Thomas More's Magnificent Utopia - Dr Richard Serjeantson

Its central idea, of a perfect but impossible place, has since become part of our mental furniture. But what does this very amusing (though also rather stern) book mean? It has sometimes been seen as a satire on the inevitable conformity of political equality but may rather offer a portrait of a magnificently just society. Utopias links both with London and with the civic culture of Renaissance Europe more generally will be explained. Focussing on its significance at the time when it was written, with reflections on its remarkably varied legacy. This is part of the Being Human festival and is complemented by an exhibition at the University of London's Senate House which runs until December 2016, Utopia and Dystopia.

[TheDevonblacksmith]

many thanks for posting this lecture, a very interesting and still current concept from over 500 years ago

[gabrielaubry]

It should be noted that there are a few aspects of Utopia that are morally ambiguous by today's standards...
- Utopia practice slavery. It's a moral virtue in that is used as a capital punishment instead of execution, but it becomes much less so when it becomes the fate of captured prisoners of war.
- Utopia is rather patriarchal, in that women are expected to be obedient to fathers and husbands.
- Utopia ascribes to the belief that one can't be moral without religion. Though Utopia practice full religious tolerance and places no official restrictions on atheists, atheists are systematically distrusted by the people and are pressured to accept religious faith.

[philovance]

It was required reading in a 2nd year English Lit. Course I took In university. I could not appreciate it back then. I was completely unfamiliar with Sir Thomas More. ‘A Man for all Seasons’ starring Paul Schofield, Orson Welles, John Hurt, Robert Shaw is on of my favourite films.

[birukethio]

Ethiopia
The Battle of Adwa (Tigrinya: ዓድዋ; Amharic: አድዋ; Italian Adua) was the climactic battle of the First Italo-Ethiopian War. Led by Emperor Menelik II, Ethiopian forces defeated an invading Italian force on 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa in Tigray. The decisive victory thwarted the Kingdom of Italy's campaign to expand its colonial empire in the Horn of Africa and secured the Ethiopian Empire's sovereignty for another forty years. As the only African nation to successfully resist European conquest during the scramble for Africa, Ethiopia became a pre-eminent symbol of the pan-African movement and international opposition to colonialism.[14]

[JPSinLA]

You apparently missed the simple message of the book. It is a message of personal responsibility in a world of corruption & your arguing about who was and was not corrupt

[mosesbullrush]

Utopia has some comparison with the modern scheme called Technocracy described in the video below.
Video Title: "Technocracy Rising - the Scientific Elite's Global Matrix of Control"
Uploader: "Millennial Millie"
/watch?v=fQSlDJ23Cwk

[threethrushes]

Utopia: the precursor to the failed twentieth-century experiment that was the USSR.

Unsurprisingly, Russian literature has a reasonably rich tradition in utopian and dystopian thought in the late nineteenth-century (Chernishchevskii, 1863), and early twentieth-century (Zamiatin, 1921), among others.

Fun fact: Utopia was translated into Russian only as late as 1798.

[avroB]

After actually reading "Utopia" and realising what a dreary Communist conformity it described, I stopped using the term in a complimentary fashion. I haven't yet decided whether it was meant to prescribe a Platonic ideal society, or a satire criticising contemporary England.

[iamfayko]

26:43 - logic behind lack of utopian crime

[martonk]

The lecturer's rhetoric is pushed a bit too far to be enjoyable, in my view. Great video, nevertheless.

[birukethio]

am live in ethiopia in africa i want to know this book is talk about ethiopia
let me know it is true

[tomgervasi]

Utopia is not a utopia, in practice it ends up turning into the totalitarian nightmares of the 20th century, not because it betrays the communist values, but because it is a fulfillment of them. It's only a utopia in the Greek sense of the term that it is 'no place'.