The distinction between a utopia and a dystopia is often in the eye of the beholder, for what some see as working, others see as failing. Thomas More in his Utopia suggests what society ought to be, while George Orwell in 1984 warns about what society might become. Some aspects of the forms of government depicted by the two are similar, but the emphasis given these issues by their authors are different.
Sir Thomas More, is probably best known for his confrontation with King Henry VIII, for which he lost his life. He was a statesman as well as a political and social philosopher. His most famous work is his Utopia, a book in which he created his version of a perfect society and gave his name to such conceptions ever after as "utopias." The word is of Greek origin, a play on the Greek word eutopos, meaning good place. In the book, More describes a pagan and communist city-state in which the institutions and policies are governed entirely by reason. More included discussions of a large number of topics covering the institutions of society, including penology, state-controlled education, religious pluralism, divorce, euthanasia, and women's rights (Maynard 41).
Russell A. Ames finds that More expressed the various reforming concepts of the statesman, the lawyer, the merchant, the humanist, and the man of religion, purposes that were intertwined and indistinguishable. Many of the Utopian customs and ordinances directly reflected More's views of problems then current, especially religious problems. It is also believed that More often made his Utopians do things which are not approved because they followed reason rather than the imperatives of the Christian religion:
The Utopians, guided by reason and also by their basically sound religion, have almost achieved a truly Christian ideal which they live by while we Christians do not (Ames 160).
The nature of European society at this time is evident in Paul Kennedy's an...