For someone who complains so regularly about utopias, it is quite the travesty that I have never managed to find the leisure or the inclination to read Thomas More’s Utopia,¹ even if small segments and portions have managed to make their way into my thought, perhaps inadvertently. I cannot deny that the text has been immensely influential; it is of primary interest to me because of the spatial and aesthetic sensibilities it embodies. If we had to make a real world anew, what would we include? What would we leave out from the domain of stipulation? These are important questions, but I am already getting ahead of myself. This piece focuses on my impressions and the concerns highlighted in the first book; I shall pick up the next day on issues in the penultimate and ultimate books.

While the first book ostensibly deals with “the Best State of a Commonwealth,”² it seems more to be a litany of complaints made against the condition of England of More’s time. More decries first the enclosure of the commons into private lands, pushed by an increased demand for land caused by the rise in wool prices.

For the vast majority of peoples, there is little hope in More’s England: once they have been squeezed out of their houses and thrust into a nomadic life, moving from place to place in order to earn to prevent the onset of privation, they are reduced further to the condition of beggars and common criminals. More asks, “what can they then else do but steal, and then justly pardy be hanged, or else go about a-begging?”³

More is also suspicious of the social effect of increased efficiency provided by structural changes in the economy: he writes that “one shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands were requisite.”⁴ There is little doubt in my mind that More was suspicious of the new because it sought to upend not just the economic foundations of English society but also the social, cultural, and political mores that had once made England great. England was no longer a unified nation, whether it was examined economically or socially or politically. In this one instance, More criticises the “few rich men” who hoard and artificially inflate the price of wool so that they can keep on selling at the prices they want to the detriment of the common peoples. “Thus the unreasonable covetousness of a few,” More remarks, “hath turned that thing to the utter undoing of your island, in the which thing the chief felicity of your realm did consist.”⁵ More is not shy about the prospects he faces — it is an England which seeks not to provide for those under its care, but for those few who happen to hold all the coinage of the realm in their castles. The aristocratic principle of excellence had been lost, and the care of the commonweal which had once resided in the body of the sovereign now lay neglected and ignored. More found that this duty of care had been lost, and in its place had been founded the duty of profit and covetousness. This being one of the chief causes of unrest and faction — More points out that “to this wretched beggars and miserable poverty is joined great wantonness, importunate superfluity, and excessive riot”⁶ — it is beyond any speck of doubt that the malaise of the commonweal comes from this economic deficiency and inequality. As much as I find defences of the English constitution particularly helpful in deciphering what its customs and traditions actually mean, in this one case an opposing view is markedly helpful. Joyce Appleby connects the enclosure of the commons and the rise of wool to the rise of capitalism; while she celebrates this early modern development that was perhaps as instrumental as the French Revolution in jolting us out of this state of early modernity, I find it hard to celebrate it entirely, despite the prosperity it has brought us. I think More and I are asking the same question: what is the price we must pay for prosperity? Does it necessarily mean the dissolution of the state as we know it? Viewed in its appropriate context, I think More recognises that despite the strength of English customs and traditions, especially political ones, the increasing commercialisation of the commonweal and the commodification of man will prove to be nothing but a sure fire disaster. Few persons have so readily brought upon the destruction of their peoples with such naïveté, though part of me cannot fathom that it was naïveté solely that caused this alone, but a Faustian pact at its core. Goethe, in my mind, wrote his Faust at a rather prescient time in human history, one that we find to be only a foreshadowing of the tumultuous and anomic nature of the period that was to follow it.

This brings me to the next question: can it be argued that More shares traits with the Luddites? More’s temporal solution in Book 1 to the economic woes of the commonweal and the common peoples is rather simple: “cast out these pernicious abominations,” he declares!⁷ More continues:

“Let not so many be brought up in idleness; let husbandry and tillage be restored; let clothworking be renewed, that there may be honest labours for this idle sort to pass their time in profitably, which hitherto either poverty hath caused to be thieves, or else now be either vagabonds or idle serving men, and shortly will be thieves.”⁸

This is a most curious statement. Why is More bothered by “idle serving men” and, in the same breath, the loss of handicrafts and traditional forms of occupation? I think More’s comments strike at the very nature of work, at the effects of the division of labour in a particular form. James Bernard Murphy’s The Moral Economy of Labour⁹ has some answers worth examining. More makes the same mistake that Adam Smith does — he takes all division of labour to be dumbing down, as Smith describes in the Wealth of Nations. However, in his example of the pin factory, carefully borrowed from the Encyclopédie, Murphy points out that Smith made two fatal mistakes, mistakes that I think we might find remedied in no small part in More. Murphy notes that the two steps that Smith first took — “the first is the analysis and separation of a process into distinct steps; the second is the assignment of these steps to distinct workers”¹⁰ — was confused into a single action, that there was to be a total concurrence between the two and that it was inevitable. As an example, he offers the varying production methods of Ford and Volvo, arguing that “for any series of tasks there is more than one technologically efficient way to integrate them: Ford introduced the assembly line to restrict each worker to a single task whereas Volvo introduced the assembly island to enable teams of workers to assemble entire vehicles.”¹¹ Even Karl Marx, who is held by many to pose an existential challenge to the sterilising march of money first noticed by Aristotle, fails to provide a workable solution:

“The integrity of Marx’s thought is rent asunder by a tragic dilemma he found inescapable: his deeply held convictions about the dignity of human labour, his hopes for a future society in which “labour is life’s prime want,” are shattered by his assent to the inexorable logic of the increasing division of labour. Just as Aristotle said that if shuttles would weave by themselves we would not need slaves, so Marx looks to automated technology to free men from the necessity of labour. In the end, as we shall see, Marx reverts to the Aristotelian view that whereas production is the realm of necessity, leisure alone is the realm of moral freedom.”¹²

Murphy argues that even Marx could not break free of the division of labour that dumbed down workers; in seeking Homo Faber he was unable to restore the unity of creation and execution, both of which both Murphy argues is essential for any truly moral system of work. Murphy concludes that “work is a mode of self-realisation only if it respects the integrity of conception and execution.”¹³ I think that what More seeks to criticise when he refers to both “vagabonds” and “idle serving men” in the same breath, as if both were but one and the same. What unity of conception and execution is there in the workers who serve mindlessly, having no part to play in either conceiving of their work or being stuck conceiving like consultants but with no execution in sight? I much prefer writing a paper on a predetermined topic: I am free to conceive of the scope of my work, broadly put, and then execute it as I deem fit. The same applies to work.

More, through analogy, characterises the new economy that was coming together while he was writing Utopia, and while he was only witness to small, isolated sketches of it — the capitalist logic had not received full articulation in 1516 and would not in More’s lifetime. More did not live long enough to see the steam engine take shape, for steel and steam to replace beasts. But it is remarkable that even at this crucial juncture, More pointed the effect this would have: rising crime, petty thievery, privation, and idleness insofar as the work thus provided would cease to be meaningful. He also recognises that this “idleness” due to the destruction of tradition occupations will make the rich richer and the nation richer, but he seems very uncomfortable with this Faustian bargain:

“Doubtless, unless you find a remedy for these enormities, you shall in vain advance yourselves of executing justice upon felons. For this justice is more beautiful in appearance, and more flourishing to the show than either just or profitable. For by suffering your youth wantonly and viciously … what other thing do you make than thieves and then punish them?”¹⁴

More, in questioning whether it is just to punish those who are left to beg and become vagabonds or resort to crime to save themselves from starvation because there are no other means available to save oneself from death, recognises the dire situation of the people. What is the price we must pay for prosperity’s sake?

It is surprising to see how much More has in common with Benjamin Disraeli, a connection which has been hinted at in passing but never really explore. Except for one brief mention,¹⁵ it is hard to find more references to the similarities between the two. I think there is a strong line of thought that ought to connect the two that is less well treaded than previously thought. Indeed, the substantive part of More’s initial parts of Utopia, especially in the second book, which I shall consider tomorrow.