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.
Continue reading “More and the Nature of Work”
- Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, in Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). ↩