Utopian people

The Utopian people are the inhabitants of an island commonwealth presented by Raphael Hythloday as a test of whether public welfare can take precedence over private wealth. Their shared stores, civic procedures, and accommodation of varied forms of worship distinguish them from societies Raphael condemns for enriching the powerful while leaving necessary workers in poverty. Yet their order is not without contradiction: it began with conquest, treats unused land as grounds for expansion, and protects religious difference only within limits set by public peace and shared assumptions about the soul and Providence.

Origins and the making of the island

The island’s political order begins with Utopus, who conquered a territory first called Abraxa and subdued its inhabitants. He then ordered a channel, fifteen miles long, cut through the land to separate it from the continent. The work was shared by the conquered inhabitants and Utopus’s own soldiers, and was completed with unexpected speed. The island’s secure geography thus appears not as nature alone but as the outcome of deliberate political and military action. Its entrance is dangerous to outsiders, with submerged rocks and a channel known only to native pilots; coastal markers guide even local ships, and the approaches can frustrate an invading fleet.

Raphael describes a commonwealth of fifty-four cities with shared manners, customs, and laws. Three senators from each city travel annually to Amaurot, the central city, to consult on common affairs. The account emphasizes uniformity across the island while also presenting a deliberate structure for collective deliberation. At the city level, thirty families elect a magistrate each year; magistrates from the city’s divisions select a prince from candidates named by the people. The prince serves for life unless suspected of plotting to enslave the people, while other offices are renewed regularly. Public business must be debated over several days, and proposals of importance pass through local family groups before reaching the senate or, in grave cases, the council of the whole island. These procedures are explicitly designed to prevent rulers from conspiring to change the government and subject the population.

Families, population, and land

Family and population are regulated as parts of a common civic system. Women marry out of their households, while sons and grandsons remain with the family under the authority of its oldest member. A city may contain no more than six thousand families, and households are kept within prescribed limits by transferring children between families with different numbers of them. When some cities grow more slowly than others, their populations can likewise be replenished from elsewhere on the island.

When the population as a whole grows, the Utopian people send citizens to the neighboring continent to establish colonies where inhabitants have more land than they can cultivate. The newcomers invite local inhabitants to join their society and adopt its rules; Raphael says that this arrangement can benefit both populations by making the land productive enough to support them. But acceptance is not guaranteed. If the inhabitants refuse to conform, the Utopians drive them from the territory they have marked out, using force if they resist. They regard a nation’s refusal to let others use idle land as a just cause of war, on the ground that people have a natural right to the unused earth needed for subsistence. If plague leaves an island city severely underpopulated, however, the colonies are abandoned before the island’s towns are allowed to dwindle. The policy’s language of common subsistence therefore coexists with the displacement of people who reject the colonists’ claims and rules.

Common provision and political purpose

Raphael presents the commonwealth’s material arrangements as the foundation of its public-mindedness. Since people do not depend on private property to secure their needs, he argues, they need not put private interests before the common good. Supplies are kept in public stores, and each person can obtain what a household needs without payment or exchange. In his account, reliable provision removes the fear of want that encourages hoarding, while the absence of private accumulation deprives people of incentives to display wealth at one another’s expense.

This account supports Raphael’s wider contrast between the Utopian people and societies in which nobles, bankers, and others may live luxuriously while carters, smiths, and ploughmen perform indispensable labor for meager returns. In the commonwealth he describes, no one is poor or left in need, and care continues for people who can no longer work. Raphael calls this condition a form of shared wealth: people possess no private holdings, yet can live without anxiety about their own provision or that of their families. He also argues that a ruler’s security depends more on the welfare of the people than on the ruler’s private riches, since poverty does not make a population safely obedient and can instead encourage unrest. The people’s welfare is thus both a moral standard and, in Raphael’s political reasoning, a condition of stability.

Religious diversity and its boundaries

The Utopian people follow several religions, sometimes within the same town. Some worship celestial bodies; others treat people renowned for virtue or glory as divine. Raphael says that many of the wisest instead worship one eternal, invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible deity, whom they call Mithras. Despite their disagreements about particular beliefs, he describes them as sharing recognition of a supreme being who made and governs the world. Their religious differences are said to diminish gradually, although the account also records that misfortunes interpreted as divine punishment have made some reluctant to abandon older forms of worship.

The arrival of Christian teaching produces a further change. After hearing about Christ’s teaching, life, and miracles, and about the constancy of Christian martyrs, many Utopian people become inclined toward the religion and receive baptism. Raphael leaves open whether their response comes from divine inspiration or from Christianity’s apparent affinity with communal property. Because none of the surviving travelers is ordained, the converts receive baptism but cannot receive the other sacraments that require priests. They discuss whether a priest chosen among themselves could perform those duties without authority from the Pope; they appear ready to make such a choice, but have not done so when Raphael leaves.

Religious toleration is a law attributed to Utopus, who had found the earlier inhabitants divided by religious quarrels and therefore easier to conquer. The law permits people to follow a religion and try to persuade others through argument and moderate, friendly conduct, but forbids force, reproach, and bitterness against those who disagree. This protection does not extend to incitement. A newly baptized man who repeatedly denounces the other religions and their adherents is tried and banished—not, Raphael stresses, for disparaging their beliefs, but for stirring sedition. The distinction makes public peace the law’s boundary: religious disagreement is permitted, while conduct judged to inflame the population can be punished.

Their public worship gives institutional form to this accommodation. The Utopian people have few, spacious temples, kept somewhat dim because their priests believe moderate light helps gather thought and encourage devotion. There are no images of God; worshippers may conceive the divine according to their own religion. The shared name Mithras and prayers that can be used without prejudice to a particular belief allow different sects to take part in public observances without erasing their distinct private rites. At seasonal festivals, they give thanks for the period ending and pray for the one beginning. Raphael also describes a solemn prayer that asks God to reveal whether another government or religion is more acceptable, and pledges to follow wherever God leads—a profession that makes the commonwealth’s confidence in its own order formally answerable to the possibility of correction.

Raphael’s ideal and the narrative’s reservation

Raphael presents the Utopian people as evidence for his argument that common ownership can redirect self-interest toward public provision. He regards their government as the only commonwealth worthy of the name: elsewhere, he says, people may speak of public welfare while each person seeks private wealth. In Utopia, the security of access to common stores allows people to pursue shared welfare without fearing that their households will be left without necessities. He also expects the arrangement to endure because, in his view, it has removed the roots of ambition and faction that have unsettled other states.

The account does not simply certify Raphael’s ideal as the final judgment of the book. After his description, Thomas More notes that several features seem absurd to him, particularly the Utopian way of making war, their religious ideas, and their shared life without money. His response is restrained because Raphael is tired and may not welcome contradiction, so the narrative ends this exchange without resolving the disagreement. The Utopian people therefore function both as a proposed alternative to unequal societies and as the subject of an argument whose claims remain open to scrutiny.