How did Thomas More's Utopia shape dystopian fiction and social science, per Laura Ashe?

Laura Ashe argues Utopia went beyond Plato's theoretical republic by dressing an imagined society as a real place, which gave rise to the genre now best known through dystopias. She also credits More with founding political and social science, because the debate on theft treats crime as something a society produces rather than a matter of individual sin. The panel adds that later dystopias are utopias in disguise, built on the same walls, slaves and outsiders treated as lesser.

• Cathy Shrank reads William Baldwin's 1552 Beware the Cat as a satire of Hythloday, a learned man who wastes his learning on decoding cats.
• Amerigo Vespucci is written into the story as the explorer whose voyage left Hythloday in Utopia.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on In Our Time (2026-10-15). Read the whole episode summary →

▸More from this episode