Utopia
by Thomas More
More
Nearly half a millennium after it was published, Thomas More's Utopia still stands as the perfect illustration of the limitations of our ability to imagine paradise, and to make that paradise come true.
On the surface, More's book is fairly straightforward. The Renaissance humanist lawyer and statesman himself appears as the narrator of its frame narrative. After a first half mostly consisting of philosophical and political discussions between More and Raphael Hythloday, a traveller he is introduced to in Antwerp, the rest of the book features Hythloday's description of the island of Utopia which is supposedly a country run along ideal lines.
What makes Utopia so confusing is that while about half of what More appears to advocate in the book is roughly what he advocated in real life, the other half is the opposite. It fizzes with ideas that seem radical even now, and certainly did then.
Utopia is tentatively democratic long before that became fashionable. The state is anti-war, only fighting when attacked. And it is, largely speaking, communist: there's no private property; there's a welfare state with public hospitals. The book is also fiercely critical of the existing social order, describing it as 'a conspiracy of the rich'.
Divorce, euthanasia, married priests and female clerics, all of which More opposed in real life, are the norm. The man who persecuted Protestants when he was English lord chancellor uses the book to advocate religious tolerance (except to atheists).