Bad Governance, Pride, and Idleness Theme Analysis

Utopia is divided into two books. The first (composed for the most part after the second) contains a discussion of governance in Europe generally and specifically in England under King Henry VIII, whom Thomas More the man famously served as a counselor and at whose hand More was later executed for treason. Book II contains the description of Utopia’s government, laws, and orders. (Following the influential Utopia scholar J.H. Hexter, we occasionally refer to Book I as the “Dialogue of Counsel” and to Book II as the “Discourse on Utopia” throughout.) Another way of thinking about this division is that Book I critically presents society as it is—organized irrationally by pride, which Hythloday takes to be the ultimate source of all human wrongdoing—whereas Book II presents a vision of society as it ought to be. The question remains, however, whether knowing what good governance ideally looks like aids us in actually governing well on earth—or, even more troublingly, whether we can really imagine what good governance looks like in the first place.

More saves this second question for Book II, and first considers what bad governance looks like, as revealed by Hythloday’s critique of certain social policies and institutions active in Renaissance Europe. Hythloday begins by arguing against the sentencing of thieves to death as disproportionate to the crime (according to records from the period, some 7,200 thieves were hanged under the reign of Henry VIII alone), and this argument spirals outward to suggest the failings of society in general that make it a breeder of thieves and worse. In Hythloday’s account, poor or idle (because untrained) men are forced to become thieves in order to avoid starvation. Those thieves who aren’t hanged then usually become soldiers, whom society keeps fighting fit by deploying in needless, vain, and unprofitable wars of conquest. Such men could be well employed as farmers, but landowners at the time and even holy men in the Church are profitably turning farmland into pastures for sheep, such that little land is available for commoners to farm. This in turn leads them into beggary, thievery, and debauchery in taverns and alehouses.

In short, unchecked pride and idleness are the parents of social corruption, and European society, irrationally, puts a stop to neither. This would not be the case, Hythloday claims, if people didn’t have the license to pursue their own private interests at the expense of the nation, and also if the government itself wasn’t stuffed with unreflective leaders and flatterers who propose nearsighted solutions that serve only to exacerbate the problems they’re intended to solve.