![]() ![]() Hytholday (rough translation: “nonsense speaker”) has sailed with Amerigo Vespucci to the New World, where he visited Utopia - the exact location of which, he cheekily informs us, he does not remember. The first recounts a conversation between a roman a clef version of More and a sailor named Raphael Hytholday, who More meets while on a diplomatic trade mission in the Low Countries. Utopia is a short text divided into two books. For those on the Left, what is to be done with Thomas More, the knighted communist, the canonised radical? To what More, and to what version of utopia, should we orient ourselves? Has “utopia” become at best an empty signifier, an outmoded concept in a time of legislative horse-trading? Or can it still be a universal homeland to which we set sail? Satire or Template? Or consider the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wore a replica of the hat depicted in a famous painting of More to President Obama’s second inauguration - a gift from the aforementioned society, and widely interpreted as a political statement against Obama’s health care mandate.Īnd yet, after the Russian Revolution the same More was memorialised alongside Marx, Engels, and others - in a collection personally approved by Lenin - as one of the “Prominent Thinkers and Leaders of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working People.” Two decades later, More was canonised as a saint by Pope Pius XI. Witness the Thomas More Society, a sort of right-wing American Civil Liberties Union, whose rallying cry of “Religious Liberty!” is associated with the man who torched heretics rather than the figure who envisioned true freedom of conscience as a basic principle of social organisation. It is this later More, rather than the idealistic author of Utopia, who is most often celebrated today. Thus, as many have noted, the first great utopian was also the first anti-utopian. In fact, when copies of Utopia were discovered following the siege of the German city of Munster - where a brief communist theocracy was established before being violently subdued by a dual Catholic and Protestant military campaign - More announced his desire to consign all copies of his book to the flames, alongside the people he’d helped burn. He was zealous in his support, overseeing six executions and reportedly torturing Protestant agitators. A horrified More decamped to the Catholic side. ![]() Only a year after Utopia first ran off the English presses, a rude monk nailed a German pamphlet to the cathedral door in Wittenberg. And perhaps that was only natural, for they marked the progenitor of the word himself. The same kinds of contradictions have marked nearly every utopian community since. These were the first “intentional communities” - in the New World or elsewhere - that explicitly and consciously organised under the utopian banner.īut while the missionary’s program of emancipation, economic self-sufficiency, equality, and social services was undeniably progressive (if not radical), it was indelibly tainted by the sins of colonialism. Undaunted, De Quiroga began organising the indigenous population into planned communities based on the political principles of his hero’s book. De Quiroga sent the now-lost rendering to More, who was executed for opposing the king’s divorce (among other reasons) before he could read it. In 1535, the Franciscan friar Vasco de Quiroga translated More’s Utopia into Spanish while working as a missionary in Mexico. Yet in painting a picture of that aspirational place, More bequeathed to radicals one of our most potent concepts.Īt the same time, a profound ambiguity has marked the word from its earliest days. In many ways More merely described the contours of an imagined land that had always existed, from the coasts of Plato’s Republic to the hills of medieval Cockaigne. Thomas More - lawyer, author, theorist, radical, martyr, saint - gave us the word with his 1516 book Utopia. ![]()
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