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But the intellectual methodology for which Socrates is known is denied most inhabitants of Plato’s City. The “Socratic method” of inquiry, in which the common beliefs of the day are challenged through a dialectic process of questions and answers, is intended to sort out the weaknesses, strengthens, objections, alternatives, or support for those beliefs. But in the City, the individual is indentured to the state. Justice is synonymous with the well-being of the City. The classes exist to work as a harmonious collective to ensure order. Dissent, independence, and change are considered destructive. Ironically, it is unlikely Socrates would have survived long in Plato’s City, given its totalitarian complexion.

Popper observed that “Plato … became, unconsciously, the pioneer of the many propagandists who, often in good faith, developed the technique of appealing to the moral, humanitarian sentiments, for anti-humanitarian, immoral purposes.… He transfigured his hatred of individual initiative, and his wish to arrest all change, into a love of justice and temperance, of a heavenly state in which everybody is satisfied and happy and in which the crudity of money-grabbling is replaced by laws of generosity and friendship.… It is the expression of, and an ardent appeal to, the sentiments of those who suffer from the strain of civilization. (It is part of the strain that we are becoming more and more painfully aware of the gross imperfections in our life, of personal as well as institutional imperfection; of avoidable suffering, of waste and of unnecessary ugliness; and at the same time the fact that it is not impossible for us to do something about all this, but that such improvements would be just as hard to achieve as they are important. This awareness increases the strain of personal responsibility, of carrying the cross of being human.)”8

One profound lesson Plato teaches, albeit not by design, is that Plato himself, considered by many the greatest of all philosophers, could not construct the perfect society. He sought to avoid the disintegration of society and the onset of tyranny, but his solution was a totalitarian City destructive of human nature. Regrettably, Plato provided a philosophical and intellectual brew for a utopian society that would influence tyrannies for centuries to come.9

CHAPTER THREE

THOMAS MORE’S UTOPIA AND RADICAL EGALITARIANISM

THE WORD UTOPIA WAS coined by Sir Thomas More, a noted British barrister, lord chancellor under King Henry VIII, and since recognized as a saint in the Catholic Church. More created utopia as the centerpiece of his novel by the same name in 1516.1 The book is an extended, Socratic-style conversation between More, a friend of his named Peter Giles of Antwerp (where the story takes place), Cardinal Morton of Antwerp, and a fictional world traveler named Raphael Hythloday.

The discussion includes a variety of topics relating to how a monarch should govern and the kinds of counsel that should be offered to a prince or a king by his advisers. “For whereas your Plato judgeth that weal publics shall by this means attain perfect felicity,” More explained in his extended dialogue, “either if philosophers be kings, or else if kings give themselves to the study of philosophy…” (43)

During the lengthy conversations that comprise Book One, Hythloday makes several references to an island nation he has visited in the New World (in the story, Hythloday was part of the real-life explorer Amerigo Vespucci’s expedition to the New World [17]. It is during this journey that Hythloday encounters the island nation of Utopia). In order to observe and understand the nation, its people, and its mores, Hythloday decided to live among the island natives for five years.

In Book Two, More describes Utopia in all its intricate detail. It was named after King Utopus, the first great king who united the people living on what was then a peninsula. When Utopus saw that people from neighboring towns and cities might present a cultural threat to the people of Utopia, he ordered that a fifteen-mile-wide