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Thomas More
Utopia
Summary: Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth
and the New Island of Utopia
More Meets Hythloday
The narrator, Thomas More, arrives in Bruges, in present-day
Belgium, and meets his friend Peter Giles. Giles introduces More
to Raphael Hythloday, an explorer who has seen much of the world.
More, Giles, and Hythloday go to More's house, and Hythloday describes
his travels. Giles asks him why he hasn't offered his services to
rulers, who could use his knowledge of diverse customs and practices
to improve society. More and Giles explain that a person of learning
and experience has an obligation to use his talents to better humanity.
Hythloday, unconvinced, attempts to demonstrate why offering one's
wisdom to government is not desirable.
Analysis
Hythloday, a fictional character, plays an ambiguous role
in Utopia. On one hand, Giles describes him as
wise and well traveled and therefore qualified to comment on a wide
range of issues. Hythloday has traveled with the famed explorer
Amerigo Vespucci, but since the author More and many others thought
Vespucci was a fraud, it is unclear whether Hythloday's association
with Vespucci lends him credibility or suggests that Hythloday is
prone to exaggeration. Hythloday in Greek means
“speaker of nonsense,” which may suggest that Hythloday's remarks,
despite being blended with factual elements from the author More's
life, should be taken with a grain of salt.
More and Hythloday's conversation about placing one's
talents at the service of a ruler demonstrates a conflict between
two ways of thinking. Hythloday believes in the purity of the ideal
of truth, whereas More believes such purity has no value and that
talents must be put to public use, even if the original ideal is
compromised by doing so. More is committed to the Humanist ideal
of individual conscience and wrestles with the problem of whether
one can remain true to one's principles and to truth while in the
employment of a ruler. As Hythloday attempts to demonstrate, reality
would force a conscientious person to make many concessions to power and
corruption. However, More and Giles argue that the wise cannot leave
leadership to the corrupt and must attempt to better society when
possible.
The author More struggled with the issue of whether to
join the service of the king or remain a philosopher, and at the
time he wrote Utopia, More was on the cusp of joining
the king's service. The argument between the narrator More and Hythloday
suggests an internal argument between More and himself as he struggled
to choose between remaining free to pursue the ideal and compromising
that ideal for the sake of social utility. He eventually rose to
the position of Lord Chancellor, the most powerful office in England next
to the king himself, but he ultimately abandoned pragmatism for
the ultimate ideal of martyrdom.
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