Property conception in Thomas More’s Utopia

Abstract

Thomas More’s work called Utopia, published in 1516, became a paradigm for the formulations of utopian social projects. In that work More retook a controversial theme to Western political philosophy and religiosity: the idea of a just society. He examined the possibilities of constructing this kind of society and its fundamentals. The theme of property and how this concept is understood in that work is the special focus of in this text. Utopia presents a kind of collectivism in the manner of Plato’s Republic. The collectivism of the Utopia island was characterized by the criticism of the nascent form of capitalist property and because of this it became a classic of political philosophy, but the feasibility of this collectivism and its fundamentals remain questionable. Utopia contains some problems such as slavery, which demonstrates that despite being a criticism of the society of that time it keeps a close relationship with its way of thinking. Would Utopia just be a counterexample of that society and More just another reactionary?