Utopia (Thomas More)
| Full title | Utopia (De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia) |
|---|---|
| Author | Thomas More |
| Published | 1516 |
| Recommended | 3 times |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Thomas More’s 1516 book in two parts: an argument about the state of England — enclosure, hanging thieves, courtiers who tell kings what they want to hear — and a traveller’s account of an island where property is common, everyone works and there is no poverty. The name he coined, from the Greek for “no place,” became the word for the whole genre. |
Utopia (Thomas More)
Where I heard about it
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Spotted at Pioneer Book, Provo — May 2023 (Books photo album)
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Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, a 468-title curriculum published in December 2025, in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction, Lexile 1420. The list credits “Thomas Moore”; the author is Thomas More, the English statesman.
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@athenaeumbc — in a stack of ~35 old books photographed by Athenaeum Book Club (October 2026) under the line “One of the hidden benefits of reading old books is that they rescue you from the arrogance of the present.” The full stack is listed on One of the hidden benefits… (tweet).
About this edition
First published in Latin at Louvain in 1516; More was executed in 1535 and later canonised by the Catholic Church. The central interpretive question is worth knowing before you start: readers have argued for five centuries over whether More is proposing the island or satirising it, since its virtues include arrangements — enforced labour, slavery for criminals, strict conformity — that he could not plausibly have endorsed. That ambiguity is the reason it survives as a book for arguing with.
Connections
- A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; a 468-title reading list published in December 2025 by the Substack writer Dissident Teacher, of which Kyle is carding only the Ages 13-99+ band.
- Thomas More — the author.
- Utopia — the concept page for the idea the book named.
- Literature