More Utopia - Lecture 1 (2024) PDF

Thomas More, Utopia, Book 1: Is it possible to “speak truth to power”? Called once “No-Place” [Utopia] because I stood apart. Now I compete with Plato’s state, perhaps Surpass it; what he only wrote about I have in fact become: the best In people, wea...

Thomas More, Utopia, Book 1: Is it possible to “speak truth to power”? Called once “No-Place” [Utopia] because I stood apart. Now I compete with Plato’s state, perhaps Surpass it; what he only wrote about I have in fact become: the best In people, wealth, in laws by far the best. “Good-place” by rights I should be called. [For what Plato’s pen hath platted briefly In naked words, as in a glass, The same I have performed fully, With laws, with men, and treasure fitly. Wherefore not Utopie, but rather rightly My name is Eutopie: a place of felicity.] “My dear Raphael, why do you not enter into the service of some king, for I am convinced that there is none who would not be extremely glad to have you, because this learning of yours and your knowledge of peoples and places would not only serve to delight him but would also make you fit to inform him of precedents and aid him with advice.”  RENAISSANCE CIVIC HUMANISM Raphael: Why would I “sacrifice my contemplative leisure to active endeavor without contributing anything to the common good”  VITA CONTEMPLATIVA (intellectual, scholarly, spiritual, contemplative life, retreat from the world) “If I should obtrude such notions and others like them on persons who are violently opposed to them, don’t you suppose they would turn deaf ears as I told my tale?” (43) “Deaf as a post, undoubtedly,” I said. “And, by heaven I am not surprised, and, to tell you the truth, I don’t think you should obtrude such speeches or give advice which you are certain they will never accept. For how can it do any good or how can such an odd discourse influence the thinking of those whose minds are prejudiced and dead set against such notions? In private conversation with good friends this academic philosophy is not unpleasant. But there is no room for it in the council chambers of kings, where great matters are handled with great authority.” “That is what I said,” he replied. “Among princes there is no room for philosophy.” (43) “[But] there is another sort of philosophy better suited to public affairs. It knows its role and adapts to it, keeping to its part in the play at hand with harmony and decorum … whatever play is being presented, play your part as best you can and do not disturb the whole performance just because a more elegant play by someone else comes to mind. “That’s how it is in the commonwealth; that’s how it is in the councils of princes. If you cannot thoroughly eradicate corrupt opinions or cure long-standing evils to your own satisfaction, that is still no reason to abandon the commonwealth, deserting the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds. You should not din into people’s ears odd and peculiar language which you know will have no effect on those who believe otherwise, but rather by indirection you should strive and struggle as hard as you can to handle everything deftly, and “If I want to tell the truth, then I have to say “Absurd,” from such things … Though that discourse of Latin absurdus, mine might perhaps have been irksome and “out of tune, repugnant to them, I do not see why it dischordant”; ab – “off, away should seem odd to the point of from” absurdity. If I were to describe everything + surdus – “deaf, Plato imagines in his Republic or what the mute” Utopians do in theirs, these things might be  That which is better (as they surely are), but might still unheard of, seem strange, because here we have “Hythloday” cannot be – Greek, spoken or heard private property and there all things “peddlar of are held in common. (44) nonsense” UTOPIA: the idea or possibility that has no place (u-topia) in the given political conversation; What, Hythloday wants to know, will become of us “if we are to avoid as odd or absurd everything that has been made to seem alien by the corrupt morals of mankind”? (45) - Example of Christ’s teaching, and (earlier), Plato’s philosophy - Ideas, or ideals, are not inherently absurd or alien, as if by logic or nature; they are “made to seem” so by moral/social/cultural consensus The Utopian (Hythloday), the morally/culturally “alien” and “The New World”: “Out of a desire to see the world he left to his brothers his heritage in his homeland (he is from Portugal), joined Amerigo Vespucci, and was his constant companion in the first three of the four voyages which everyone is now reading about; but on the last voyage he did not come back with him. He sought and practically wrested from Amerigo permission to be one of the twenty-four who were left behind in a fort at the farthest point of the last voyage.” (12)  “The Age of Exploration” makes modern Utopian literature possible: a mediation of the morally/culturally “alien” The role of literature/books …. More: “How far will we be from happiness if philosophers will not even deign to impart their advice to kings?” Hythloday: “[Philosophers] are not so disagreeable as that … Indeed they have already done so by publishing many books, if those in power were prepared to accept their advice.” (36) What role do books play in mediating between the ideal and the real, the philosophical and the political, truth and power? “Your sheep,” I said, “which are ordinarily so meek and require so little to maintain them, now begin (so they say) to be so voracious and fierce that they devour even the people themselves; they destroy and despoil fields, houses and towns.” “Noblemen, gentlemen, and even some abbots … not content with the annual rents and produce which their ancestors were accustomed to derive from their estates, not thinking it sufficient to live idly and comfortably … these drones leave nothing for cultivation; they enclose everything as pasture … [and] turn all habitations and cultivated lands into a wilderness … so that one glutton … may join the fields together and enclose thousands of acres within one hedge, the farmers are thrown out: some are stripped of their possessions, circumvented by fraud or overcome by force; or worn out by injustices they are forced to sell. One way or another, the poor wretches depart, men women, husbands, wives, orphans, widows, parents of little children … they depart, I say, from hearth and home … and they cannot find any place to go … finally what else is left but to steal and to hang--justly, to be sure-- or else to bum around and beg? For that matter, even as vagrants, they are thrown into jail because they are wandering around idly, though no one will hire them, even when they offer their services KARL MARX on “PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION”: enclosure of large swaths of productive common land in the hands of a few wealthy landowners, transformation of commoners, peasants, and subsistence farmers into wage workers (or criminals) “The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people.” “The proletariat... were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.” [[