According to Wikipedia, “Sir Thomas More, venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to May 1532.” He wrote the book Utopia in the year 1516.

According to Wikipedia, “Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More, written in Latin and published in 1516. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs.” The book was later written in English in the year 1551.

Utopia is the word used to describe an imaginary, perfect world. Thomas More was the first person ever to write of a Utopia. According to the British Library, “More’s book imagines a complex, self-contained community set on an island, in which people share a common culture and way of life.” The overall theme of the book is the ideal nature of a Utopian society. According to PressBooks, “In Utopia, there is no greed, corruption, or power struggles due to the fact that there is no money or private property.” The concept of a Utopia is an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions. According to BBC Culture, “More’s Utopia is the creation of a well-meaning member of the upper classes with a plan, rather than the live-for-the-moment dream of a peasant or worker. In Utopia, private property is abolished. “There is nothing within the houses that is private or any man’s own,” writes More.”

This book, Utopia, identifies a world traveler. This traveler is quite sensible, as we see in this book. This traveler insists on himself seeing what works, and what does not work. He insists on the punishment fitting the crime. The traveler also says that if thieves had a job, they would not be thieves. People would not steal if they could work. He says that there really is no sin. There is just deprivation. The traveler also gets into an argument with the narrator later it the book. The traveler blames all evil on private property and makes a case for a centralised Utopian society, while the narrator says that the people need economic insensitive or they will not work. Basically the traveler is making a case for the centrally planned society, and the narrator is making a case for the decentralised society. After this, the narrator continues to describe Utopia. He describes Utopia as a place where there is no wealth, gold, silver, jewels, money, they have no value. He also says that there is a limited number of families in a city, and a limited number of people in one family. Also, no one even cares for fashion, there is no greed, and there are few conflicts. He even says that food and meals are free, since there is no such thing as money.

Why does More present the traveler as a sensible reformer early in Book I, but not later? The answer is that the majority of beliefs in the book would not be accepted by the majority. This is kind of like a tactic to help bring readers into the book, by first presenting the ideas that the traveler believed that was more believable at first, and then bringing in more radical ideas.