Utopia and Dystopia

Sir Thomas More, is probably best known for his confrontation with King Henry VIII, for which he lost his life. He was a statesman as well as a political and social philosopher. His most famous work is his Utopia, a book in which he created his version of a perfect society and gave his name to such conceptions ever after as "utopias." The word is of Greek origin, a play on the Greek word eutopos, meaning good place. In the book, More describes a pagan and communist city-state in which the institutions and policies are governed entirely by reason. More included discussions of a large number of topics covering the institutions of society, including penology, state-controlled education, religious pluralism, divorce, euthanasia, and women's rights (Maynard 41).

Russell A. Ames finds that More expressed the various reforming concepts of the statesman, the lawyer, the merchant, the humanist, and the man of religion, purposes that were intertwined and indistinguishable. Many of the Utopian customs and ordinances directly reflected More's views of problems then current, e

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m geographical features to the way cities are developed to the way justice is meted out to individuals. Some elements are not dissimilar to the life of society in More's time--the life of the farmer in Utopia is not dissimilar to that of the British farmer except for the communal living in Utopia, for instance. The family is the basic unit of society in Utopia, reflecting More's own belief in the primacy of the family and his perception that family life was not sufficiently strong in his own society. He presents his vision as if it were a real place he had visited, a place that has eliminated conflict so that happiness can reign. Orwell sees the world of 1984 as a dystopia, or a government that does not work and that harms its citizens. He analyzes the issue in two works, 1984 and Animal Farm, and what links the two most directly is that both are anti-utopian in nature, for Orwell had developed a certainty that government in a utopian society would always be corrupted and would lose sight of its principles because of expediency. In 1984, George Orwell warned of the seductions of government thought control as he saw them developing in the Soviet Union and elsewhere because of the tensions after World War II. Orwell showed a
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Approximate Word count = 1608
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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