Utopia book 1 summary

Plot Summary. Literary Devices.

In Book One, Thomas More describes the circumstances surrounding his trip to Flanders where he has the privilege of meeting Raphael Hythloday. This first part of Utopia chronicles the early conversations between More, Peter Giles , and Hythloday. The three men discuss a wide range of civil, religious and philosophical issues. Hythloday is renegade and iconoclastic on certain issues but he is a skilled orator. Both More and Giles think there is considerable merit in much of what Hythloday has to say. Book Two is the continuation of the conversation during which Hythloday explains the details of Utopia in full. Once in Antwerp, More finds his friend Giles.

Utopia book 1 summary

More then travels to Antwerp, where he takes up residence and befriends an honest, learned citizen of that city named Peter Giles. More is returning home from church one day when he runs into Giles, who is speaking with an old man called Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday, we learn, sailed the world alongside the great historical explorer Amerigo Vespucci, and he even traveled to the New World by way of Asia. Moreover, it was in the New World that he came into contact with the Utopians, an island people who live in what Hythloday thinks to be the most perfectly organized commonwealth in the world. More and Giles are so impressed with Hythloday that they encourage him to go into the service of a prince as his counselor, but Hythloday has his doubts: princes are too interested chivalry and war to heed wisdom, and his fellow counselors would be proud and corrupt. There a lawyer praised England for severely punishing its thieves with the death penalty. Hythloday counters that the punishment is disproportionate to the crime in such a case; moreover, he argues that, instead of killing its thieves, England should change the social conditions that breed thieves in the first place. Specifically, he indicts the pride and greed of aristocrats and landowners as a great cause of idleness among the lower classes. Idleness, he says, causes poverty and misery. Hythloday instead proposes that thieves be forced to labor as punishment, which would spare them their lives and also serve the public good. At the end of this story, More says that he still believes that if Hythloday were to serve as the counselor of a prince, he would greatly benefit his nation.

What choice do they have? However, the two men leave open the possibility that in a better world, where people are open-minded and interested in the public good, school philosophy does have a place in governance.

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Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. The Utopian Genre. The critic J. Davis advances an influential account in his Utopia and the Ideal Society He argues that, unlike other ideal world narratives, utopias idealize neither people nor nature; that is, people who appear in utopian works can be good or bad, just like in the real world, and nature can be both fruitful and hostile, just like in the real world.

Utopia book 1 summary

More then travels to Antwerp, where he takes up residence and befriends an honest, learned citizen of that city named Peter Giles. More is returning home from church one day when he runs into Giles, who is speaking with an old man called Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday, we learn, sailed the world alongside the great historical explorer Amerigo Vespucci, and he even traveled to the New World by way of Asia. Moreover, it was in the New World that he came into contact with the Utopians, an island people who live in what Hythloday thinks to be the most perfectly organized commonwealth in the world. More and Giles are so impressed with Hythloday that they encourage him to go into the service of a prince as his counselor, but Hythloday has his doubts: princes are too interested chivalry and war to heed wisdom, and his fellow counselors would be proud and corrupt. There a lawyer praised England for severely punishing its thieves with the death penalty. Hythloday counters that the punishment is disproportionate to the crime in such a case; moreover, he argues that, instead of killing its thieves, England should change the social conditions that breed thieves in the first place. Specifically, he indicts the pride and greed of aristocrats and landowners as a great cause of idleness among the lower classes. Idleness, he says, causes poverty and misery.

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Its figure is almost square, for from the one side of it, which shoots up almost to the top of the hill, it runs down, in a descent for two miles, to the river Anider; but it is a little broader the other way that runs along by the bank of that river. Beneath the veil of an ideal communism, into which there has been worked some witty extravagance, there lies a noble English argument. He argues that the crime is too harsh and unjustly severe for such a small crime. I might have contracted it, but I resolved to give it you at large, that you might observe how those that despised what I had proposed, no sooner perceived that the Cardinal did not dislike it but presently approved of it, fawned so on him and flattered him to such a degree, that they in good earnest applauded those things that he only liked in jest; and from hence you may gather how little courtiers would value either me or my counsels. And being thus refreshed it finds a pleasure in that conflict; and if the conflict is pleasure, the victory must yet breed a greater pleasure, except we fancy that it becomes stupid as soon as it has obtained that which it pursued, and so neither knows nor rejoices in its own welfare. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes; for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners, as well as tenants, are turned out of their possessions by trick or by main force, or, being wearied out by ill usage, they are forced to sell them; by which means those miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families since country business requires many hands , are all forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go; and they must sell, almost for nothing, their household stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might stay for a buyer. They have a particular sagacity, founded upon much observation, in judging of the weather, by which they know when they may look for rain, wind, or other alterations in the air; but as to the philosophy of these things, the cause of the saltness of the sea, of its ebbing and flowing, and of the original and nature both of the heavens and the earth, they dispute of them partly as our ancient philosophers have done, and partly upon some new hypothesis, in which, as they differ from them, so they do not in all things agree among themselves. They had never so much as heard of the names of any of those philosophers that are so famous in these parts of the world, before we went among them; and yet they had made the same discoveries as the Greeks, both in music, logic, arithmetic, and geometry. Notice that Hythloday does not blame individuals for the state of England; he blames the organization of society as a whole. And if he, Hythloday, were to suggest that the king cease his wars of conquest and focus on domestic matters, what would happen? On these issues, either More is silent or he takes the traditional position. It is ordinary to have public lectures every morning before daybreak, at which none are obliged to appear but those who are marked out for literature; yet a great many, both men and women, of all ranks, go to hear lectures of one sort or other, according to their inclinations: but if others that are not made for contemplation, choose rather to employ themselves at that time in their trades, as many of them do, they are not hindered, but are rather commended, as men that take care to serve their country.

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If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. It is ordinary to have public lectures every morning before daybreak, at which none are obliged to appear but those who are marked out for literature; yet a great many, both men and women, of all ranks, go to hear lectures of one sort or other, according to their inclinations: but if others that are not made for contemplation, choose rather to employ themselves at that time in their trades, as many of them do, they are not hindered, but are rather commended, as men that take care to serve their country. First, he does not believe that, as things stand, his advice would be accepted. To accomplish this he ordered a deep channel to be dug, fifteen miles long; and that the natives might not think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labour in carrying it on. The only offense for which there is a prescribed punishment is adultery: a person who commits adultery once is forced into bondage, and a person who commits the offense twice is sentenced to death. And this humour of ordering their gardens so well is not only kept up by the pleasure they find in it, but also by an emulation between the inhabitants of the several streets, who vie with each other. It is the work of a scholarly and witty Englishman, who attacks in his own way the chief political and social evils of his time. The majority of those presently sitting in royal councils invariably practice a system of flattery toward their superiors and of personal aggrandizement and would surely override his idealistic and philosophical proposals. More and Giles do disagree with the notion that common property is superior to private property, and the three agree that Hythloday should describe the Utopian society in more detail. He points out that the Romans punished thieves and other criminals by forcing them to serve the public good in stone quarries and mines. Their priests are men of exceptional character and dignity. They are essentially hedonists: people who believe that pleasure is the most important thing in life. If any man imagines that there is a real happiness in these enjoyments, he must then confess that he would be the happiest of all men if he were to lead his life in perpetual hunger, thirst, and itching, and, by consequence, in perpetual eating, drinking, and scratching himself; which any one may easily see would be not only a base, but a miserable, state of a life.