*Utopia*, published in Latin in Leuven in 1516, is a two-book dialogue that took shape in Thomas More's correspondence with the Erasmian humanists of his circle. The title is already a pun: in Greek *ou-topos* means 'no place', while *eu-topos* means 'good place'. More places this ambiguity at the centre of his work.

Book I is a sharp critique of Tudor England: the enclosure of common lands, hanged thieves, peasants conscripted for war. 'Sheep are devouring men,' More writes — his famous summary of pasture privatisation in service of the wool trade. Book II then turns to the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus, who describes the island of Utopia: a society without private property, where everyone works six hours, where many religions coexist in tolerance, and where war is despised.

The text's meaning remains genuinely open. Is More sincerely advocating common ownership — or constructing it in order to demonstrate its impossibility? The Erasmian habit of irony, the speaker's name (which in Greek suggests 'speaker of nonsense'), and More's own role as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII all complicate the picture. Perhaps the honest answer is that the book is both serious and a game.

What is unambiguous is its aftereffect. After *Utopia*, it became harder to treat the existing social order as the only possible one. More invented a mode of thinking — the systematic design of a radical institutional alternative — that runs from Bacon and Campanella through Marx, modern science fiction, and contemporary political philosophy. The name became a method, not a place.