Utopia (Thomas More)

More’s Latin book of 1516, in two parts. In the first, a fictionalised More and a friend meet a traveller, Raphael Hythloday, and argue about the state of England — enclosure, hanging thieves, courtiers who tell kings what they want to hear. In the second, Hythloday describes the island he visited, where property is common, everyone works, everyone is educated, and there is no poverty. The name More coined for it, from the Greek for “no place,” has since become the word for the whole genre.

Context: First published in Latin in 1516; More was executed in 1535 and later canonised by the Catholic Church. Lexile 1420. Filed under Fiction. The central interpretive question is unresolved and 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