Before Utopia

This book explores the influence of Stoicism on the evolution of Thomas More's mind, asserting that More's engagement with the work of Erasmus radicalized his understanding of Christianity and shaped the writing of Utopia.

Before Utopia demonstrates that Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) is not, as is widely accepted, a rhetorical play of spirit but is instead built from a particular philosophy. That philosophy is not Platonism, but classical Stoicism. Deeply disturbed in his youth by the conviction that he needed to decide between a worldly and a monastic path, Thomas More was transformed in 1504 by Erasmus’ De taedio Iesu and Enchiridion. As a consequence, he married in 1505 and wholeheartedly committed himself to worldly affairs. His Lucian (1506), written after working directly with Erasmus, adopts the Stoic mindset; Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1511) shows from beginning to end the workings of More’s life-changing Stoic outlook. More’s Utopia then goes on to systematically illustrate the Stoic unitary two-dimensional frame of thought within an imaginary New World setting. Before Utopia is not just a book about Thomas More. It is a book about intellectual history and the movement of ideas from the ancient world to the Renaissance. Ross Dealy emphasizes the continuity between Erasmus and More in their religious and philosophical thought, and above all the decisive influence of Erasmus on More.

Environmentalism has relentlessly warned about the dire consequences of abusing and exploiting the planet's natural resources, imagining future wastelands of ecological depletion and social chaos. But it has also generated rich new ideas about how humans might live better with nature. Green Utopias explores these ideas of environmental hope in the post-war period, from the environmental crisis to the end of nature. Using a broad definition of Utopia as it exists in Western policy, theory and literature, Lisa Garforth explains how its developing entanglement with popular culture and mainstream politics has shaped successive green future visions and initiatives. In the face of apocalyptic, despairing or indifferent responses to contemporary ecological dilemmas, utopias and the utopian method seem more necessary than ever. This distinctive reading of green political thought and culture will appeal across the social sciences and humanities to all interested in why green utopias continue to matter in the cultivation of ecological values and the emergence of new forms of human and non-human well-being.

An instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from one of the world’s leading economists, offering a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, but left us unsatisfied “A magisterial history.”—​Paul Krugman Named a Best Book of 2022 by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo. Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

Human beings universally dream of a better world. For centuries they have expressed their yearning for ways of life that are free from oppression, want and fear, through philosophy, art, film and literature. In this concise and engaging book, Mark Jendrysik examines the multifarious ways utopians have posed the question of how human beings might establish justice and realize truly human values. Drawing upon a range of sources, from Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, he argues that, though for many utopia means ‘demanding the impossible’, the goals that seemed out of reach for one generation are often realized in the next. Nonetheless, he shows that, while utopian thought points toward our most noble aspirations, it also illustrates the dangers of totalitarianism, of the surveillance state and of global climate change. This engaging book will be an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to understand how, for good or ill, utopian aspirations shape our lives, even in times that seem designed to close off dreams of a better world.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

"Utopia" ("Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia") is a work of fiction and political philosophy by Thomas More (1478–1535) published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs.

Utopia is an epoch-making work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More, written in Latin and published in 1516. The book tells about a fictional island society and its religious, social, and political customs.