The figure of Thomas More and his work Utopia have followed chaotic but often separate fates all along history. More wrote his Utopia in 1515, when he was under forty years of age and, more important, before the first expressions of the Lutheran movement in England. Ten years after the first edition of Utopia, Europe had become a different world, often a much more hostile one, a place in which Thomas More assured he would not have repeated the same adventure. (...) In 1532, when busy writing his great polemical work against William Tyndale, More went as far as thinking that Utopia, like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, might have become subversive and the books needed to be destroyed. He added that he would “helpe to burne... (shrink)

This paper shows how solidarity is one of the founding principles in Thomas More's Utopia. In the fictional republic of Utopia described in Book II, solidarity has a political and a moral function. The principle is at the center of the communal organization of Utopian society, exemplified in a number of practices such as the sharing of farm work, the management of surplus crops, or the democratic elections of the governor and the priests. Not only does solidarity benefit the individual (...) Utopian, but it is a prerequisite to ensure the prosperity of the island of Utopia and its moral preeminence over its neighboring countries. However, a limit to this principle is drawn when the republic of Utopia faces specific social difficulties, and also deals with the rest of the world. In order for the principle of solidarity to function perfectly, it is necessary to apply it exclusively within the island or the republic would be at risk. War is not out of the question then, and compassion does not apply to all human beings. This conception of solidarity, summed up as “Utopia first!,” could be dubbed a Machiavellian strategy, devised to ensure the durability of the republic. We will show how some of the recommendations of Realpolitik made by Machiavelli in The Prince correspond to the Utopian policy enforced to protect their commonwealth. (shrink)