When Sheep Eat People
Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, is often misunderstood as a naive blueprint for a perfect society. It is nothing of the sort.
Utopia is framed as a dialogue between Thomas More himself, the humanist Peter Giles, and a seasoned traveler named Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday claims to have journeyed with Amerigo Vespucci and to have spent years living on a distant island called Utopia. The name itself is a provocation. It means both “no place” and, by a near-homonym, “good place.” From the start, More signals that what follows is not a literal proposal but a thought experiment.
Hythloday describes Utopia in meticulous detail. Property is held in common. Money does not exist. Citizens work limited hours, and everyone contributes. Education is widespread. Political offices rotate. Laws are few and written plainly so that no one needs lawyers to understand them. Religious tolerance is practiced, but atheism is discouraged because it undermines social obligation. Even war is treated with suspicion and is fought, when unavoidable, with minimal bloodshed and maximum restraint.
None of this is presented without tension. Utopia also has features that disturb modern readers: slavery exists, travel is tightly regulated, conformity is valued, and individual freedom is constrained by communal expectation. More does not hide these elements. He places them deliberately alongside admirable institutions, forcing the reader to decide what trade-offs they are willing to accept.
Crucially, More never tells us whether Utopia should be imitated. In the closing pages, he explicitly withholds endorsement. He allows his fictional self to admire certain Utopian practices while doubting others. The book ends unresolved. The reader is left not with a program, but with unease.
That unease is the point. Utopia is not a design for a perfect society. It is a comparative device. By describing a coherent but alien social order, More juxtaposes the customs of the imagined island with the England he knew, not to praise every Utopian rule, but to expose the moral costs of policies that were already being justified as progress.
One of the most striking moments in the book is his discussion of sheep. On the surface, this seems absurd. Sheep are hardly a philosophical topic. Yet for More, they had become a symbol of something deeply wrong.
In More’s England, wool had become extraordinarily profitable. Landowners discovered that raising sheep required far fewer workers than growing crops. Where villages had once supported families for generations, enclosed fields could now be managed by a handful of shepherds. The solution was obvious from a purely economic perspective: enclose the land, remove the people, let the sheep graze.
The consequences were devastating. Peasants lost access to common land. They lost work, food security, and a place in the social order. Many were forced into towns, where they became beggars or petty criminals. The state responded not by questioning the economic logic that had displaced them, but by punishing the displaced themselves, often brutally.
This is where More’s famous line appears: sheep, once meek and tame, had become so ravenous that they devoured human beings. It is a deliberately shocking image. Sheep, symbols of innocence, are turned into predators. What More is really saying is that an economy that treats people as disposable inputs will inevitably produce misery, no matter how rational it appears on paper.
More’s critique is not anti-trade or anti-efficiency. It is a moral critique of economic reasoning detached from social obligation. He is attacking a form of progress that measures success in output and profit while ignoring what happens to the people who make up the society. Enclosure was legal. It was profitable. It was defended as modernization. And yet it hollowed out communities and created a class of surplus human beings.
This is why the sheep matter. They represent the moment when economic logic overrides the social fabric that sustains human life. Land becomes a commodity rather than a shared inheritance. People become obstacles rather than members of a community. Progress is defined narrowly, and its costs are externalized.
The relevance to our own time is uncomfortable. We no longer fence off fields for sheep, but the structure is familiar. Automation increases efficiency while displacing workers. Housing becomes an investment vehicle rather than a place to live. Communities are reorganized around market value instead of social need. Entire ways of life disappear, explained away as necessary sacrifices to growth.
Like the landowners of More’s time, we tell ourselves that this is inevitable, that the market demands it, that resistance is sentimental or naive. And like them, we are surprised by the social consequences: loneliness, fragmentation, anger, and a growing sense that society no longer exists as a shared project.
More’s question still stands. Is progress worth it if it destroys the social conditions that make a society worth belonging to in the first place? Is an economy rational if it produces wealth while dissolving community, obligation, and continuity?
Utopia does not give a simple answer. But it refuses the comforting illusion that efficiency and morality automatically align. It insists that progress must be judged not only by what it produces, but by what it consumes.
Five hundred years later, the sheep are different. The question is the same.