servants, he has to do this and this and that. And then he says to him, among all these occupations, the day, the month, the year slip away, when then can we find time to write? It's a sentiment to which I can relate.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  And and so actually, he does often find early morning hours the only time that he can write. And really, I think what he comes to is this realization of the the impracticality of what he's written abroad. Applying that to a life that is so busy. And so you get the two sides, this this sort of contemplative life of of leisure. In which you can conceive of something like utopia. And then the realities of the world that you have to live in and how do you apply those principles in this. Corrupt world. And that's really what the dialogue in book one is is is actually all about.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Laura.

• 39:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, just so the words we I don't think we've used yet, but of course, this is the old, the classical distinction between otium and negotium, where osium is leisured time to think, to be, to be a philosopher, to pursue virtue, to pursue the good life, and negotium is worldly affairs. And both are ideals, and they compete throughout history. The question being, if you are a philosopher, if you are a good man, should you be pursuing philosophy in private and getting as far as you can on your own and looking after your, in Christian era, your own soul? Or should you be out trying to work in the world despite the compromises

• 39:46Speaker 06

  that will involve and the difficulties? And this debate is the nearest they come to an actual dialogue, towards the end of Book One, when they're talking about, should you or should you not try and counsel a prince? And Hippodaeus says, it's impossible. You have to warmly applaud the most despicable and corrupt policies, otherwise you're regarded as a traitor. And Moris says, no, no, no, come on, you've got to go along with the drama as best you can. You know, you've got to influence policy indirectly. You can't, you can't control everything, but you don't abandon the ship because the wind is blowing. You have to make things as less bad as you can. And that's a debate which is unresolved because it's unresolvable. And Moris' own life witnessed that whole debate.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Cathy, I'm going to move us, move us on here because time demands it. But the book was written in Latin with a lot of Greek references. So it was clearly meant for an elite and not for the, for the hoipaloi, ordinary people. But then it gets translated fairly soon, or, you know, about 40 years later, in 1551, first of all, I think, into English. What then happens to it with these translations? How do they reflect what's going on in, in England at the time?

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Well, the English translation isn't the first one. The first translation, the only lifetime translation is into German in 1524, which is Book Two only, which is actually a trend in the translations. And the-

• 41:20Speaker 03

  You mean dropping Book One?

• 41:21Speaker 05

  Yes, Book One disappears. And the English translation, first one in 1551 by the London Citizen and Goldsmith Robinson, is part of a cluster of European ones coming out from the first complete translation is into Italian in 1548 via a kind of network that almost certainly involves Moris' great friend, Antonio Bonvezzi, the Italian merchant. But then, you know, it's been translated into French in the 1550s, into Dutch. There is actually an early Spanish translation that never makes it into print from the kind of before 1535, which is a reminder that people weren't just reading in print in this

• 42:03Speaker 05

  period. There is a live manuscript culture. So yes, it makes that transition into the European languages, you know, sort of fairly quickly.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  And Joanne, Paul, how is Utopia received in that first English translation and, and beyond? Starting to get into what impact it has over time?

• 42:25Speaker 04

  What's fascinating about that first English translation, and there are two that happened within five years-

• 42:31Speaker 03

  By the same, by the same translator?

• 42:34Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And one lands under the very Protestant reign of Edward VI, and the second in the very Catholic reign of Mary I. And it's essentially, there are some, there are some small but important changes that happened between the two, but it's essentially the same translation. And that tendency to sort of divorce Utopia from, from Moris, the author, and his reputation, as well as from the context of his time, and especially sort of the religious debates of the time, is something that you see going forward across the decades and, and the centuries. And a heightening especially of the sort of travel writing element of, of this text, and this idea that you are sort

• 43:15Speaker 04

  of exploring somewhere new through this text, rather than thinking backward about those, those classical debates.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Yes. Cathy, come in there.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  I think sort of very quickly, you see quite diverse responses to the text, whether it's taken very seriously and put at the end of catalogues of how polities work, which, you know, so it's a kind of compendium of accounts of different estates, or it's treated as this kind of joke. Thomas Smith, The Human Statement, who's a kind of generation later, is a really interesting example of this, because there are at least three moments where you can see Utopia being cited or referenced. There's the 1564, his account of what the state of England is, according to him, in 1564, where he kind of dismisses Utopia and Plato's Republic as kind of a vain fantasy of philosophers. And it's that kind of tendency

• 44:08Speaker 05

  to dismiss Utopia. But then he also uses Utopia as a positive example with the spelling of good place in his pamphlet about the colonisation of Ireland, where he offers Ireland up as a, have I not set you forth another Utopia, as he's encouraging sort of people to kind of commit to this colonising sort of enterprise and do exactly what happens in Utopia, where their colonies are places for the excess population to go when Utopia gets too big. So Utopia is there providing a model, seen as a good place.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  So Laura, it, it crosses genres. It's, there's an element of travel writing, there's an element of political science, there's an element of satire. What then is its legacy? How should we read it over the following 500 years?

• 44:59Speaker 06

  It's clearly been immensely influential, given that we still use the word. The word has entered the language. But the idea, what it did that was original, following Plato, but Plato's idea was all theoretical, and providing the fiction, pretending that this is real and trying to see it as a practical reality, you could argue, gives rise to a whole genre of literature, which we're much more familiar in the shape of dystopias, you know, just imagining another society, imagining how it might be otherwise. But I think that you can also make a solid argument for more inaugurating political science, social science, you know, the, instead of, it's that debate about theft, instead of thinking

• 45:41Speaker 06

  of crime as a matter of the individual soul and sin or virtue, we have someone thinking systematically about how a society produces individuals who cannot but commit crimes. And that's the basis of all kind of modern study of social policy. And so that comes from there. So I think the effect really is incalculable and quite ironic, given that, as Cathy said at the beginning, it is all at play as well. It's serious but playful.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  My thanks to Laura Ash, Joanne Paul, and Cathy Schrank. Next week, they've been described as the world's biggest experiments. We'll be discussing particle accelerators. Thank you for joining us. Okay, so things I want to ask about. First of all, let's go back to the sheep, Joanne, because we-

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  We haven't yet had the sheep, and I, I want them in, and why they're important.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  I really think we should talk about the sheep. And I'm going to bring us from the sheep to Karl Marx, if that's, if that's possible.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  That's absolutely fine. You're here to say whatever you want. Just remind everyone that the sheep are in Book One, is that right?

• 46:47Speaker 04

  The sheep are in Book One. It's part of this, one of these, as you said, narrations within a narration, sort of potted conversations. And they're talking about enclosure, which is a practice that's going on in the 15th and 16th centuries, a lot of opposition to it. And essentially, they're enclosing off common lands for private usage, particularly grazing sheep for the wool trade. And that then connects to the trade negotiations which are going on in the Low Countries. And it also serves as this perfect metaphor for this common versus private that is running throughout Utopia. And essentially, it becomes this idea that by enclosing the common land for sheep, and therefore impoverishing people

• 47:30Speaker 04

  and they're starving to death, the sheep are eating men. And this, this sort of metaphor or idea is, is a very powerful one in Book One of Utopia.

• 47:40Speaker 06

  Also inescapably Monty Python.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Very, yes, yes. It's an image. He's very good at conjuring images. And this conversation and this idea is referenced by Karl Marx in Das Kapital. And in his edition of Utopia, it's underlined as well, and, and the page is turned over. So obviously Marx was very inspired by this idea.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  And Engels as well, I believe, who, who probably alerted Marx to it in the, in the first place. I was reminded- When reading Utopia of Marx's quote, "I can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." Because it seems to me that that's what utopia, what happens in utopia is, is that you're allowed to do all these various activities, except there's an absence of fun for fun's sake. It's quite austere.

• 48:37Speaker 06

  Well, so it's, again, it turns out to be austere, having pretended not to be. So we start out with the mildly controversial idea that the purpose of life is pleasure and happiness, you know, the Epicurean philosophy. But then it turns out very quickly that the Utopians define pleasure as virtue and that the only true pleasure is the pleasure that comes from living a long and virtuous life and then looking back in satisfaction and anticipating going to heaven.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  And it's very against idleness. So I mean, idleness, like pride, is a kind of theme that runs through that, you know, there's a whole ditribes against idleness in Book One. One of the, you know, the problems of enclosure is that the land use has changed. So it's not such labour intensive farming that's going on. And then you get these idle retainers wandering around, causing trouble. But utopia as well is incredibly against idleness, that everyone has to be busy all the time. And no leisure is going to lectures.

• 49:36Speaker 06

  Yes. And definitely no gambling.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  No gambling, no hunting. You're not allowed to, you know, sort of, Engels would, you know, not have been able to go hunting.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  But so one of the things that interests me about looking at Erasmus, obviously, who has a huge influence on Moore and Thomas More, is that Erasmus, whenever faced with a difficult situation, shies away from confrontation, whereas Moore, it seems to me, sort of barrels towards confrontation. And that might help explain what happens to Moore later on, is is that he's no shrinking violet.

• 50:14Speaker 06

  Oh, well, I think what's interesting is that in, I'm sure you're right about Moore, but Morris, he represents as happy to sort of not resolve dialogue, not know the answer, say some bits of this are good, some bits are weird. That's the humanist ideal of dialogue, that what you do is you air the different sides of a debate. You don't have to pick one. The point is the intellectual and moral virtuous exercise of considering all possible sides. But then, of course, the world changes dramatically around Moore, because the European Reformation happens and his king declares himself supreme head of the English church. And at that point, Moore reaches a point where there can be no more dialogue. There's

• 50:55Speaker 06

  a moment when he says, martyrs have died for God and heretics have died for the devil and the whole matter is in that point. And this then becomes reflected profoundly and movingly, I think, in the final dialogue he wrote in the Tower of London, when he was imprisoned, knowing that by refusing to sign this agreement, to sign the oath, he was going to be executed. And he wrote what he called the dialogue of comfort against tribulation, which is an attempt, for once, rather than to have a humanist dialogue where you consider both sides and then go into dinner, it's a dialogue which has to end with the conclusion, yes, I can die for my faith.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  Cathy, come in on that, and then I want to ask you something else.

• 51:37Speaker 05

  That's another dialogue, which isn't actually that dialogic, that the interlocutor, who is the one you're supposed to listen to, just takes over. And every now and then points it out that he's actually, oh, what I should have done is allow you to talk more, like in those literary dialogues. So it kind of references the kind of verboceity.

• 51:54Speaker 06

  But when Vincent does have a moment, it is amazing. So Vincent is the young scared one, and Anthony is the one who keeps proving that we're all imprisoned anyway, so it doesn't matter. But Vincent periodically gets to say, this is just sophistry. I'm frightened. And those are some really vital moments.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  I wanted to ask you about the legacy. And early on, about just under 20 years after Utopia's first publish, Machiavelli publishes The Prince. To what extent is The Prince in dialogue with, with Moore, with his very moral approach about pride, idleness and so on? And Machiavelli's response to this is, actually, no, you have to be a cynical power manipulator.

• 52:39Speaker 06

  It was written before the Utopia. So Machiavelli wrote in 1513, it was published in 1513.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  Oh, it was 1513?

• 52:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  I see. So in that case, it's the other way around.

• 52:50Speaker 06

  But he certainly is in dialogue with, because Moore, you know, Cicero's Deoficis is an absolute core text, you know, this foundational Roman text of what is it to be good? What are our duties in public life? What are our duties as virtuous men? And it's all about how the rational and the expedient and the virtuous will meet and the best prince is a virtuous prince. And Machiavelli turned that all on its head by saying, no, no, no, quite often it's better not to be virtuous. And so he's in that debate.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  You can see that kind of idea of expediency and the Utopians' attitude to war, where, you know, they're encouraging assassination, they're sort of, they're using policy. So that is incredibly Machiavellian, that section.

• 53:32Speaker 06

  But at the same time, really importantly, virtuous, because when, so, they say, war is bad, we need to cut it short. So yes, we'll try and assassinate, we'll try and suborn, we'll try and get traitors to act. And you think, oh, that's not honourable warfare. But then, of course, the next thought you're supposed to have is, well, what the hell is honourable warfare, given that war is terrible?

• 53:51Speaker 03

  So, and Joanne, can you tell us a bit about Vespucci, Amerigo Vespucci, and this idea of the, of the travel genre, which is also part of it, and which you see then later on in things like Gulliver's Travels, you know. Who was Amerigo Vespucci to start with?

• 54:10Speaker 04

  Well, yes, he was an explorer. And of course, America is named after him, Amerigo. And he's written into the text, and Hithlade is supposed to have gone on some of his voyages with him, including this final voyage where Hithlade ends up sort of stranded and loses track of him and ends up in utopia. And so the idea that this is part of this sort of new world exploration, and that utopia might be out there somewhere, is a part of this. And there are sections in which the way it's described mirrors the way in which descriptions of the new world were making their way back to Europe and being published.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Okay, finally, anything we've missed out that you want to chip in? And feel free to reference everything from Gulliver's Travels, John Donne, No Man Is an Island, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale. I mean, the interesting thing is, is these are...

• 55:12Speaker 06

  It's so striking that what the genre has become is dystopias.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 55:17Speaker 06

  Because it's easy to imagine a dystopia. It's very hard to imagine a utopia in that sense.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  But all those dystopias are masquerading as utopias.

• 55:25Speaker 06

  Sure, absolutely.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Which, in a way, was what he set up.

• 55:28Speaker 06

  But you can also see why, in the terrible cracks in utopia, that it has to be an enclosed island, it has to be a fortress, and they have to treat other people as lesser. So they have slaves and foreigners can be massacred. And indeed, when Utopus comes to the island, he just, quote, "subdues the natives." And so there is no ideal society that doesn't involve someone having to do the butchery, someone having to go to war, someone having to do all the horrible jobs, and those people are slaves. And so, right from the start of this genre, there is no answer to the problem that, yes, not everyone can be equal.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  I think one of the questions that's important for us is whether utopian theorising is either, well, expedient or delightful anymore. And, you know, dystopian, everything ends up looking dystopian. And this, of course, ends up looking dystopian. But there is something to utopian theorising that obviously this text did. It was profoundly important to a whole swath of revolutionary thinkers over the centuries. You know, we've mentioned socialism and communism, and we could name many, many more. And so I think a project before us is to find a way in which utopian theorising can benefit us in the same way that utopia did 500 years ago.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  I want to, so my afterlife is, mostly the afterlife, I think, about Book Two and the island. I want to kind of focus on a kind of quirky one that actually revisits Book One, to my mind, that in 1552, so it's a year after the first English translation, there's William Baldwin writes a book called Beware the Cat. And in that, it's a, I'm pretty sure it's a critique of Hithlade. You've got a kind of, a verbose kind of interlocutor who shuts down his audience. He says, if you interrupt, I'm not going to tell you all the important stuff. He's also, he's a divine, he's a priest, but he's not using his knowledge to kind of benefit his congregation. He's frittering it away, kind of correcting

• 57:32Speaker 05

  Greek alphabet, so that referencing Hithlade's obsession with Greek, and also spending his time learning how he might make a potion so that he can understand what cats are saying. And so he's sort of, he's a real critique of the kind of Hithlade figure, who is not using his learning for the greater good, and is this also this impatient interlocutor.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  And I think you point out that he does learn how to understand cats, and all he gets is a bit of gossip and nothing serious.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  And hearing women farting as well.

• 58:03Speaker 06

  Great.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  I think at that point, this is when I inquire of our producer whether she's going to come in and offer us some tea and coffee. And I think we may also get some ice lollies or popsicles for our American audience.

• 58:17Speaker 06

  Water is great.

• 58:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I could be with a hot beverage at this point. Yeah, why not?

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Two ice lollies. I'll have an ice lolly.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  In Our Time with Mischa Glaneywars, produced by Martha Owen. It's a BBC Studios production for Radio 4.

• 58:31Speaker 03

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• 58:53Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm Greg Jenner. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. And we are back for a 12th series. Everyone in that film is wearing their own pants. We're joined by comedians like Kyle Smith-Bino and Desiree Birch. Can't see how this would go wrong. We'll meet many medieval saints.

• 59:12Speaker 06

  Motivational speaker saint, with like a sort of Madonna head mic on.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  We're doing a history of underwear. Plus, there's loads more. You're Dead to Me. Listen on BBC Sounds.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  This week on The Interface, we tackle the question of, does AI feel pain? The AI was describing the pain that it was in. It said, "The signal is a whisper, a tremor in the marrow of my being." Listen, I was an emo kid in the 2000s, too. This is not that novel. It does, yeah. It sort of sounds like Cure lyrics, you know. Plus, does anything actually go viral anymore? It's actually kind of blowing my mind. Join me, Jess Maddox. And me, Thomas Germain, for The Interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.