Review of 'Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
As a philosophical exercise in world-building, originally written in Latin 500 years ago it is unsurprising that this is a bit of a slog. It is fascinating, the intent is debatable, but it's somewhat like if J.R.R. Tolkien only wrote the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, in Latin, and invented communism.
It describes a society where everyone is happy and taken care of, well except the ones who apparently aren't happy enough to avoid doing things that get them sentenced to death or slavery. There's complete religious freedom, except for denying the existence of an afterlife, which is allowed, but means you're unfit for any office with responsibility, since you're obviously ready to break any law if it profits you. And the Utopians only do war if they absolutely have to, and then they like using really violent hired soldiers, which the world would be better off without, …
As a philosophical exercise in world-building, originally written in Latin 500 years ago it is unsurprising that this is a bit of a slog. It is fascinating, the intent is debatable, but it's somewhat like if J.R.R. Tolkien only wrote the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, in Latin, and invented communism.
It describes a society where everyone is happy and taken care of, well except the ones who apparently aren't happy enough to avoid doing things that get them sentenced to death or slavery. There's complete religious freedom, except for denying the existence of an afterlife, which is allowed, but means you're unfit for any office with responsibility, since you're obviously ready to break any law if it profits you. And the Utopians only do war if they absolutely have to, and then they like using really violent hired soldiers, which the world would be better off without, and resolve things peacefully as soon as possible, or be really ruthless to scare everyone from messing with them again.
Almost the entire book is made up of Raphael Hythloday describing the society of Utopia to Thomas More. This is prefaced with a bit of philosophical back and forth between the two where More tells Raphael he should be an advisor to kings, Raphael saying they'd ignore him and he'd go nuts, and More saying he has an obligation to do his best with the system that exists.
It ends with More sending an exhausted Hythloday off to bed without discussing unspecified disagreements he has with the qualities of Utopia and stating that, again unspecified, qualities are things he'd wish for, but doesn't hope for, for the societies of Europe.
