In choosing one’s mate, men should be allowed to see their prospective wives naked, since who wants goods that aren’t on show? Feminists, however, should note that women would enjoy the same prerogative. One should recall that More, far from being the liberal-cum-existentialist portrayed in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, showed not the slightest compunction in torturing and executing heretics. Adultery would be punished by the strictest form of slavery. On certain festive days wives would fall down at their husbands’ feet, confessing that they have performed some domestic duty negligently. The perfection of his utopia is not tarnished in his view by the fact that it contains slaves. Not all More’s proposals would delight the heart of Jeremy Corbyn. Labour should be reduced to a minimum, though the TUC might balk at the suggestion that workers would use some of their leisure time to attend public lectures before daybreak. War is fit only for beasts, and standing armies should be disbanded. Instead of being worshipped, gold and silver should, he suggests, be used to make chamber pots. Perhaps this is one reason why Utopia is not bedside reading in Buckingham Palace. Monarchs, he argues, would do well to swear at their inauguration never to have more than 1,000lbs of gold in their coffers. Tenants are evicted so that “one insatiable glutton and accursed plague of his native land” may consolidate his fields. There are a great number of noblemen, More complains, who live like drones on the labour of others. Such men, the book announces, are “greedy, unscrupulous and useless”. Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism and described the current social order as a “conspiracy of the rich”. Thomas More’s Utopia, a book that will be 500 years old next year, is astonishingly radical stuff.

Thomas more 1516