Thomas More

In the play, “A Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt uses contrasting characters in order to illustrate the rise of a corrupt conscience. Sir Thomas More, the protagonist of the play, is “known to be honest” (55). Despite being perceived as steadfast, More is secluded due to his unwillingness to conform to the greedy mindset of the “successful”. On the other hand, Bolt introduces Richard Rich and the Common Man to the audience. Rich, as indicated by his name, is willing to adjust his morals if it…

Utopia: The Perfect Society Saint Thomas More’s Utopia presents us with a retelling of the world’s one and only “perfect” society. It is a very detailed account of the life style of the Utopians from a man named Raphael Hythlodaeus. This fictional account of the island in the new world is incredibly vivid and even mixed in with truths from explorers and other facts from the time, which makes it seem almost as if it was reality. On the surface, More’s Utopia is a blueprint for a perfect society,…

Sir Thomas More’s titular nation of Utopia has come to colloquially express a society free of conflict. A “Utopia” is that place where there are (virtually or literally) no poor, no class struggles, no crimes, etc. More’s Utopia, as described through the recollection of the landless traveler/philosopher Raphael Hythloday, achieves these ends primarily through its commonplace “laws,” i.e., its distributed model of property. Jonathan Swift’s scathing satire “A Modest Proposal…” sardonically…

Do you know what a utopia is? Well, it’s an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. In 1516, when Sir Thomas More wrote the first 'Utopia', he coined the word from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. For thousands of years, people have dreamt of perfect worlds, with no conflict, no struggling. But is it possible for these worlds to ever exist? No, even though some people think a utopia can exist, it is not possible because of the fact that no one thinks…

witnessed by humans. Utopia, according to Oxford Dictionary, is defined as “An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect.” Saint Thomas More, an English 16th century philosopher, lawyer, and Renaissance humanist, published a two-part book called Utopia. The first portion relays the corruption in England through the eyes of More and a few friends as they sit in his garden chatting. The concepts they discuss such as war, stealing, murder, or even how society works in general…

Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia are seminal political treatise that examine in great detail the nature of virtue in humanity. While the concept of virtue and politics in both texts are crucial to both works, the way in which they are treated by the respective authors is divergent and in some circumstances completely polarised. Consideration of the environmental factors and historical influences surrounding both texts gives insight into the variation of virtue in the texts.…

Through Utopia, More provided the leaders of his time with keen insight to help improve his world by claiming that leaders should not use poverty as a method of controlling his people. In Utopia More claimed, “Certainly it is wrong to think that the poverty of the people is a safeguard of public peace.”(Utopia, Sir Thomas More) What More means in this quote is that a leader should not use poverty as a means to control his people. More’s point here was when people are dependent on their leader’s…

change from the typical Gregorian chant to more instruments, and the way of thought eventually followed with the new wave of change. Thomas More would be a very big part of this with his Utopia and the new ideas that went into this book would show how vastly different the Renaissance way of thought was from the thinking of the old with the middle ages slowly fading away and becoming ancient history. Thomas More’s Utopia resembles the…

Evaluating Utopia As seen through Thomas More’s depiction of Utopia, he views it as a perfect society that has no complications and everyone in the society is content with his or her life. Although, a dystopia typically derives from a once thought utopic society. Like seen in George Orwell’s 1984, while these two texts are different, they have similarities in the theme of utopia verse dystopia. In Orwell’s famous novel, it seemed like everything in the world created and managed by the…

be to fantasize and entertain the idea. Sir Thomas More, in 1516 imagined a place of perfection in which he decided to named Utopia. The very word Utopia itself derives from the Greek root Ou-tupos meaning ‘no place’. More interestingly the easily confused identical Greek root Eu-tupos means ‘good place’. Did Sir Thomas More purposely coin a word to mean both good place and no place? Based on the indecisiveness of the word itself, I believe Sir Thomas More knew that a utopian society at best…