Context
- Publication: Printed in English by Abraham Vele. EEBO link.
- Scholarship: Scholarship on Utopia addresses the book's humanism, the status of counsel, religious freedom, communism, rhetoric, and other matters of politics and religion.
- Why I'm reading it: The Canon, economics, history of religion.
Content
- Form: A discourse in two parts: first, Raphael Hythloday comes to England and meets Cardinal Morton, with whom he discourses on the state of England; second, Hythloday describes the workings of Utopia.
- Genre: (Political) Discourse.
- Conceit: Hythloday recommends that England reduce its violence (war, capital punishment) and inequality (enclosure, gambling, commodity prices). Then Hythloday explains the organization of Utopia (54 shires, 30 families per shire, one town per shire, one councilman per town, one elected prince, semi-weekly meetings), the Utopian economy (guild system, academics, labor rotation, communism, distaste for precious metals), health (vice is replaced with profitable recreation, slaves slaughter cattle, hospitals care for the sick, communities dine together, the elderly are favored), domestic law (slavery replaces the death penalty for crimes such as adultery, companionate marriage is encouraged but limited by age) foreign policy (enemies are bribed and divided, rather than conquered), and religious tolerance (Christianity survives alongside other faiths, but atheism and secularism are forbidden).
- Other notes:
- Ironic detachment from Hythloday ("nonsense-talker") and Utopia ("nowhere").
- Profoundly Aristotelian understanding of wealth: no reserve value, and actually a weapon against less-enlightened peoples.
- Education as entertainment.
- Despite the passing reference to religious tolerance, most of the practices described resemble austere western Christianity.
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