500 years on, are we living in Thomas More’s Utopia?

By J.T.

IT WAS meant as a joke, of sorts. Even the title of Thomas More’s “Utopia”, which was published 500 years ago this month, was composed with the author's tongue in his cheek: a Greek pun on “ou topos” (“no place”) and "eu topos" (“good place”). The book recounts a conversation between More and one Raphael Hythloday, a sailor whose surname means “a pedlar of nonsense”, and who brings news of an eccentric, egalitarian civilisation on a faraway island.

If More could see into the future, he might be puzzled by his work’s far-reaching legacy. “Utopia” was not the first scholarly attempt to imagine a perfect society—More frequently acknowledged Plato’s “Republic”—but it has become the name that we use to describe such visions (with “dystopia”, its opposite, appearing in the 1950s). Perhaps most bewildering to its author would be the extent to which developed nations have achieved many of his Utopian ideals, once so laughably remote.

Not all of the text is in jest. It opens with Hythloday’s critique of sixteenth-century England, as he laments the death penalty for petty thieves, the displacement of peasants by the rapidly growing wool trade and the tyranny of headstrong kings. His detailed description of Utopia, a crescent-shaped isle in the antipodes, offers a glimpse of what a fairer world might look like. Some readers have interpreted this as a genuine attempt to propose an alternative system of government.

Yet is hard to take this imagined nation entirely seriously. In their disdain for vanity, its inhabitants make potties out of gold and children’s playthings out of jewels. Many of their liberties are at odds with More’s personal convictions: as Lord Chancellor, he had heretics burnt at the stake, and he was executed for opposing Henry VIII’s first divorce. At times “Utopia” seems less an exemplar of idealism, and more of a satire on it.

The island’s rules are based on a simple argument: “where possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost impossible that there the weal-public may justly be governed and prosperously flourish.” Utopians therefore have no personal property. Their houses, which they keep unlocked at all times, are allocated to them every ten years by ballot. Their clothes are all the same. Food is brought to market by its suppliers, who receive no payment from its consumers. Meals are eaten in halls, with an entire parish sitting together. Money does exist, but it is accumulated solely by the government through trade, and is used to pay for mercenaries in times of war. Since there is no price mechanism to signal a glut or shortage, production is centrally planned, with officials deciding how many men are needed each harvest.

Unsurprisingly, these aspects of Utopian life have appealed to supporters of communism. (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves were dismissive, scoffing that “castles in the air” were not particularly useful for stoking revolutions.) More, however, questioned the wisdom of Utopian economics. He suggested that the common good is not as powerful an incentive as private benefit, and that failing to compensate labour directly would reduce productivity—that a man without “regard of his own gains driveth not to work”, since “the hope that he hath in other men’s travails maketh him slothful”. He believed that eradicating property rights would be foolish, for where a man cannot defend what “he hath gotten with the labour of his own hands, shall not there of necessity be continual sedition and bloodshed?” And one can imagine More raising an eyebrow as Hythloday asks why a “man would ask more than enough which is sure never to lack”. Only a naive economist could believe that human demand is equal to human necessity.

If Utopia were real, it would run into many of the problems that actual communist societies have experienced. Even the best-intentioned harvest organisers are sometimes prone to ordering, for example, too many carrots and too little bread. That problem lessens in free markets, because carrot farmers won’t produce extra vegetables if nobody wants to buy them, since prices fall when there is a surplus; meanwhile bakers will churn out more loaves if there is a shortage that drives the price up. But in a planned economy, when the planning goes wrong, the island’s shoppers would have to divide the limited bread between them (or bribe the baker for more than their share). The harvest helpers would have little reason to work their hardest, with no prospect of a raise or advancement. They would be better off trying to find a corrupt parish magistrate to rig the housing ballot in their favour.

Capitalist economies are not immune to inefficiency or bribery themselves, of course. But half a millennium after “Utopia” was published, with its claims (sincere or sarcastic) that private wealth and successful civilisations were incompatible, many Western countries appear to have proved otherwise, by achieving the best of Utopia’s ideals. Though Hythloday’s island has a prince that serves a life term, he is chosen by a body of 200 representatives, each of whom is democratically elected in a constituency. A council of 20 of these officials must ratify any decision the prince makes. Such checks on executive power were wishful thinking in More’s time. They are commonplace now.

Utopians transported into developed countries of today would also be pleasantly surprised to discover that their rights to follow “divers kinds of religion” and to divorce if “the man and woman cannot well agree between themselves” were now taken for granted. Men and women in these countries can join labour forces with near full employment, and work for around nine hours a day—both conditions that Hythloday describes to an awed narrator. They could get from overseas “all such things as they lack at home” through trade. They would be entitled to welfare payments and pensions as “provision for them that were once labourers and be now weak and impotent”. With a few notable exceptions, they could walk into a hospital and receive treatment “whereby they may be restored again to their health”. In some countries they would even have the right to “finish their lives willingly” in the face of incurable disease.

These Utopians might also be happy to learn that most restrictions from their homeland no longer applied. Western states have largely abolished daft laws about what you can wear and where you are allowed to live. They do not require you to apply for travel permits within your own country. They do not tell you how many children you ought to have, or whether you can have sex out of wedlock. All of these constraints existed in Utopia, and many were introduced by communist regimes.

Hythloday was right about one aspect of capitalism: it encourages each man to “plucketh to himself as much as he can, so that a few divide among themselves all the whole riches”. In aggregate the selfish actions of individual people have been a remarkable force for good, by guiding markets to produce what they want, rewarding innovators who can do so in more efficient ways and thus raising the standard of living. In the last three centuries, this process has lifted billions of people out of poverty and drastically increased their life expectancy. But it has also tended to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few. Income inequality has been rising since the 1970s and is approaching levels last seen in the 1920s. Real wages for the working class in developed economies have stagnated. Unrestrained, short-sighted self-interest has also unleashed the rather dystopian spectre of catastrophic climate change.

Half a millennium after “Utopia” was published, it is worth celebrating that so many of its freedoms and so few of its limits exist today; a rare bright spot in a year that has offered little comfort for believers in liberalism. Perhaps it is also time to ponder what ideals, no matter how far-fetched, are worth striving for now—and how to achieve them.