Utopia by Thomas More: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Utopia
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The first three paragraphs of the Introduction
Sir Thomas More, son of Sir John More, a justice of the King’s Bench, was born in 1478, in Milk Street, in the city of London. After his earlier education at St. Anthony’s School, in Threadneedle Street, he was placed, as a boy, in the household of Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor. It was not unusual for persons of wealth or influence and sons of good families to be so established together in a relation of patron and client. The youth wore his patron’s livery, and added to his state. The patron used, afterwards, his wealth or influence in helping his young client forward in the world. Cardinal Morton had been in earlier days that Bishop of Ely whom Richard III. sent to the Tower; was busy afterwards in hostility to Richard; and was a chief adviser of Henry VII., who in 1486 made him Archbishop of Canterbury, and nine months afterwards Lord Chancellor. Cardinal Morton—of talk at whose table there are recollections in “Utopia”—delighted in the quick wit of young Thomas More. He once said, “Whoever shall live to try it, shall see this child here waiting at table prove a notable and rare man.”
At the age of about nineteen, Thomas More was sent to Canterbury College, Oxford, by his patron, where he learnt Greek of the first men who brought Greek studies from Italy to England—William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre. Linacre, a physician, who afterwards took orders, was also the founder of the College of Physicians. In 1499, More left Oxford to study law in London, at Lincoln’s Inn, and in the next year Archbishop Morton died.
More’s earnest character caused him while studying law to aim at the subduing of the flesh, by wearing a hair shirt, taking a log for a pillow, and whipping himself on Fridays. At the age of twenty-one he entered Parliament, and soon after he had been called to the bar he was made Under-Sheriff of London. In 1503 he opposed in the House of Commons Henry VII.’s proposal for a subsidy on account of the marriage portion of his daughter Margaret; and he opposed with so much energy that the House refused to grant it. One went and told the king that a beardless boy had disappointed all his expectations. During the last years, therefore, of Henry VII. More was under the displeasure of the king, and had thoughts of leaving the country.
The excerpt below is the opening of the volume’s Introduction, signed with the initials H. M.: the first three paragraphs of the editorial introduction. It begins with his birth in Milk Street in 1478, his boyhood in Cardinal Morton’s household, and the prophecy Morton made about the boy; it goes on to his years at Canterbury College, Oxford, where he learned Greek from Grocyn and Linacre, and his move to Lincoln’s Inn in 1499. The third paragraph describes the hair shirt, the log pillow and the Friday whippings, his seat in Parliament at twenty-one, and his opposition to Henry VII’s subsidy in 1503.
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Dialogue
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Antwerp and London in 1515 and 1516, the Flanders of More’s embassy, and the invented island of Utopia: fifty-four cities, one language, no money.
Book I and Book II, in twelve groups
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Project Gutenberg #2130
Utopia is a Latin book of 1516 in two parts, cast as a conversation. In the first, Thomas More, on an embassy at Antwerp, meets a Portuguese traveller, Raphael Hythloday, who has sailed with Vespucci and crossed unknown countries, and the two argue about whether a philosopher should counsel a king. Hythloday says the causes of theft are enclosure and idleness, and that no commonwealth can be just while property and money remain. In the second part he describes the island of Utopia, which has abolished both: goods are kept in common stores, everybody works six hours a day, magistrates are elected, and gold is used for chains. The book is a traveller’s report, not a programme by its author.
Book I is the dialogue at Antwerp: the Cardinal’s table, the thieves hanged twenty on one gibbet, the sheep that eat men, and the argument that private property is the root of the mischief. Book II is Hythloday’s account of the island itself: its fifty-four cities, its magistrates and three-day debates, its trades and six-hour day, its common halls, its contempt for gold, its moral philosophy of pleasure, its slaves and marriages, its wars and its religions. Wikipedia’s article on Utopia sets out the two parts and the long dispute about what More meant by them. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #2130.
Utopia by Thomas More: Summary, Ideas & Arguments
This page offers a summary and analysis of Utopia: both of its parts in reading order, the argument of each section described, and the offices, places and terms the island’s constitution depends on explained as they come up. Thomas More wrote it in Latin and it was printed in 1516, and the volume opens with an introduction signed with the initials H. M. which follows his life from his birth in 1478 to the printing of the book in 1516. Nothing in the book is spoken by More in his own person: the island is described by Raphael Hythloday, a traveller he meets at Antwerp, and the More of the dialogue spends the first part arguing with him. The page keeps the edition’s order: the introduction, then the dialogue at Antwerp, then the island. It belongs with the rest of the Philosophy Classics on this site.
The first part is a dialogue set at Antwerp, where More is sent as Henry VIII’s ambassador and Peter Giles introduces him to Hythloday, a Portuguese who has given his estate to his brothers and sailed with Vespucci. Hythloday will not enter a king’s service, and the talk turns on why. At Cardinal Morton’s table he argues that hanging thieves is neither just nor useful: men are maimed in wars, retainers are turned off when their lord dies, and the great owners enclose the fields, so that the sheep devour men and towns. His remedy is to give every man a means of living, and he says plainly that you first make thieves and then punish them. Plato’s Republic is cited in the same argument, since Hythloday holds that no state can be governed happily while property and money stand.
The second part turns to the island. Hythloday describes a crescent of land two hundred miles broad, cut off from the continent by Utopus, who set his own soldiers to dig the channel that brought the sea round it. There are fifty-four cities, all built alike, with Amaurot at the centre; houses are entered by any man, since none are locked, and the gardens behind them are tended in rivalry between streets. Thirty families choose a Syphogrant each year, ten Syphogrants a Tranibore, and the two hundred Syphogrants elect the Prince for life from four names. No measure is concluded on the day it is proposed: it is debated three days in council, and to consult about the state outside the council is a capital offence. Agriculture is taught to all, everyone learns a trade, and the working day is six hours.
Goods are brought to storehouses and every father takes what he needs without payment; there is no money inside the island, and the market is a place of plenty rather than of exchange. Families eat in common halls, the old served first, with a short lecture of morality at each meal and children waiting at table. Travel needs a passport from the Prince, and a man who stays in another town works at his own trade there. Gold and silver are kept for war and foreign payments, so the island makes its very chamber-pots and the chains of its slaves from them; the ambassadors of the Anemolians, who arrived in cloth of gold, were taken for slaves by the islanders. Their moral philosophy puts happiness in pleasure, honestly taken, and their learning, once given paper and printing, runs to Greek.
The rest of the report covers slaves, who are condemned men or poor foreigners who come of their own accord, and marriages, made after a strange public inspection and dissolved only for adultery or insufferable perverseness; war, which the Utopians detest and fight by hiring others and by offering rewards for the enemy’s princes; and religion, where many worships live together under Utopus’s law of toleration, and the priests are few and honoured. The book ends with Hythloday’s peroration, in which he calls the other commonwealths a conspiracy of the rich, and with More’s own reply: he does not agree with everything, and says he wishes rather than hopes to see some of it followed. The same questions about justice and happiness are put in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and the Project Gutenberg #2130 text is the one this page follows.
Historical Context
More wrote the book in Latin, and it is in two parts: the second, describing the island, which he sometimes called Nusquama, that is Nowhere, was probably written towards the close of 1515, and the first, introductory part early in 1516. It was printed at Louvain late in 1516 under the editorship of Erasmus, Peter Giles and their friends, revised and printed again by Froben at Basle in November 1518, and reprinted at Paris and Vienna; it was not printed in England in More’s lifetime. The introduction records the English line as well: Ralph Robinson’s version of 1551, made in Edward VI’s reign, came first, and the translation printed in this volume is Gilbert Burnet’s of 1684, which the introduction calls the more skilful.
The frame is dated from More’s own service. In 1515 he was sent into Flanders with Cuthbert Tunstal to treat with the commissioners of Charles, Prince of Castile, was away six months, and at Antwerp became friends with Peter Giles, the secretary of the town; he went again in 1516 and was near Erasmus at Brussels. The introduction names Plato’s Republic and Plutarch’s account of Spartan life under Lycurgus among the books behind the fiction, and says that More sometimes puts the case as of France when he means England. Hythloday’s route follows Vespucci, and his name, the introduction notes, is made of two Greek words and means knowing in trifles.
The English text keeps the marks of its date. The first part is one continuous dialogue; the second is divided by the headings the edition prints, of their towns, magistrates, trades, traffic, travelling, slaves and marriages, military discipline, and religions, and it is these headings the groups below follow. The names stand as the translation has them, Amaurot, Anider, Syphogrant, Tranibore, Hythloday. The introduction is an editorial essay written long after More, not a preface by him; it ends with the book’s reception in 1517, says nothing of More’s later career, and is signed only with the initials H. M. The volume prints that essay before the book, so the groups below begin where the book begins, with the meeting at Antwerp.
Key Ideas & Arguments
- Common property: No man owns the house he lives in or the goods he eats: the houses are shifted by lot every ten years and any man may enter any of them, while the storehouses give each father what he needs without payment. Hythloday calls this the foundation of the whole constitution, and More’s objection in Book I is that without property no one will work. The island’s answer is that nobody is idle and the public store is full.
- The six-hour day: Six hours of work, three before dinner and three after, with eight hours of sleep and the rest left to each man’s discretion, mostly reading. The Syphogrants’ chief care is that nobody be idle; the point of the short day is that labour is measured by public need and leaves time for the mind. Building and clothing take little, so when there is no public work the hands are sent out to mend the highways, and the hours are shortened further.
- Syphogrants and Tranibors: Thirty families choose a Syphogrant yearly, ten Syphogrants a Tranibore, and the two hundred Syphogrants elect the Prince for life from four names, by secret vote. The Prince wears no crown, only a sheaf of corn carried before him. No public matter is settled on the day it is raised: it is debated three days, and to consult about the state outside the council is punished with death.
- Gold and infamy: Gold and silver are kept for war and for foreign payments, and inside the island they are marks of disgrace: chamber-pots and close-stools are made of them, slaves wear chains and fetters of gold, and children wear pearls and diamonds and lay them aside when they grow up. The ambassadors of the Anemolians, who came in cloth of gold, were taken for slaves by the islanders, and the children called them fools to their faces.
- Pleasure and virtue: Their moral philosophy makes happiness consist in pleasure, but only in the pleasures reason approves: the mind’s delight in knowledge, the health of the body, and the harmless pleasures of sense. Virtue is living according to nature, and nature leads men to seek their own pleasure and to help others to theirs. Against this they set the false pleasures of fine clothes, jewels, hunting and dice, which are not pleasures at all but corrupt habits of taste.
- Religious toleration: Many religions live in the island, some worshipping the sun or the moon, some dead heroes, and the wiser sort one eternal being they call Mithras. Utopus made a law that a man may hold what religion he pleases and draw others by argument alone, and no man is punished for his faith; those who deny the soul’s immortality are not punished either, but are never raised to office or trust. Priests are few, thirteen to a town, and held in great honour.
Core Arguments & Influence
- Property, crime and the common store: Book I puts the argument in the mouth of a lawyer at Cardinal Morton’s table: thieves are hanged by the dozen, and the lawyer wonders why so many remain. Hythloday answers that the law punishes the effect and ignores the cause, that enclosures have pulled down villages and turned ploughmen into vagabonds, and that a commonwealth founded on property must always produce the misery it then punishes. His remedy is radical, goods in common and money abolished, and Book II shows the same argument built rather than merely asserted.
- The philosopher at court: The question that opens the dialogue is whether a wise man should serve a king, and it is argued on both sides. More, in the dialogue, says that the springs of good and evil flow from the prince and that a philosopher should go through with the play that is acting; Hythloday answers that princes prefer war, that ministers think themselves wise, and that a court punishes anyone who cites the practice of other nations. Plato’s image of the man who keeps indoors while a great company runs out into the rain, since he cannot persuade it home, is his answer to the demand that he take office.
- Labour, time and abundance: Utopia’s economy rests on an argument about idleness. Elsewhere, Hythloday says, women, priests, rich men’s retainers and sturdy beggars do no work, and many trades serve only luxury. Remove those and six hours a day is more than enough: in a great city of the island scarce five hundred hands are out of work. The island therefore keeps everyone at a trade, sends the surplus to mend roads, and stores two years of provision against scarcity. The constitution’s stated end is to regulate labour by the public need and leave men the time to improve their minds.
- Gold, pleasure and the measure of value: The island’s contempt for gold is the most theatrical thing in the book, and it carries an argument: things are valued by use, and the metals men kill for are of almost no use but for war. The same reasoning governs pleasure, which is not denied but measured. Health is the greatest bodily pleasure, the mind’s pleasures are the greatest of all, and the honours and jewels other nations prize are ranked with children’s toys. The Utopians wonder, Hythloday says, that a man of lead should be served because he owns a heap of metal.
- A commonwealth of reason, and its fortune: The introduction notes that the book gave the language the adjective Utopian, for a scheme too good to be carried out, and quotes Erasmus’s letters of 1517, one wishing that the true source of all political evils might be laid open, another reporting a burgomaster of Antwerp who knew the book by heart. That double life has stayed with it: it is read as a model of equality and as a warning about models, and the last page keeps both readings alive, since More’s reply neither accepts nor refutes what Hythloday has said.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Utopia?
The download is the whole book: the introduction signed H. M., the first part from the Antwerp meeting to Hythloday’s argument about property, and the second with all eight of its headings, from the towns and magistrates to the religions and the closing speech. Nothing is abridged, and no section is summarised in place of itself. The book is not left with Hythloday’s speech as its last word, since More answers it on the final page.
The page is arranged to be read beside the text. Twelve groups follow the edition’s own course; six notes explain the ideas the argument turns on; five themes follow the book from the hanged thieves to the prayer at the end. The historical section gives the printing history from Louvain to Basle and the first English version, with the introduction’s own account of More’s life. Read straight through, or use the groups as a table of contents: each says what its passage argues and where it stops.
The files come in three formats with the same text: EPUB for Apple Books, Calibre and most phones, AZW3 for a Kindle, and KEPUB for Kobo. No account is needed, nothing is locked or time limited, and any passage found here can be looked up in another printing of the translation. The text is the Gutenberg transcription, kept as it stands, so a passage quoted on this page can be found again in any printing of the translation.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #2130 — the complete text, unabridged, with the introduction, both parts and all eight headings of the second.
- Both parts in full Book I’s dialogue and Book II’s report are printed as the edition has them, with the headings and More’s closing reply kept in place.
- Twelve groups, in reading order Each group covers a stretch of the text and stops where that stretch stops, from the meeting at Antwerp to the last sentence of the book.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the parts and headings intact and nothing to install beyond the reading app you already use.
- Plato’s Republic, the book Hythloday cites for the rule of philosophers and the community of goods. Read it beside Book I, where the argument for common property is put in Plato’s terms and then pushed further than Plato pushed it. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Boethius’s Consolation, written in prison and asking much the same question about justice and happiness, with a different answer: the goods of fortune are not goods at all. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The shelf where this edition sits, with the rest of the free philosophy on the site in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, from Plato and Aristotle to Hume and Nietzsche. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The twelve groups below follow the edition’s own course. Book I is one continuous dialogue with no headings, from the meeting at Antwerp to the argument about property; the island’s geography opens Book II before the first heading, and the rest of Book II follows the edition’s eight headings in order. Nothing has been merged or renamed, and each group stops where the passage it covers stops.
- Book I — Antwerp and the traveller: More is in Flanders as Henry VIII’s ambassador, and at Antwerp Peter Giles introduces Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese who has given his estate to his brothers and sailed with Vespucci. Hythloday will not put himself into a king’s service, and the talk turns on whether a philosopher can do any good at court.
- Book I — Thieves and the Cardinal’s table: At Cardinal Morton’s table a lawyer boasts that thieves are hanged twenty at a time, and Hythloday answers that the penalty is neither just nor useful. Men maimed in wars, retainers turned off when their lord dies and fields enclosed leave no honest means of living; the sheep, he says, devour men and towns. His remedies are argued out, and the Cardinal’s approval wins over the company that had just scorned them.
- Book I — The counsel of kings and the root of the matter: Hythloday imagines himself in the French king’s council and in a council of revenue, and tells what he would say against both: the Achorians gave up a conquest they could not keep, and the Macarians bind their king never to hoard above a thousand pounds of gold at once. Then comes the root, that while property and money remain no nation can be governed justly. More objects that with all things common nobody will work; Hythloday holds his ground.
- Book II — The island and the town of Amaurot: The island is a crescent two hundred miles across in the middle, cut from the continent by Utopus, who made his own soldiers dig the channel. Fifty-four cities stand alike, at least twenty-four miles apart, and Amaurot lies at the centre. The streets are twenty feet wide, the houses three storeys with flat roofs, their doors shut of themselves and stand open to any man, and the gardens behind them are worked in rivalry between streets.
- Book II — Magistrates, trades and the working day: Thirty families choose a Syphogrant yearly, ten of them a Tranibore, and the Syphogrants elect the Prince from four names by secret vote. Everyone learns agriculture and is brought up to a trade, and the working day is six hours, because the island keeps no idle hands. The Syphogrants’ care is that nobody be idle; those set apart for learning are few, and are put back to work if they disappoint.
- Book II — Traffic, halls and meals: Goods come into storehouses and every father takes what he needs without payment; there is no money in the island, and no one fears asking too much. Families eat in common halls, fifteen households to a side, with slaves for the rough service and the women cooking in turn. The old are served first, a short lecture of morality opens each meal, and children wait at table before they are old enough to sit.
- Book II — Travel, treasure and the ambassadors: A traveller needs leave and a passport from the Prince, and must work at his trade wherever he stays; without a passport he is punished as a fugitive. The council at Amaurot balances plenty and scarcity between towns, and the island sends abroad its overplus, keeping gold for war and for hiring soldiers. Its chamber-pots are of gold and silver, and the Anemolian ambassadors, who came in cloth of gold, were taken for slaves.
- Book II — Pleasure, learning and printing: Their moral philosophy is argued at length: happiness lies in pleasure, but only in the pleasures reason allows, and the mind’s are the greatest. Health is the chief bodily pleasure, and the false pleasures of jewels, fine clothes and hunting are dismissed. Hythloday taught them Greek in three years and gave them Plato and Aristotle, and showed them paper and printing, which they improved on his crude account of the arts.
- Book II — Slaves, marriages and the laws: Slaves are condemned criminals and poor foreigners who come of their own accord; the incurably ill are exhorted to end their lives, and no man is forced. Marriage is made after a public inspection of the naked body, divorce needs the Senate, and adultery ends in slavery. The island has few laws and no lawyers, and makes no leagues with other nations, holding that the fellowship of human nature is a better bond than treaties.
- Book II — Military discipline: The Utopians detest war as a brutal thing, yet they train both men and women and fight to defend their friends or to free an oppressed people. They do it mostly with money: they proclaim rewards for the enemy’s princes, sow division, and hire the Zapolets, a warlike people five hundred miles to the east. A victory won with much blood troubles and shames them, and when they have won they kill as few as they can.
- Book II — The religions of the island: Many worships live together: the sun, the moon, dead heroes, and one eternal being the wiser sort call Mithras. Utopus made a law that every man might choose his religion and draw others by argument alone, and that no man be punished for his faith; those who deny providence are not punished either, but are never raised to office. Priests are few and honoured, they go to war and pray for peace, and the temples serve every sect at once.
- Book II — The peroration and More’s answer: Hythloday ends by calling the other commonwealths a conspiracy of the rich, who pursue their private ends under pretence of the public good, hold the poor to the lowest rates they can, and get their contrivances established as law. Money, he says, is the root of the frauds and thefts that the law then punishes, and pride alone keeps the world from taking the Utopian laws. More answers briefly: he commends the account, but he does not agree to everything, and he wishes rather than hopes to see it followed.
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Part of: Philosophy Classics · Thomas More
