What Genre is Utopia?

My Response

As the new management of Idiosyncrasy Booksellers, I must be cutthroat in my shelving schemes. Utopia isn’t travel literature, for the travel elements serve to juxtapose the thought experiments with contemporary England. It’s not any sort of fiction, for there is no plot and the characters are merely there to add depth to the hypothetical, like adding fish sauce to french onion soup. I don’t think that it’s social satire, either, because there are too many valid points (from pacifism to antitrust policy) mixed in amongst the extremes for the entire work to be reduced to that category. “Restrict the right of the rich to buy up anything and everything, and then to exercise a kind of monopoly” (20). We’re left, then, with the educational categories. I have to agree with C.S. Lewis’s point that if we take the arguments of Utopia seriously, it’s a confused book. We can’t accept Utopia as political or economic theory, because its solutions in those realms are not serious. Paradise without liberty, a communist state where gold lines chamber pots until needed to pay for mercenaries in war! 

         Three categories remain, so I pivot from prosecution to defense. Utopia is a work of moral philosophy. It’s a collection of thought experiments chasing-down ideals to their furthest ends in order to illustrate their implications. Though we should not treat the arguments within Utopia as serious, we should consider the gestalt seriously, for it provokes worthwhile questions. Is private property the root of all greed? Is the sacrifice of personal liberty necessary to create a little-u utopia? Can a flawed but well-established system of society reform into one based on entirely different ideals without immediate chaos and suffering? (Remember, the Utopians are colonizers who subjugated the indigenous people of their island.)

So, if you’re looking for a conversation starter for your next dinner party with political movers and shakers, you can find Utopia on the Moral Philosophy shelf, right above the whiskey. 

The Assignment

You’re the owner of an independent shop, “Idiosyncrasy Booksellers.” You’ve just received a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia, and you have to put it in one of the sections of your shop. Because you’re idiosyncratic, here are the categories:

1. moral philosophy
2. science fiction
3. ethnography
4. high fantasy
5. social satire
6. realist fiction
7. political theory
8. economic theory
9. theology
10. humanist manifestos
11. travel literature

Which category would you choose? You must choose one, and only one.