Utopia

What It Is

A short Latin book, published in Louvain in 1516 with Erasmus's help and under 150 pages long. Thomas More was a London lawyer and a rising royal servant. He wrote the descriptive part first, during an embassy to Antwerp, then went home and added the opening dialogue.

It is a fiction with a frame, and More builds himself into it: he appears as a character, alongside his real friends, receiving an account of a place he has invented. He gave that place an alphabet, a language and a history, and then argued with his own creation. The prefatory letters at the front of the book are part of the joke.

The title is the first clue and it is a good one. Ou-topos means no place. It puns on eu-topos, good place. More was a humanist and a lawyer, and he does not intend to let you settle.

Why It Matters

It named a genre and a mode of political thought. Every imagined society since — Bacon, Fourier, Marx's followers, Bellamy, Morris, Huxley, Orwell, Le Guin — is written in relation to this book, whether it knows it or not.

What it contains was startling in 1516, and a good deal of it would still be startling at a dinner table now. And it was written by the man who as Lord Chancellor prosecuted heretics with real enthusiasm, went to the block rather than accept his king as head of the church, and was made a saint in 1935.

So: blueprint, satire, humanist exercise, or a lawyer's brief for a position he does not personally hold? Nineteenth-century socialists claimed him. The Catholic church canonised him. Both readings survive contact with the text, which is exactly what More arranged.

And Book One is not a warm-up. It is where the book's hardest question gets put, and it is a question More lived inside and eventually died of. It runs under every page of what follows.

Before You Read

Three or four hours. The Latin is elegant; every decent translation is easy going.

Bring your irony and keep it where you can reach it. Nearly every name in the book is a joke in Greek. Almost nothing in it means what it appears to mean, down to the place names and the narrator's own. More is telling you something, and telling it in Greek so that only his friends will hear. A good edition footnotes all of this. A bad one leaves it silent, and you lose half the book.

Read the prefatory letters. They are not front matter. They are the fiction beginning.

Which Translation to Read

• Clarence H. Miller (Yale University Press, 2001; second edition 2014) — recommended. The most accurate English version and the one most alert to More's tone, from a scholar who spent a career inside More's Latin. Miller catches the Greek jokes and explains them, prints the ancillary letters, and never flattens the irony into either satire or manifesto. Less racy than Turner, more precise than anyone. The cost: he is careful rather than sparkling, and the apparatus is unmistakably academic. View on Amazon →
• George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, revised edition, 2002). The standard student edition and the best on the political thought and the humanist context. The cost: the translation is freer, and the notes serve the political theory rather than the comedy.
• Paul Turner (Penguin Classics, 1965). By some distance the funniest and fastest read. Turner anglicises the Greek names so an English reader hears the puns as More's first readers did. The cost: anglicising the names is also a real loss, and the edition is thin on notes.

Take Miller to read it properly, Logan and Adams if you have come for the political theory, Turner for a quick and genuinely entertaining evening. The Yale Complete Works, volume 4, remains the scholarly monument for anyone who wants to go further.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Book One slowly, and resist the urge to hurry through to the famous part. Book One contains the argument. Without it, the famous half loses the frame that gives it its edge, which is why most people misremember this book.

Keep asking one question as you go: does More agree with this? He has built the book so that you can never quite be sure, and the uncertainty is not a flaw in his execution. It is the execution.

Save the introduction for afterwards if it takes a position on his intentions, which most do.

The common mistake is to read it as a manifesto — for communism, against it, for tolerance, against the church. It is a lawyer's book by a lawyer who argued for a living. It puts the case. You are the bench.