ate another’s thought, in order to place oneself in a more respectable position. With this, Machiavelli pronounces human nature to be very cold-blooded, deceiving, self-centered, and most of all temperamental. Thomas More, in Utopia, tried to express that the only way for a better life was through change. More’s key complaints of human nature were greed, power, and pride. More, seemingly, imagined a society, in which these three things no longer existed, believing that they were man’s downfall. The main thought that he attempted to instill in the minds of the English was this: Take a miserable spell of disastrous harvests, when many of thousand of men have passed on in hunger. If at the end of this famine the barns of the rich were searched, surely enough provisions would be found in them to have saved the lives of those who died from starvation and disease, if it had been rationed equally among them. Thusly, the suffering of a bad harvest was unnecessary. So easily might men get the necessities of life if that cursed money, which is supposed to provide access to them were not in fact the chief barrier to our getting what we need to live. With this, More described greed. At first glance, Thomas More’s Utopia appears as a socialist, communist society; however, if Utopia is a truly socialist state, then one can see that oppression is inescapable. It is clear that More attempted to create an egalitarian society to better the people as a whole, and not individually. His descriptions of the institutions of Utopia (i.e., A day in Utopia, The household, Utopian Beliefs, and Treatment of the dying) was precise and so well formatted that it is difficult to see any flaws, without peering deeply into his words. More outlines an utopian day as “…a six-hour working day—three hours in the morning, then lunch—then a two-hour break—then three more hours in the afternoon, followed by supper” (M...
