Analyze the “utopia”

Introduction

Published in 1516, Sir Thomas More's (1478-1535) De Optimo Republicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia (On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia), usually just called Utopia (trans. 2005), is a dialogue between the narrator and a seafarer named Raphael Hythloday in which the troubled conditions of European political and civic communities are contrasted with those of the well-ordered fictional island. More, a lawyer who eventually became chancellor of England during the reign of Henry VIII, explores the compromises that the philosophical counselor must make when employed by a less-than-philosophical monarch, echoing Plato's ...