30 | What is Utopia? Part I. Thomas More: Critical Realism in a Time of Enclosure

What's Left of Philosophy

In this episode, we kick off a new series on the concept of utopia by taking a look at the guy who invented the word, Thomas More. We discuss how his wonderfully satirical 1516 book Utopia was written in response to the enclosures happening in England, which forced masses of peasants into unemployment and misery and created the conditions for early capitalist agriculture. His fictional island nation of Utopia thrives without private property, but More’s real trick is how he reveals the wildly utopian and fantastical nature of our own capitalist world order. Plus Owen invents the phrase ‘professional social improvement class’, which is just great.

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References:

Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, ed. George M. Logan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and his Utopia, trans. Henry James Stenning, accessed at the Marxist Internet Archive: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1888/more/index.htm>.

Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the language of Renaissance humanism,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Padgen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Alexandre Matheron, “Spinozism and the Breakdown of Thomist Politics: Machiavellianism and Utopia,” in Politics, Ontology, and Knowledge in Spinoza, trans. and ed. Filippo Del Lucchese, David Maruzzella, and Gil Morejón (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com