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Utopia Paperback – April 19, 2017

by Thomas More (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 2,423 ratings
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Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More (1478–1535) published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
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  1. Print length
    68 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    April 19, 2017
  4. Dimensions
    6 x 0.16 x 9 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1545480052
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1545480052
  7. Lexile measure
    1390L
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 19, 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 68 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1545480052
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1545480052
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.67 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.16 x 9 inches
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1390L
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 2,423 ratings

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
2,423 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find this book to be an excellent and thought-provoking read that offers great lessons for today's world. Moreover, the story receives positive feedback as a foundational dystopian/utopian novel. However, the value for money receives mixed reactions, with some appreciating the great price while others find it not worth the cost. Additionally, opinions about the book's fashion are divided, with one customer describing it as beautiful while another finds it rather horrible.

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Thought provokingStory qualityValue for moneyFashion
22 customers mention "Thought provoking"22 positive0 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking, describing it as an important work of literature that offers great lessons for today's world. One customer notes how it encourages reflection on human nature.

"This audiobook has a great, smooth narration that lets me enjoy the authors ideas while commuting. Very nice recording...." Read more

"...Middle Ages viewed the ideal society and also as a legitimate look at ongoing social problems...." Read more

"...It is a great book that allows one to think about human nature. Utopia itself is an imaginary place that is nonexistent...." Read more

"...that it’s easy to say “shitty worldbuilding” — It was very influential for its time. Maybe more interesting now as a historical artifact...." Read more

19 customers mention "Story quality"19 positive0 negative

Customers praise the story of this foundational dystopian/utopian novel, with one customer noting its historical context and another highlighting its ideas about the good life.

"I wish it could be real. I enjoy the idea of this society, and I think it's brought to the pages masterfully...." Read more

"...In the same spirit, these letters also include a specimen of the Utopian alphabet and its poetry...." Read more

"...Yes, the society of Utopia is a really good idea, on paper...." Read more

"...He accounts with great detail the Utopian society and how the collectivist state of mind colors every aspect of their society...." Read more

16 customers mention "Value for money"11 positive5 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's value for money, with some appreciating the great price and noting it's free, while others find it not worth the cost.

"...Utopians used to minimize the importance of gold, fine apparel, and money. Gold and jewelry were considered baubles only interesting to children...." Read more

"Classic book and it was free. What else do people want. Beggars can't be choosers (that's what my Ma always said)." Read more

"...and clothing finery would be disregarded as unimportant and without value..." Read more

"Great book for a great price. Plain and simple. Just wished it would include the original preface. Oh well." Read more

6 customers mention "Fashion"3 positive3 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the fashion in the book, with some finding it beautiful while others describe it as dull.

"...the method the Utopians used to minimize the importance of gold, fine apparel, and money...." Read more

"...and relevant even today, but the way he makes them are timid and somewhat dull." Read more

"Great book for a great price. Plain and simple. Just wished it would include the original preface. Oh well." Read more

"...In fact it seems rather horrible. The author also uses very long sentences which are tiresome to read. Your mileage may vary." Read more

Love the classics!
5 out of 5 stars
Love the classics!
Have waited ages to read this book. I read a few pages every night before I go to sleep, I have enjoyed this book immensely.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • imas
    5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Idea of a Society
    Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2025
    Verified Purchase
    Thomas Moore had an interesting idea of a utopian society- this is a reprint from the original , but still great.
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  • Charlotte A. Hu
    5.0 out of 5 stars What this perfect world lacks is privacy
    Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    This audiobook has a great, smooth narration that lets me enjoy the authors ideas while commuting. Very nice recording. The ideas in the book seem mildly terrifying especially since I'm an introvert. Life has been regulated to be public. So all meals are at a public location and women are mandated to take their turns preparing the public meals (sounds like a truly horrific slavery). Any man may enter into any man's house and the houses are rotated by lottery.
    What this perfect world lacks is privacy. Children of families that are naturally more abundant than others are "reassigned" to families who are unable to produce children. Do the parents have any say in this matter?
    Like so many of the books which purported to prescribe a perfect world for us, the perfection of this world is it's horror. As so many decisions have been mandated, it appears that individual freedom to chose - even to keep one's one child - or to NOT participate in the public evening meal every night (how exhausting) - are not optional. It reminds me a bit of the 1800s laws in the US mandating church attendance. What if I don't want to eat dinner tonight? What if I decide I'm just gonna order pizza and have a beer and watch the Spurs? Apparently that is not allowed in the perfect society of the 1500s.
    This kind of novel is nonetheless valuable because in attempting to create a perfect world, it allows readers to really think about what IS perfect. Is the chaos of democracy better? Democracy has its chronic indecision and inability to move smartly forward because of the laborious and time consuming process of getting Congress or the public to agree on a concept. Yes, I have to say, I much prefer the raging American debates about abortion and gay rights to the no one lacks for anything world of Thomas More where none consider diamonds or gold interesting because they aren't useful, but iron is valued because it can be used. All cups are made from pottery; all cloth is the same color as the original material. Everyone wears the same clothes and works on their free time to improve their minds. Actually, Star Trek, the Next Generation, is a pretty close imitation of the ideas in this book, but at least in ST, you can have a private cup of tea alone in your room and you can do something privately that may not improve your mind.
    23 people found this helpful
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  • Sam Adams
    4.0 out of 5 stars Utopia
    Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    Thomas More lived from 1477 to 1535. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in 1535 for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. Utopia, written in Latin, was published in 1516. It was translated to English by Ralph Robinson in 1551. The translation by Clarence Miller was published by Yale University Press in 2001. [This review is based on the Miller translation.]

    The text of Utopia is in two books. Book 1 was written after Book 2. It is in Book 2 that the society of the place named `Utopia' is described by a traveler, Raphael Hythloday, who through his travels had lived there for a time and has returned to England to report on what he learned. Book 1 is a lead-in to Book 2 and was probably intended to establish interest in the subject of Book 2. The narrative form of Book 1 is a conversation of Hythloday with Thomas More and Peter Giles, and of Book 2 the form is a monologue by Hythloday.

    Hythloday, speaking in Book 1, agrees with Plato and the people of Utopia that "as long as everyone has his own property, there is no hope of curing them and putting society back into good condition." (48) More disagrees and believes, along with Aristotle and Aquinas, "that no one can live comfortably where everything is held in common. For how can there be any abundance of goods when everyone stops working because he is no longer motivated by making a profit, and grows lazy because he relies on the labors of others." (48)

    These statements occur near the end of Book 1, which began, after some preliminaries, with a conversation about the justice of the death penalty for theft. (In an endnote on page 145, Miller tells of a report from 1587 that "in the reign of Henry VIII alone 72,000 thieves and vagabonds were hanged.") Hythloday believes that theft is a necessary consequence of personal property. Unstated but evident is that he believes also that personal property is not only a sufficient condition for theft (which makes theft a necessary consequence of it), but also a necessary condition for theft (which makes theft contingent upon it). Removing personal property, then, removes the possibility of theft, he believes: with the unexamined assumption that you cannot steal what you already own in common with everyone else. But of course you can: you take it and keep it for yourself so no one else can use it, taking what belongs to everyone, and not sharing it with anyone. Only the coercion of others, through established law or otherwise, can alter this. But then you are back to the existence of theft and social restraints to admonish and respond to it.

    In Book 2 Raphael Hythloday describes Utopia. The word `Raphael' means "God's healer", and the word `hythloday', from Greek, means "peddler of nonsense". The word `utopia' is a Greek pun that means both "good place" and "no place". If Hythloday is speaking nonsense motivated by the deepest moral compassion, where is the nonsense? Is Utopia a good place that is no place, or is it no place that is a good place? (The second reading can mean it is not a place that is a good place.)

    "From my observation and experience of all the flourishing nations everywhere, what is taking place, so help me God, is nothing but a conspiracy of the rich, as it were, who look out for themselves under the pretext of serving the commonwealth." (132)

    Outside of Utopia, money is the cause of endless trouble. In Utopia, "once the use of money was abolished, and together with it all greed for it, what a mass of troubles was cut away, what a crop of crimes was pulled up by the roots! Is there anyone who does not know that fraud, theft, plunder, strife, turmoil, contention, rebellion, murder, treason, poisoning, crimes which are constantly punished but never held in check, would die away if money were eliminated?" (132)

    Utopia is a society under full and strict regimentation. Its culture is, in effect, nothing but what is a consequence of social regimentation. Nothing exists in the culture that is not a result of this pervasive social control. Utopians believe they do not live in a tyranny only because they accept and desire the collective regimentation under which they live. They are the perfect slaves.

    Utopians are ambivalent, in fact illogical if not morally arrogant, about killing for food or defense. They eat animals but "they do not allow their citizens to be accustomed to butchering animals" but rather have "bondsmen" do this because they believe that butchering animals for food "gradually eliminates compassion, the finest feeling of human nature." (68) Bondsmen are apparently immune to such a descent into moral corruption, or else they are bondsmen exactly because they are already morally degraded and so either immune to further corruption or they are beyond moral rectification, and therefore the moral consequences of killing for food cannot matter for their moral selves. So bondsmen who butcher animals either have no compassion, it having been gradually eliminated through butchering, or because their moral precondition, their qualification of moral impurity, includes diminished compassion from which their moral descent continues, or else they have compassion and, being bondsmen, they are somehow immune from the moral consequences of killing for food, either because of their moral deficiency or because bondsmen have a moral strength that the citizens of Utopia lack.

    Marriage is not allowed until age 18 for women and age 22 for men. Extramarital sex is a crime, and in the case of anyone married, the consequence of a second act of adultery is death. The method is not stated, nor who in Utopia administers capital justice, although it is likely to be a slave. (99)

    It is mainly (or only) the slaves who kill for the Utopians, but it did not require any killing to become a slave. In fact, "the most serious crimes" (unstated, but clearly not only murder) are punished by "servitude" (slavery). "If slaves are rebellious or unruly, then they are finally slaughtered like wild beasts that cannot be restrained by bars or chains." On the other hand, if they are "tamed by long suffering and show that they regret the sin more than the punishment, their servitude may be either mitigated or revoked, sometimes by the ruler's prerogative, sometimes by popular vote." (100)

    What happens to those slaves (bondsmen) who helped feed the citizens of Utopia by butchering animals for food and thus suffering the apparent moral consequence of diminished compassion is not stated. Perhaps Utopia uses only slaves gotten from outside the citizenry of Utopia for their necessary killing. Utopia has slaves captured in wars they fought and other "foreigners who have been condemned to death" which the Utopians "acquire [...] sometimes cheaply, more often gratis and take them away." Foreign slaves are kept "constantly at work" and in chains. (95) Utopia also has slaves who entered into slavery by choice. These are "poor, overworked drudges from other nations [...] who chose to be slaves among the Utopians." Such slaves can relinquish their slavery whenever they choose, but in doing so they leave Utopia, although they are not "sent away empty-handed." (96)

    Utopians do not fight their own wars if they can avoid it. Killing, although morally necessary, is morally degrading, so they hire mercenaries to defend Utopia. They do, however, train for war - men and women both - "so that they will not be incapable of fighting when circumstances require it". (105) They go to war reluctantly, and "do so only to defend their own territory, or to drive an invading enemy from the territory of their friends, or else, out of compassion and humanity, they use their forces to liberate a[n] oppressed people from tyranny and servitude." (105) Upon declaring war, they immediately offer enormous rewards for the assassination or capture of the enemy prince and others "responsible for plotting against the Utopians." (108)

    Utopians are tolerant of differing views on religion and "on no other subject are they more cautious about making rash pronouncements than on matters concerning religion." (122) However, they scorn unbelievers in any deity or afterlife, and "do not even include in the category of human beings" nor "count him as one of their citizens" if he "should sink so far below the dignity of human nature as to think that the soul dies with the body or that the world is ruled by mere chance and not by prudence." (119) "For who can doubt that someone who has nothing to fear but the law and no hope of anything beyond bodily existence would strive to evade the public laws of his country by secret chicanery or to break them by force in order to satisfy his own personal greed?" (119) "He is universally looked down on as a lazy and spineless character." (119) In fact, "a religious fear of the heavenly beings" is "the greatest and practically the only incitement to virtue." (127)

    There is a kind of state religion in Utopia which includes high priests and public worship. "They invoke God by no other name than Mythras, a name they all apply to the one divine nature, whatever it may be. No prayers are devised which everyone cannot say without offending his own denomination." (126) "When the priest [...] comes out of the sacristy, everyone immediately prostrates himself on the ground out of reverence; on all sides the silence is so profound that the spectacle itself inspires a certain fear, as if in the presence of some divinity." (128) Priests are held in such high esteem that "even if they commit a crime they are not subject to a public tribunal but are left to God and their own consciences. [...] For it is unlikely that someone who is the cream of the crop and is elevated to a position of such dignity only because of his virtue should degenerate into corruption and vice." (124)
    94 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Tiako
    5.0 out of 5 stars Un livre de référence, dans un anglais accessible
    Reviewed in France on February 26, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    Que dire... J'avais déjà lu la version française d'Utopia, et j'avais été marqué par l'athmosphère qu'arrivait à nous peindre More, malgré les siècles qui nous séparent de lui. L'invention du terme d'utopie n'est que le commencement de son travail, et il est très intéressant de découvrir son utopie, qui permet aussi, de changer notre regard sur le monde.

    Concernant la version anglaise, je suis très satisfait : le texte est on ne peut plus agréable, et relativement accessible (je parviens à le lire, sans grande difficulté), même après une formation de générale scientifique comme la mienne. Je le recommande donc à tous ceux qui désireraient améliorer leur anglais, tout en découvrant un texte intéressant et utile pour la culture générale.

    Attention cependant, le faible prix de ce livre s'explique par l'absence de commentaires et d'annotations. Pour ceux qui voudraient une lecture plus approfondie avec des clés de lecture, mieux vaut vous orienter vers des versions un peu plus chères.
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  • Sir Duncan The Tall
    5.0 out of 5 stars Kitap biraz küçük
    Reviewed in Turkey on February 3, 2024
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    Ing okumak isteyenler alsın
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  • clotilde
    5.0 out of 5 stars Bom livro
    Reviewed in Brazil on October 1, 2023
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    Boa leitura
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  • Sharmin
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great book at a great price
    Reviewed in Australia on April 24, 2019
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    Great book at a great price
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  • homeport_uk
    5.0 out of 5 stars Utopia Classic and Free
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 19, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    New to Kindle App on my laptop, I started off with free books, to see how it worked for me. Utopia written by Thomas Moore in 1516, is really a critque of people of his own time, a book that has influenced much of society. The tale is based around a imaginery character called Raphael Hythloday, whom Moore meets and who tells him about his travels to a distant place called Utopia, and it is this that Moore bases his book on.

    The community of Utopia is based on the idea that everything is shared, both social and political. There is no private wealth, and everything is shared, so all men and woman capable of working, must contribute to the community, by doing their fair share of work. Those that will not work, yet are capable are punished. The idea is one of sharing and exchanging items to make sure everyone has what they need to live simply. There is no money within Utopia.
    There is an equality of men and woman and the opportunity to educate themselves, People are allowed to worship any religion, all of them are equal in Utopia. Utopia is a democratic and equal society, where everyone can grow, both mentally and as a community, working together.
    In many ways the book Utopia opened peoples eyes to new ideas and ways of working together.

    This book deserves to be read, I defiantly reccomend it....
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