(Utopia and irony in Thomas More’s context)

Abstract

The usual conception of the idea of Utopia is that of a social entity that, because of its own perfection, cannot exist in the real world. This conception is preeminent not only in modern and contemporary thinking, but also in the interpretations of More’s Utopia: according such idea, in the utopian republic, the humanist creates a perfect state, but unreal, and because of that, he places it in the island named noplace. This interpretation forgets the auto-ironical elements in Utopia, whose presence in the work avoids reading it according the scheme ideal perfection-real imperfection. We try a more “hermeneutic” reading of the english humanist’s work.