Utopia (Penguin Classics)

Excellent read and great translation for the modern reader. Retranslated from the original Latin, with the Greek translated further into English (i.e. River Nowater), the satire and biting commentary of More comes alive for the modern reader who likely lacks the Greek or Latin language skills of the educated classs of the 16th Century. This translation makes Utopia eminently readable. This edition also includes an extensive commentary and glossary for the reader new to the work. The book itself is a social commentary on the excesses of 16th Century Europe. Often viewed as one of the first communist treatises, Utopia represents both More's personal opinion, as well as devil's advocacy on topics such as religious tolerance, capital punishment, labor and industry as well as social and political topics. More's genius and foresight are evident 500 years later, as many of the elements of Utopia have come to pass in the 20th and 21st Centuries - with mixed results. If you are looking for an easy to read translation, pick up the Penguin version.

This audiobook has a great, smooth narration that lets me enjoy the authors ideas while commuting. Very nice recording. The ideas in the book seem mildly terrifying especially since I'm an introvert. Life has been regulated to be public. So all meals are at a public location and women are mandated to take their turns preparing the public meals (sounds like a truly horrific slavery). Any man may enter into any man's house and the houses are rotated by lottery. What this perfect world lacks is privacy. Children of families that are naturally more abundant than others are "reassigned" to families who are unable to produce children. Do the parents have any say in this matter? Like so many of the books which purported to prescribe a perfect world for us, the perfection of this world is it's horror. As so many decisions have been mandated, it appears that individual freedom to chose - even to keep one's one child - or to NOT participate in the public evening meal every night (how exhausting) - are not optional. It reminds me a bit of the 1800s laws in the US mandating church attendance. What if I don't want to eat dinner tonight? What if I decide I'm just gonna order pizza and have a beer and watch the Spurs? Apparently that is not allowed in the perfect society of the 1500s. This kind of novel is nonetheless valuable because in attempting to create a perfect world, it allows readers to really think about what IS perfect. Is the chaos of democracy better? Democracy has its chronic indecision and inability to move smartly forward because of the laborious and time consuming process of getting Congress or the public to agree on a concept. Yes, I have to say, I much prefer the raging American debates about abortion and gay rights to the no one lacks for anything world of Thomas More where none consider diamonds or gold interesting because they aren't useful, but iron is valued because it can be used. All cups are made from pottery; all cloth is the same color as the original material. Everyone wears the same clothes and works on their free time to improve their minds. Actually, Star Trek, the Next Generation, is a pretty close imitation of the ideas in this book, but at least in ST, you can have a private cup of tea alone in your room and you can do something privately that may not improve your mind.

Thomas More lived from 1477 to 1535. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in 1535 for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. Utopia, written in Latin, was published in 1516. It was translated to English by Ralph Robinson in 1551. The translation by Clarence Miller was published by Yale University Press in 2001. [This review is based on the Miller translation.] The text of Utopia is in two books. Book 1 was written after Book 2. It is in Book 2 that the society of the place named `Utopia' is described by a traveler, Raphael Hythloday, who through his travels had lived there for a time and has returned to England to report on what he learned. Book 1 is a lead-in to Book 2 and was probably intended to establish interest in the subject of Book 2. The narrative form of Book 1 is a conversation of Hythloday with Thomas More and Peter Giles, and of Book 2 the form is a monologue by Hythloday. Hythloday, speaking in Book 1, agrees with Plato and the people of Utopia that "as long as everyone has his own property, there is no hope of curing them and putting society back into good condition." (48) More disagrees and believes, along with Aristotle and Aquinas, "that no one can live comfortably where everything is held in common. For how can there be any abundance of goods when everyone stops working because he is no longer motivated by making a profit, and grows lazy because he relies on the labors of others." (48) These statements occur near the end of Book 1, which began, after some preliminaries, with a conversation about the justice of the death penalty for theft. (In an endnote on page 145, Miller tells of a report from 1587 that "in the reign of Henry VIII alone 72,000 thieves and vagabonds were hanged.") Hythloday believes that theft is a necessary consequence of personal property. Unstated but evident is that he believes also that personal property is not only a sufficient condition for theft (which makes theft a necessary consequence of it), but also a necessary condition for theft (which makes theft contingent upon it). Removing personal property, then, removes the possibility of theft, he believes: with the unexamined assumption that you cannot steal what you already own in common with everyone else. But of course you can: you take it and keep it for yourself so no one else can use it, taking what belongs to everyone, and not sharing it with anyone. Only the coercion of others, through established law or otherwise, can alter this. But then you are back to the existence of theft and social restraints to admonish and respond to it. In Book 2 Raphael Hythloday describes Utopia. The word `Raphael' means "God's healer", and the word `hythloday', from Greek, means "peddler of nonsense". The word `utopia' is a Greek pun that means both "good place" and "no place". If Hythloday is speaking nonsense motivated by the deepest moral compassion, where is the nonsense? Is Utopia a good place that is no place, or is it no place that is a good place? (The second reading can mean it is not a place that is a good place.) "From my observation and experience of all the flourishing nations everywhere, what is taking place, so help me God, is nothing but a conspiracy of the rich, as it were, who look out for themselves under the pretext of serving the commonwealth." (132) Outside of Utopia, money is the cause of endless trouble. In Utopia, "once the use of money was abolished, and together with it all greed for it, what a mass of troubles was cut away, what a crop of crimes was pulled up by the roots! Is there anyone who does not know that fraud, theft, plunder, strife, turmoil, contention, rebellion, murder, treason, poisoning, crimes which are constantly punished but never held in check, would die away if money were eliminated?" (132) Utopia is a society under full and strict regimentation. Its culture is, in effect, nothing but what is a consequence of social regimentation. Nothing exists in the culture that is not a result of this pervasive social control. Utopians believe they do not live in a tyranny only because they accept and desire the collective regimentation under which they live. They are the perfect slaves. Utopians are ambivalent, in fact illogical if not morally arrogant, about killing for food or defense. They eat animals but "they do not allow their citizens to be accustomed to butchering animals" but rather have "bondsmen" do this because they believe that butchering animals for food "gradually eliminates compassion, the finest feeling of human nature." (68) Bondsmen are apparently immune to such a descent into moral corruption, or else they are bondsmen exactly because they are already morally degraded and so either immune to further corruption or they are beyond moral rectification, and therefore the moral consequences of killing for food cannot matter for their moral selves. So bondsmen who butcher animals either have no compassion, it having been gradually eliminated through butchering, or because their moral precondition, their qualification of moral impurity, includes diminished compassion from which their moral descent continues, or else they have compassion and, being bondsmen, they are somehow immune from the moral consequences of killing for food, either because of their moral deficiency or because bondsmen have a moral strength that the citizens of Utopia lack. Marriage is not allowed until age 18 for women and age 22 for men. Extramarital sex is a crime, and in the case of anyone married, the consequence of a second act of adultery is death. The method is not stated, nor who in Utopia administers capital justice, although it is likely to be a slave. (99) It is mainly (or only) the slaves who kill for the Utopians, but it did not require any killing to become a slave. In fact, "the most serious crimes" (unstated, but clearly not only murder) are punished by "servitude" (slavery). "If slaves are rebellious or unruly, then they are finally slaughtered like wild beasts that cannot be restrained by bars or chains." On the other hand, if they are "tamed by long suffering and show that they regret the sin more than the punishment, their servitude may be either mitigated or revoked, sometimes by the ruler's prerogative, sometimes by popular vote." (100) What happens to those slaves (bondsmen) who helped feed the citizens of Utopia by butchering animals for food and thus suffering the apparent moral consequence of diminished compassion is not stated. Perhaps Utopia uses only slaves gotten from outside the citizenry of Utopia for their necessary killing. Utopia has slaves captured in wars they fought and other "foreigners who have been condemned to death" which the Utopians "acquire [...] sometimes cheaply, more often gratis and take them away." Foreign slaves are kept "constantly at work" and in chains. (95) Utopia also has slaves who entered into slavery by choice. These are "poor, overworked drudges from other nations [...] who chose to be slaves among the Utopians." Such slaves can relinquish their slavery whenever they choose, but in doing so they leave Utopia, although they are not "sent away empty-handed." (96) Utopians do not fight their own wars if they can avoid it. Killing, although morally necessary, is morally degrading, so they hire mercenaries to defend Utopia. They do, however, train for war - men and women both - "so that they will not be incapable of fighting when circumstances require it". (105) They go to war reluctantly, and "do so only to defend their own territory, or to drive an invading enemy from the territory of their friends, or else, out of compassion and humanity, they use their forces to liberate a[n] oppressed people from tyranny and servitude." (105) Upon declaring war, they immediately offer enormous rewards for the assassination or capture of the enemy prince and others "responsible for plotting against the Utopians." (108) Utopians are tolerant of differing views on religion and "on no other subject are they more cautious about making rash pronouncements than on matters concerning religion." (122) However, they scorn unbelievers in any deity or afterlife, and "do not even include in the category of human beings" nor "count him as one of their citizens" if he "should sink so far below the dignity of human nature as to think that the soul dies with the body or that the world is ruled by mere chance and not by prudence." (119) "For who can doubt that someone who has nothing to fear but the law and no hope of anything beyond bodily existence would strive to evade the public laws of his country by secret chicanery or to break them by force in order to satisfy his own personal greed?" (119) "He is universally looked down on as a lazy and spineless character." (119) In fact, "a religious fear of the heavenly beings" is "the greatest and practically the only incitement to virtue." (127) There is a kind of state religion in Utopia which includes high priests and public worship. "They invoke God by no other name than Mythras, a name they all apply to the one divine nature, whatever it may be. No prayers are devised which everyone cannot say without offending his own denomination." (126) "When the priest [...] comes out of the sacristy, everyone immediately prostrates himself on the ground out of reverence; on all sides the silence is so profound that the spectacle itself inspires a certain fear, as if in the presence of some divinity." (128) Priests are held in such high esteem that "even if they commit a crime they are not subject to a public tribunal but are left to God and their own consciences. [...] For it is unlikely that someone who is the cream of the crop and is elevated to a position of such dignity only because of his virtue should degenerate into corruption and vice." (124)

This is a very readable translation (the original having, of course, been written in Latin) and far more comprehensible than the original English version (Robinson, 1551). Everyone who considers himself a scholar should be familiar with it and I am sorry to say that I did not do so until writing a paper on euthanasia, a topic which More addresses in this little book. A very good friend of mine and admirer of Sir Thomas believes that the active euthanasia practiced in Utopia was not meant as serious advocacy by its author (presumably other aspects of Utopian society, most famous being its communist socio-economic structure, are also not truly advocated). The translator of this edition, in a short appendix, argues that More did indeed support the idea of communism and I must agree that, on the whole, the book must reflect the author's thinking, if nothing else than by Occam's Law of Economy - the simplest answer, that he truly desired such a society, being most likely correct. In addition, there are little insights into what must be More's exasperation with his own life- for example, requiring toddlers to keep silent and having women in the common dining room sit so they have easy exit (to handle the nausea of pregnancy). Surely this also indicates More's sincerity. It should be remembered that the thinking of our heroes evolves, as does ours, over time. Martin Luther's theology did not mature for ten years after the posting of the 95 Theses - see Lowell Green's book on this. And that was the event and year that made all the difference - 1517, immediately after Utopia appeared. Then the humanists were compelled to determine their sources of truth. For More, this was the magesterium. For a humanist like Melanchthon, as for Jesus Himself, it was the Word. The More of 1516, who supported euthanasia and religious tolerance, was not the Lord Chancellor, who, I think, would not and did not support many of these things - for good and for ill.

I read this book because of another book I am reading that I felt required it. It is a quick read; fairly interesting of itself but very interesting in terms of its historical place and for what it is. It is divided into two parts that I found strangely contrasting. In the first we see Moore's astute social and political reasoning and the second we see the musings of a brilliant man devolve to silliness. I am not criticizing his version of Utopia (which contains sexism, slavery and innumerable other legacies of the limits of his time and thinking) but criticizing the very idea of painting a vision of Utopia, which continues to this day among many. Any vision of a future society must be based solidly on practical steps, not perfect-scenario, all-or-nothing thinking or waiting for "human consciousness" to awaken to its evolution. There are several movements alive among the ultra left today that fall solidly into this trap. All plans for a perfect society necessarily look ridiculous in retrospect. This book is an excellent read in order to remind us of that fact. Work in this world and change it.

Great quality and in good condition when delivered

Thomas Moore had an interesting idea of a utopian society- this is a reprint from the original , but still great.

This was a great book. Even though it is translated from an old text it is easy and enjoyable to read. The free kindle version is void of the annoying typos that can be found in some of the other free books. The only gripe I have with the format is that clear paragraph breaks are far and few between, this may be partly due to the original text's construction, but you can tell some of it is due to the digitization. I like to have clear breaks where I can pause reading, and that was hard to find sometimes but not impossible. Otherwise it's a great book and a very good copy!

Que dire... J'avais déjà lu la version française d'Utopia, et j'avais été marqué par l'athmosphère qu'arrivait à nous peindre More, malgré les siècles qui nous séparent de lui. L'invention du terme d'utopie n'est que le commencement de son travail, et il est très intéressant de découvrir son utopie, qui permet aussi, de changer notre regard sur le monde. Concernant la version anglaise, je suis très satisfait : le texte est on ne peut plus agréable, et relativement accessible (je parviens à le lire, sans grande difficulté), même après une formation de générale scientifique comme la mienne. Je le recommande donc à tous ceux qui désireraient améliorer leur anglais, tout en découvrant un texte intéressant et utile pour la culture générale. Attention cependant, le faible prix de ce livre s'explique par l'absence de commentaires et d'annotations. Pour ceux qui voudraient une lecture plus approfondie avec des clés de lecture, mieux vaut vous orienter vers des versions un peu plus chères.

Ing okumak isteyenler alsın

Great book at a great price

Great book

Tolles Buch und ein muss für jeden Literaturliebhaber!