Sir Thomas More, Utopia 
The most striking formal feature: the dialogue form (modeled on Plato).
It is based on the rhetorical principle of disputare in utramque partem: debating an issue from both sides. This in itself implied putting received ideas and traditionally accepted truths in question: radical humanism.
The form permits Sir Thomas More to make radical statements without claiming responsibility for them.
Blueprint for communism and conservatism.
BOOK 1:
One of the most famous passages
Hythloday attacks social injustice in England, especially the practice of enclosure, the process by which common land was appropriated by rich landowners, forcing tenants into poverty and crime and leading to the destruction of villages. Enclosed land was turned into pasture land for sheep, since at the time the wool trade was the most profitable.
“Your sheep,” I replied, “that used to be so meek and eat so little. Now they are becoming so greedy and wild that they devour human beings themselves, as I hear. They devastate and pillage fields, houses, and towns. For in whatever parts of the land the sheep yield the softest and most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry . . . are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury, without doing any good to society, no longer satisfies them . . . They enclose every acre for pasture; they destroy houses and abolish towns . . .” (Bk 1)
Book 2
Hythloday’s account of Utopia: a society of consensus, social harmony, order – no private property, no money, no exploitation, no social injustice.
Rotation of city dwellers and farm workers every 2 yrs., of houses every 10 yrs.
All wear the same clothes.
Everyone takes part in the democratic process.
Everyone works, but only 6 hrs. a day, 6 days a week. In their leisure time they engage in useful recreational pursuits: music, educating themselves, public debates. They never waste time, never play dice or gamble.
All activities are communal.
Disdain for gold: used for chamberpots; only criminals wear gold, and their chains are made of gold; only children play with pearls.
the philosophy of life
Epicureanism: a school of philosophy that advocated pleasure as the supreme good (especially the pleasure of freedom from pain and fear). True pleasures are NOT greed for riches, clothes, or prestige, or gambling and hunting.
Hythloday sums up: no one owns anything, but everyone is rich. By contrast, European nations are a “conspiracy of the rich” (p. 587).
The solution to social injustice and exploitation: to abolish private property and the money economy.
The parasitic classes (nobles, priests, soldiers, lawyers) should be abolished. By abolishing money, greed would disappear.
Criticism
Norbrook
Its radical ideas: a communist republic: no monarch
- religious tolerance
- laws based on REASON, not tradition
- participation of citizens in public life
Greenblatt
an attack on modern individualism (radical humanism)
a world of complete social control and mutual surveillance.