Resident of Earth

“…it would be a very dangerous matter if a man were found to be wiser in any point than his forefathers were. As a matter of fact, we quietly neglect the best examples they have left us; but if something better is proposed, we seize the excuse of reverence for times past and cling to it desperately.”

Thomas More, Utopia, 1516

Since its conception amid the humanist ferment of sixteenth-century Europe, Thomas More’s Utopia has undergone an extraordinary evolution. Historians, literary scholars, fiction writers, political scientists, and artists alike constantly breathe new life into the Utopian discourse. Originally published in 1516, Utopia has been variously read as a hilarious satire of contemporary issues, a sincere proposal for political reform, an allegory of Christian morality, and even a precursory socialist vision. Amazingly, after 500 years of debate, there remains little to no consensus on the meaning of Utopia, More’s intentions in writing it, nor its place on the fact-fiction spectrum. As generations of readers project new hopes and anxieties onto it, the book has served as a mirror of cultural, political, and philosophical currents, revealing not what Utopia meant, but what it continues to make possible in the political imagination.

The first essential question in understanding Utopia: Was it a work of fact, fiction, or some complex interplay of both? To explore this question, scholars have interrogated the humanist circle that interacted with Utopia’s early editions as well as parsed the elements of the story that were based on reality. The mean interpretation, being that there is no clear mode, is that there were some truthful pieces, but that the story is mostly fictitious. No clear consensus has emerged, either, about whether More intended for Utopia to be received as fact or fiction. Phillip Wegner aptly articulated this in saying that Utopia contains “a fundamental undecidability” but “can just as readily be turned on its head and used as a basis for a most definitive answer to the question of More’s intentions.” The subsequent question: What portion of Utopian values and ideologies can be attributed to More? In the twentieth century, scholarship landed on the dominant interpretation that Utopia was a vessel for More’s subtle criticisms and suggestions for reform, situated safely in the literary genre. Most scholars do reject the idea that Utopia was a wholesale prescription for the ideal commonwealth.

Years before he became Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, and much longer still before he was canonized as Saint Thomas More, the author of Utopia was known mostly for his classical erudition. Thomas More was a scholar among scholars, embedded in the circle of Erasmus and other Renaissance humanists who sought to revive classical learning and moral reform. In 1516, More took his cue from his contemporaries and published what became a prolific satire. Unsurprisingly, these same prominent humanists played an integral role in the initial reception of Utopia. The first edition, printed in Leuven, contained prefatory letters and inclusions from a number of More’s circle, including Peter Giles, Gerhard Noviomagus, Cornelius Grapheus, John Paludanus, and Jerome Busleiden. Guillaume Bude’s letter appeared in the second edition, and eventually, in the third edition, a letter from Erasmus found its way to publication. Scholars of Utopia have long debated the function of the prefatory letters. Were the letters simply part of a literary ruse, or a genuine corroboration of More’s narrative? 

The ambiguity of the text’s form, characters, and backdrop lends it to such polar interpretations as all fact or all fiction. In Book I, More recounts his actual trip to Antwerp, where he meets Peter Giles and is introduced to the fictional traveler Raphael Hythloday. Utopia is cast as a dialogue between Raphael and More himself. The self-referential aspect of the narrative as well as the inclusion of other recognizable characters, Peter Giles and John Morton, may have made the story more believable to sixteenth-century readers. Details such as these grounded Utopia enough to blur the line between real and imaginary. In addition to these deliberate narrative choices, Peter R. Allen posits that the corroborative letters were simply an extended metaphor– a game that the circle of humanists was intimately familiar with and could engage in at ease. Though the letters and autobiographical details may have confused readers, Allen assures that the humanists were in on the joke and that the other “primary aim of these letters and verses is to identify Utopia as a humanist document within the growing forces of this movement.” Regardless of whether the humanists approved of the ideas, it is generally accepted that the letters were a ruse. 

The most saturated debate about Utopia as fact or as fiction, though, is the discussion on More’s intellectual influences. Was More’s fictional island inspired by the “discovery” of the New World, or did it merely use the unknown frontier as a canvas to project critiques of European society onto? One view argues that More used the unknownness of the Americas as an opportunity to air his qualms with European institutions. From this perspective, Utopia says less about the state of people in the Americas and more about More’s tensions with European institutions. On the other hand, it can be said that the Utopians were heavily based upon Indigenous Americans, especially as depicted by Amerigo Vespucci. The evidence that More read and engaged with reports of Spanish exploration beyond Vespucci is scant. However, the reference to Vespucci’s Four Voyages in Utopia speaks enough to the fact that More probably did consider the Indigenous Americans, if only as an opportunity to provide commentary on heathenism.

Utopia occupied two spaces- satire and the imagined New World- that were permeable enough for the book to defy constraint. Whether More intended the book as a joke, purely fiction, and did not believe in any of the Utopian ideals, or whether he intended it as a candid evaluation of European errors, the result was a new intellectual tradition that remains relevant after half a millennium. In this intellectual tradition, the imagined space is a forum for discourses of reform, discontent, and innovation. 

It is by way of this abstraction of Thomas More’s Utopia that reform movements of the nineteenth century called themselves utopian socialists. The influence of Thomas More’s Utopia on Enlightenment social reform and European colonization of the Americas is a vital and fascinating link in the history of sociopolitical thought. The circumstances that bred the hybrid invention of utopian socialism are two-pronged. The first condition is the importation of the utopian intellectual and literary traditions to America. The second is the reinterpretation by Enlightenment thinkers and social theorists of Utopia as a prelude to communism. These two byproducts of Utopia joined and lent themselves to the American utopian socialist movement of the nineteenth century.

While More’s work is often viewed as a literary satire, it also laid the conceptual groundwork that utopian socialists later adapted to critique the inequalities of their own societies and imagine radically different alternatives. During the Enlightenment– and before the dominant interpretation reverted to an emphasis on More’s Christianity– Utopia was reinterpreted as advocating reason, social planning, and improvement through education and civic virtue. Following this shift in thought, social theorists read Utopia as anticipating Enlightenment ideals. Karl Kautsky, a Marxist theorist, even interpreted Utopia as a proto-communist manifesto.

In the broader American political frontier, unimpeded by Monarchy, nineteenth-century socialists and labor reformers drew upon utopian sources as they developed critiques of capitalism and inequality. More’s Utopia displayed communal labor, short working hours, universal education, and the abolition of private property; these features resonated strongly with social reformers.

Due to its unique position on the borderlands of fact and fiction, Utopia has defied disciplinary boundaries. Phillip Wegner, once again, concisely expressed the very central issue of genre in utopian studies; he explains that utopian narratives, like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward “helped mediate the passage between changing definitions of collective national identity” in America. Recent scholarship has embraced Utopia using interdisciplinary lenses to place it both historically and socially. The nineteenth-century creation of utopian and dystopian literature marked the beginning of what has since become known as “utopian studies.” Despite drawing its name and some defining characteristics– most importantly, the literary ones– from More’s Utopia, utopian studies is the least historically focused interpretation of More’s work. Utopian studies operates in an interdisciplinary space with heavy influences from literary analysis, fiction writing, performance and visual arts, history, sociology, anthropology, and political science. Although historians may view this space as ahistorical, presentist, or only tangentially related to the historical discipline, it is a critical framework for understanding many nineteenth and twentieth-century histories. 

Fiction in the style of More’s Utopia existed long before the genre gained a name for itself in the science fiction works of the nineteenth century. Works such as Arcadia, Oceana, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels employed similar techniques as Utopia, especially in their reflection of contemporary social, political, and religious tensions. Tom Moylan describes the genre of utopian fiction as having a tendency “to go where others haven’t (at least not in ways acknowledged within the purview of those who are inclined to settle for the world as they immediately and unreflectively see it and know it).” Early and modern examples of utopian literature share in common their critical undercurrents. They allow contemporary readers to imagine worlds parallel to their own but which have been untouched by the real world influences that cause corruption, whatever they may be. As More utilized the unknown landscape of the Americas as a backdrop for his commentary on Late Medieval Europe, Edward Bellamy used the future as a backdrop for his commentary on the United States’ Gilded Age. B.F. Skinner likewise used the fictional intentional community, Walden Two, as a vessel for his ideas about new directions for behavioral science and psychology. An author’s ability to identify a blank canvas, a new frontier, on which to project their real-world commentary is the pulse of utopianism.

As a response to the burgeoning field of utopian literature, authors such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood implicitly and explicitly positioned their works as responses to the dangers of utopian thinking. Tom Moylan defines dystopianism as the twentieth-century shadow movement to utopianism. While utopian fiction suspends disbelief in hopes of imagining how the world might be, dystopian fiction reintroduces corrupt real-world influences. Just as More himself was skeptical of Raphael Hythloday for his ivory-tower inventions that had little to do with reality, the dystopian movement is wary of the “in a perfect world” trope. In Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, eugenics takes a front seat in a biting critique on the eradication of human pain and pleasure for the sake of conformity. Shortly thereafter, in 1949, Orwell published 1984, which landed similar critiques on the dangers of conformity through a focus on totalitarianism, propaganda, and state surveillance. In 1985, Margaret Atwood published her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which introduced gender hierarchy and religion as central threads in the web of oppression. Although both the utopian and dystopian genres present critiques on the material world, utopian fiction denies the human factor while dystopian fiction centers it.

The sociopolitical characteristic of utopianism is reflected in the work of sociologists, anthropologists, and critical theorists. Mid-twentieth-century scholars began to emphasize the injustices and contradictions in Utopia, especially in light of World War II, the ideological divides of the Cold War, and modern social movements. Thomas More almost certainly did not conceive of his book opening conversations on critical race theory, gender and sexuality, or indigeneity; these modern tools of analysis have been overlaid on Utopia as a means of better understanding the human condition. Some of the most promising new scholarship utilizes interdisciplinary models and intersectional lenses. Lyman Tower Sargent, a prominent political scientist, argues that “there are, of course, differences about what belongs within the constellation of ideas, concepts, and literary genres that hover around Utopia, but there is something like a consensus that there is such a constellation.” Within this web, there are as many definitions of utopia as there are pieces of scholarship. 

Utopia is a work in perpetual reinterpretation. Once heralded as a model of humanist optimism, it has also been viewed as a totalitarian caution, a religious allegory, and a sophisticated satire. Today, we continue to debate whether Utopia is primarily an earnest proposal, an ironic critique, or somehow a mix of both—a tension that keeps More’s work relevant in discussions of political idealism, reform, and the limits of human imagination. What makes Utopia distinct from that of any other work of Renaissance satire is its proclivity to take on entirely new meaning with every generation. Utopia was, itself, once a frontier for the imagination of sixteenth-century humanists, but as readers searched for their own utopias, the word became representative of any new frontier that allowed for the critical reexamination of the status quo. 

Further Reading:

Allen, Peter R. “Utopia and European Humanism: The Function of the Prefatory Letters and Verses.” In Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963).

Blackledge, Paul. “Karl Kautsky and Marxist Historiography.” Science & Society 70, no. 3 (2006): 337–59. 

Cave, Alfred A. “Thomas More and the New World.” In Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 23, no. 2 (1991).

Chambers, R.W. “The Meaning of Utopia.” In Utopia, 2nd ed. Edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Guarneri, Carl J. “The Americanization of Utopia: Fourierism and the Dilemma of Utopian Dissent in the United States.” In Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 72–88. 

Hexter, J. H. “The Roots of Utopia and All Evil.” In Utopia, 2nd ed. Edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Kautsky, Karl. Thomas More and His Utopia. Translated by H. J. Stenning. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927. 

Kumar, Krishan. “Utopian Thought and Communal Practice: Robert Owen and the Owenite Communities.” Theory and Society 19, no. 1 (1990): 1–35. 

Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Five Hundred Years of Thomas More’s Utopia and Utopianism.” In Utopian Studies 27, no. 2 (2016): 184–92. 

Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37.

Skinner, Quentin. “Review of More’s Utopia, by Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter.” In Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 153–68. 

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Wegner, Phillip E. “Genre and the Spatial Histories of Modernity.” In Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity, 1-26. University of California Press, 2002.

Wegner, Phillip E. “Utopia and the Birth of Nations.” In Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity, 27–61. University of California Press, 2002.