Thomas More’s Utopia: Sources, Legacy and Interpretation

Abstract

Against a background of contested interpretative complexity, Chapter 8 explores More’s Utopia as an attempt to address the problems of the good life in both contemporary society and an imagined alternative and to explore how the optimum state of a commonwealth could be built around deficient human beings. More drew on three types of resource: classical learning, the ‘possibilities’ opened by the discovery of the New World, and the metaphor of the theatre as furnishing inspiration for alternative paradigms. Central to Utopia was a claim that people always act rationally in pursuit of their perceived interests. Could society be restructured so that those perceptions motivated socially productive, rather than destructive, outcomes? Could a society of friends, rather than mutually competitive enemies, be imaginatively realised? Can wisdom and power ever be reconciled?