More's Utopia

In Thomas More’s Utopia, an ideal human society, known as Utopia, is described by the fictional character Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday claims that Utopia is an ideal human society in which all of the citizens of the community work together for the betterment of the community. Essentially, his claims reveal that a society advances together if the private interests of the citizens are the same as the interests of the community. However, private property is concerned solely with the advancement’s of one’s own wellbeing, not the society as a whole. Therefore, private property is destructive to a human society because it does not aid in the advancement of human society; it actually harms the society. The destruction caused by the presence of private
Having private property in a society makes it so it is impossible to have equality in a society. Hythloday doubts that “equality can ever be achieved where property belongs to individuals” (38). This lack of equality stems for the discrepancies that form because of the differences in wealth. This inequity leads to more discrepancies because money controls society. Having a large inequity in wealth can easily lead to a monopoly or oligopoly in a society. A monopoly is not necessarily created but if power “is concentrated in so few hands (an oligopoly you might say), and these so rich, that the owners are never pressed to sell until they have a mind to” (19) in order for them to get their desired price. This results in the more power one man gains the more he is able to exercise his power and control others. The more a man exerts this power, the more others are hurt in the process of him gaining his wealth and power. Once a man obtains an unequal amount of power, he is able to live a very luxurious life. This reveals that men who do not contribute to society and pursue their own gains are allowed to live the best and most comfortable lives. Hythloday asserts this in saying that a man “doing either nothing at all or something completely useless to the commonwealth, gets to live a life of luxury and grandeur” (107). This demonstrates that men who choose to live selfish
Private property allows men to care about their own wellbeing more than that of the public. Since Utopia has no private property and everything is distributed evenly, “no men are poor, no men are beggars, and though no man owns anything, everyone is rich” (107). This is because “where there is no private business, every man zealously pursues the public business” (107). The absence of private property in Utopia creates a classless society where every citizen is equal with one another. However, having private property permits men to gain more than necessary and become wealthy. This wealth has to come at the cost of the public and the other citizens. If men cared about the wellbeing of other men, then they would not allow this to happen. Nonetheless, they proceed to satiate their own desires by creating an inequity between citizens. This is exemplified in Europe through monarchal powers. A king can do no wrong “for all property belongs to the king” (32) and it is vital for the king “to leave his subjects as little as possible, because his own safety depends on keeping them from getting too frisky with wealth and freedom” (32). A king has so much power over his subjects because the entire kingdom his private property. Therefore, his will controls everything in the society, and this creates a natural