Thomas More

New to the Penguin Pocket Hardbacks series - books that have changed the history of thought, in sumptuous, clothbound editions. In Utopia, Thomas More gives us a traveller's account of a newly discovered island where the inhabitants enjoy a social order based on natural reason and justice, and human fulfilment is open to all. As the traveller, Raphael, describes the...

Utopia by Thomas More presents a fantastical picture of a distant island where society is perfected and people live in harmony. Yet, its title means 'no place', and More's hugely influential work was ultimately an attack on his own corrupt, dangerous times, and on the failings of humanity. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the...

A major new translation by Dominic Baker-Smith of More's perennially popular Latin text. Utopia is Thomas More's work of philosophical fiction, imagining the island of the title, on which thousands live in peace and harmony. Through dialogue and correspondence between Raphael Hythloday and his friends and contemporaries, More explores the theories behind war, political disagreements, social quarrels, and wealth distribution,...

What we can learn from a Renaissance nowhere In 1516, a book was published in Latin with the enigmatic Greek-derived word as its title. Utopia—which could mean either "good-place" or "no-place"—gives a traveler's account of a newly discovered island somewhere in the New World where the inhabitants enjoy a social order based purely on natural reason and justice. As the...

In Thomas More’s hugely influential Utopia, a traveller recounts his discovery of an island nation in which the inhabitants enjoy unprecedented social cohesion and justice. The book imagines a community in which laws, personal relations, and professional ambition are based on reason, in contrast with the tradition-bound superstitions of Europe, which were, in More’s eyes, impediments to equality and peaceful...

The Essential Works of Thomas More is the first comprehensive one-volume collection of St. Thomas More's writings. "[A] tremendous scholarly undertaking. . . . Accessible and transparent to both scholars and the general audience.”—Renaissance and Reformation In this book, Wegemer and Smith assemble More’s most important English and Latin works for the first time in a single volume. This collection...

Part of the Hero Classics series. Utopia is a distant island where the inhabitants are thriving and justice and reason prevail, in contrast to the realities of sixteenth-century Europe, where greed, superstition and unenlightened tradition reign. Using the framework of a traveller's account to a fictional land, Thomas More created an ingenious treatise which envisioned a more humanist approach to...

'To find citizens ruled by good and wholesome laws, that is an exceeding rare, and hard thing.' Thomas More's Utopia presents an account of an idealised fictional society that has fascinated readers since its first publication in Latin in 1516. It is a scathing critique of More's contemporaries and a hopeful portrait of a better world; a ridiculous satire of...

Inspiring, provocative, prophetic, and enigmatic, Utopia is the literary masterpiece of a visionary statesman and one of the most influential books of the modern world. Based on Thomas More's penetrating analysis of the folly and tragedy of the politics of his time and all times, Utopia (1516) is a seedbed of alternative political institutions and a perennially challenging exploration of...