![]() The King imprisoned More’s father as punishment and made More pay a fine to secure his father’s release. ![]() As a member of Parliament, More fell out of favor with King Henry VII after a fight over decreased land grants to the Crown. The word “utopia” comes from Englishman Sir Thomas More’s (1478-1535) book Utopia, written in 1516. While the dream of the development faded, the project’s name was remembered, providing a name for Utopia Parkway, which in turn lent its name to Utopia Playground. When the Utopia Land Company found itself unable to secure additional funding, the project was swiftly abandoned. The roadways in Utopia were to be named after Lower East Side streets such as Ludlow, Division, Hester, and Essex. The plan included industries and a cooperative store. The land was obtained for development in 1905, at which time the company acquired a $9,000 mortgage to grade streets and divide the land into lots. The Utopia Land Company planned to construct an expansive cooperative community for Jewish residents of the Lower East Side on fifty acres of land east of 164th Street between the communities of Jamaica and Flushing. This would not be the case, Hythloday claims, if people didn’t have the license to pursue their own private interests at the expense of the nation, and also if the government itself wasn’t stuffed with unreflective leaders and flatterers who propose nearsighted solutions that serve only to exacerbate the problems they’re intended to solve.Utopia Playground takes its name from a housing development in Queens that was never built. In short, unchecked pride and idleness are the parents of social corruption, and European society, irrationally, puts a stop to neither. ![]() ![]() This in turn leads them into beggary, thievery, and debauchery in taverns and alehouses. Such men could be well employed as farmers, but landowners at the time and even holy men in the Church are profitably turning farmland into pastures for sheep, such that little land is available for commoners to farm. Those thieves who aren’t hanged then usually become soldiers, whom society keeps fighting fit by deploying in needless, vain, and unprofitable wars of conquest. In Hythloday’s account, poor or idle (because untrained) men are forced to become thieves in order to avoid starvation. Hythloday begins by arguing against the sentencing of thieves to death as disproportionate to the crime (according to records from the period, some 7,200 thieves were hanged under the reign of Henry VIII alone), and this argument spirals outward to suggest the failings of society in general that make it a breeder of thieves and worse. More saves this second question for Book II, and first considers what bad governance looks like, as revealed by Hythloday’s critique of certain social policies and institutions active in Renaissance Europe. The question remains, however, whether knowing what good governance ideally looks like aids us in actually governing well on earth-or, even more troublingly, whether we can really imagine what good governance looks like in the first place. Hexter, we occasionally refer to Book I as the “Dialogue of Counsel” and to Book II as the “Discourse on Utopia” throughout.) Another way of thinking about this division is that Book I critically presents society as it is-organized irrationally by pride, which Hythloday takes to be the ultimate source of all human wrongdoing-whereas Book II presents a vision of society as it ought to be. (Following the influential Utopia scholar J.H. Book II contains the description of Utopia’s government, laws, and orders. The first (composed for the most part after the second) contains a discussion of governance in Europe generally and specifically in England under King Henry VIII, whom Thomas More the man famously served as a counselor and at whose hand More was later executed for treason.
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