The Open Utopia Website

Thomas More open | Utopia Edited and with an Introduction by Stephen Duncombe Released by Minor Compositions 2012 Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions and provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] isbn 978–1–57027–245–5 Text designed and set in Minion by Charles Peyton Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburg Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 This edition of Utopia is open: open to use, open to copying, open to modification. Open Utopia by Stephen Duncombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.stephenduncombe.com. www.autonomedia.org [email protected] contents Preface | Intellectual Commons v Introduction | Open Utopia ix Utopia Map of Utopia 4 Utopian Alphabet 5 Four Verses in the Utopian Tongue 7 A Short Meter of Utopia Anemolius 9 Of Utopia Gerard Geldenhouwer 11 To the Reader Cornelius Graphey 13 Prefatory Epistle Thomas More to Peter Giles 15 Book I 25 Book II 81 Thomas More to Peter Giles 195 Erasmus to John Froben 199 Peter Giles to Jerome de Busleyden 201 Guillaume Budé to Thomas Lupset 207 Jerome de Busleyden to Thomas More 219 John Desmarais to Peter Giles 225 Beatus Rhenanus to Willibald Pirckheimer 229 Cast of Contributors 233 Sources 235 Acknowledgements 241 Intellectual Commons . in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full no private man can want anything . Thomas More, Utopia oes the world really need another edition of Thomas More’s Utopia? Kept in print more or less continuously since it was first D published in 1516, the translations and editions of this book, not to mention the scholarly interpretations and academic dissertations based upon this slender volume, would likely constitute the mass of a medium- sized island in themselves. It takes a bit of audacity to introduce yet another version of Utopia. Yet I have done so here because what the world does not have, and what I believe it needs, is a complete English- language translation of Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself — that is, that all property is common property. This edition of Utopia is open: open to read, open to copying, open to modification. Open Utopia is assembled from translations and editions of More’s Utopia that are in the public domain. The Preface, Introduction and footnotes, written by me, are licensed under Creative Commons, as are the few new translations I commissioned especially v open utopia for this volume. The Creative Commons “by-sa” license allows users to use, study, copy, share, and modify the work freely, as long as attribution is given and the content remains free to share. (The complete ancestry of Open Utopia can be found under “sources.”) Open Utopia is a complete edition, meaning that I have included all of the letters and commendations, as well as the marginal notes, that were included in the first four printings of 1516–18 in which More himself had a hand. Non-scholarly editions of the book often omit this material, but I believe these letters and notes, written by the author and his friends among the European literati, are essential for under- standing what More was doing in and with his Utopia. (The first-time reader, however, can comfortably skip ahead to Book I and Book II first, backtrack through the letters More wrote to Peter Giles that lie on either side, and then wander at their leisure through the other letters, commendations, and marginal notes.) I have also supplied a cast of contributors and copious footnotes of my own — not to bog the reader down with the intricacies of academic debates, but to give historical, literary, and etymological context, providing the twenty-first-century reader with the information that More’s learned sixteenth-century audience was likely to know. This paper-and-ink book is only a part of a larger project. Using pri- marily open-source software, I have created the Open Utopia website. On this site I have presented Utopia in different formats in order to enhance its openness. If the visitor wishes to read Utopia online, they can. If they want to download and copy a version, I have supplied links to do so in different formats for different devices. In partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book, I have provided an annotatable and “social” text available for visitors to comment upon what More — or I — have written, and then share their comments with others. Those vi preface who like to listen will find a reading of Utopia in audio format, and those who prefer to watch and look can browse the user-generated gal- leries of Utopia-themed art and videos. For people interested in creat- ing their own plan of an alternative society, I have created Wikitopia, a wiki with which to collaborate with others in drafting a new Utopia. More versions for more platforms are likely to be introduced in the future. Please visit the Open Utopia website at theopenutopia.org. Thomas More’sUtopia is more than the story of a far-off land where there is no private property. It is a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, open to modification, and open to re-creation. I have done my best with Open Utopia to convey this message and con- tinue the tradition. Onward to Utopia! Stephen Duncombe No-Place, 2012 vii open utopia Today we are people who know better, and that’s both a wonderful and terrible thing. Sam Green, Utopia in Four Movements topia is a hard sell in the twenty-first century. Today we are people who know better, and what we know are the horrors of “actually U existing” Utopias of the previous century: Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Maoist China, and so on in depressing repetition.1 In each case there was a radical break with the present and a bold leap toward an imagined future; in every case the result was disastrous in terms of human cost. Thankfully, what seems to be equally consistent is that these Utopias were relatively short-lived. History, therefore, appears to prove two things: one, Utopias, once politically realized, are staggering in their brutality; and two, they are destined to fail. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Yet we need Utopia more than ever. We live in a time without alterna- tives, at “the end of history” as Frances Fukuyama would have it, when neoliberal capitalism reins triumphant and uncontested.2 There are still aberrations: radical Islam in the East, neo-fascist xenophobia in the West, ix open utopia and a smattering of socialist societies struggling around the globe, but by and large the only game in town is the global free market. In itself this might not be so bad, except for the increasingly obvious fact that the system is not working, not for most people and not most of the time. Income inequality has increased dramatically both between and within nations. National autonomy has become subservient to the imperatives of global economic institutions, and federal, state, and local governance are undermined by the protected power of money. Profit-driven indus- trialization and the headlong rush toward universal consumerism is hastening the ecological destruction of the planet. In short: the world is a mess. Opinion polls, street protests, and volatile voting patterns demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, but the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcry of No! No to dictators, No to corruption, No to finance capital, No to the one percent who control everything. But negation, by itself, affects noth- ing. The dominant system dominates not because people agree with it; it rules because we are convinced there is no alternative. Utopia offers us a glimpse of an alternative. Utopia, broadly conceived, is an image of a world not yet in existence that is different from and better than the world we inhabit now. For the revolutionary, Utopia offers a goal to reach and a vision to be realized. For the reformer, it provides a com- pass point to determine what direction to move toward and a measuring stick to determine how far one has come. Utopia is politically necessary even for those who do not desire an alternative society at all. Thought- ful politics depend upon debate, and without someone or something to disagree with there is no meaningful dialogue, only an echo chamber. Utopia offers this “other,” an interlocutor with which to argue, thereby clarifying and strengthening your own ideas and ideals (even if they lead to the conclusion that Utopia is undesirable). Without a vision of an x introduction alternative future, we can only look backwards nostalgically to the past, or unthinkingly maintain what we have, mired in the unholy apocalypse that is now. Politically, we need Utopia. Yet there are theoretical as well as practical problems with the project. Even before the disastrous realizations of Utopia in the twentieth century, the notion of an idealized society was attacked by both radicals and conservatives. From the Left, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously criticized Utopians for ignoring the material conditions of the present in favor of fantasies of a future — an approach, in their estimation, that was bound to result in ungrounded and ineffectual political programs, a reactionary retreat to an idealized past, and to inevitable failure and political disenchantment.

Load more