📙 Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, is a powerful and original study of social conditions, unlike anything which had ever appeared in any literature.
📙 He learns from a sailor, one of Amerigo Vespucci’s companions, of a wonderful Kingdom of Nowhere, in which all questions of labor, government, society, and religion have been easily settled by simple justice and common sense.
📙 In Utopia, we find for the first time as the foundations of civilized society, the three great words: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, which retained their inspiration through all the violence of the French Revolution and which are still the unrealized ideal of every free government.
📙 As he hears of this wonderful country, Thomas More wonders why after fifteen centuries of Christianity, his own land is so 'uncivilized'.
📙 Thomas More’s Utopia describes the travels of one man, Raphael Hythloday, to an undiscovered island that he considers to be the best country on earth.
📙 In Book 1, Thomas More (not only the author, but also a main character) arrives in Antwerp on a business trip where he runs into an old friend, Peter Giles and meets a new friend, Raphael Hythloday.
📙 Hythloday is a great traveller and has all sorts of controversial opinions, so the three of them head over to Giles’s garden to have an intense chat about whether or not it’s possible for philosophy to influence politics.
📙 Giles and More say, it is possible for philosophy to influence politics, whereas Hythloday insists that politics and philosophy are irreconcilable. He ends by just randomly mentioning this place called Utopia.
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