Agriculture, Cities,
and Government- UTOPIA
Each city is surrounded by farmland, and every
member of each city spends occasional two-year stints in the country doing
agricultural work. Cities do not attempt to expand their frontiers; they think
of the surrounding areas as land to be worked rather than as estates to be
owned. When one city has an agricultural surplus, it exports with no charge to
its neighbors. Those neighbors do the same in return. When it is time to
harvest, extra men are sent from the city to help out. Harvesting usually takes
little more than a day.
Cities are distinguishable from each other
only by those differences imposed by geographical location and topography.
Hythloday describes them all by describing one, choosing the capital city,
Amaurot, as his subject. Amaurot is spread along a tidal river that is bridged
only at its farthest point from the sea, so that ships can access all of the
city quays. A second fresh water stream runs through the city. The source of
this stream is enclosed within the city walls, so that the city will never be
without a source of drinking water.
The city is surrounded by a thick wall. Its
streets are rationally planned to allow for easy movement of traffic. Buildings
are well maintained. Every house has a front door that opens on a street and a
back door that opens onto a garden. No doors can be locked; there is no private
space. Houses are all well built and three stories high, with brick or flint
facades.
Households are split into groups of thirty,
and every year each of these groups chooses an administrator, called a
phylarch. Every ten phylarches operate under a higher official, called a senior
phylarch. Senior phylarches meet in a committee chaired by the chief executive.
Under pain of death, no person may discuss issues of state outside of the
committee, so as to insure no one can conspire against the government and
install tyrannical rule. They operate under the rule that no issue brought to
committee can be decided upon until the next day, so as to remove any chance of
over-hasty action.
Commentary
The communal method of agricultural work was a
revolutionary idea for its time for a variety of reasons. In England and Europe
agricultural work was an occupation of the poor, disdained by those with any wealth
or station. In Utopia, those class distinctions are broken down; working on the
land is made a necessary part of life, and the stigma of that work is removed.
The sentence stating that Utopians think of the land as something to be worked
rather than to be owned is an obvious reference to the enclosure movement that
Hythloday attacked in Book 1. The enclosure movement in Britain transformed the
wool and agricultural market into an oligopoly that simultaneously drove up
prices and deprived small landholders of their livelihood. Utopian agriculture,
for that matter, does not operate on any market system whatsoever. Instead of
selling off its surplus, a city freely gives it away. As can be seen in its
agricultural policy, the economic structures of markets and money simply do not
exist in Utopia. More earlier claimed that without the competition inspired by
the market Utopian productivity can't possibly match that of a market-based
economy. Hythloday's response will be seen later in his description of Utopia.
Amaurot is laid out much as London is.
Amaurot's tidal river finds a corollary in the Thames, and both rivers are
spanned by bridges at the farthest possible point from the sea in order to
provide the greatest number of accessible quays. Thomas More was certainly
aware of the resemblance of Amaurot to London, and no doubt created this
similarity on purpose. In creating Amaurot as a likeness to London, it is
almost as if he wishes the two to be compared in the reader's mind. It should
be noted that Hythloday's description of the buildings of Utopian cities were
not far off from the cities of Flanders, where Thomas More wrote and set part
of the book. Travelers to these cities were often amazed to see their
cleanliness and the quality of buildings. This is an interesting fact in that
it suggests the possibility that some aspects of the ideal can be achieved in
the flawed world, that perhaps More is correct in his argument with Hythloday
after all.
Utopian politics seems a strange mixture of
freedom and repression. Utopia employs a democratic government, its people
represented by two layers of elected public officials, the higher level
selected by the lower level. However, the rule abolishing on pain of death any
discussion of politics outside of the political arena seems incredibly
repressive. This repression, though, is a fair repression in the sense that all
citizens of Utopia are equally bound by it. This is a very different repression
than those in place in Europe, where the poor and weak were repressed by the
rich and powerful. Utopia is operating under a rule of law, with all citizens
subject to that law, even if the law itself strikes modern readers as
excessive.
Hythloday trumpets the lack of private space as
a wonderful idea promoting friendship and stifling pettiness and gossip. Again,
though, in the loss of private space is a correspondent loss of privacy and
autonomy. Utopia is a society in which everyone watches everyone else, much as
everyone does in George Orwell's nightmare world of ##1984##. There is
often little differentiating one man's Utopia from another's dystopia.
Bibliography
Sir
Thomas. Utopia. David Wootton, ed. Hackett Publishing Company,
Cambridge, England, 1999.
Social Plugin