The book that gave the world a word for an impossible good place.

Utopia

Thomas More · 1516

Written in 1516 by a scholar-statesman who would later be executed by the king he served, Utopia invents a genre and a word in the same gesture. Thomas More frames an imagined communist commonwealth — no money, no private property, no idle nobility — as an argument against the England he saw around him: farmland enclosed for sheep, the poor hanged for the theft that poverty drove them to, kings who spent their treasuries on wars of vanity. The book never says outright whether Utopia is a blueprint or a joke, and that unresolved irony is exactly why it has outlasted five centuries of readers trying to settle the question for themselves. Gilbert Burnet's 1684 translation, printed here, was itself an act of protest — Burnet turned to More's book after defending a friend executed for treason against a different king.

9 chapters · 42,104 words · ~3.2 hr read