"They wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is"
About this Quote
Gold gets its shine here by being exposed as a kind of mass hallucination: prized not for what it does, but for what we agree it means. More’s line, spoken with the cool amazement of an outsider looking in, is doing two jobs at once. On the surface it’s a commonsense observation - you can’t eat bullion, you can’t cure a fever with coins - yet entire societies reorganize themselves around it. Underneath, it’s an indictment of a moral economy that lets symbols outrank people.
The rhetorical trick is the inversion: “even men for whom it was made” are valued less than the metal they minted into meaning. More doesn’t attack greed as an individual vice; he targets the social technology of value-making. Gold is “made” valuable by human consensus, then that consensus hardens into a hierarchy where humans become disposable inputs. It’s a tidy description of how markets can turn from tools into gods.
Context matters: Utopia (1516) arrives as Europe is flooding with New World bullion, monarchies are centralizing, and enclosure is throwing people off land in the name of efficiency. More stages this astonishment as a travel report from an imagined society to make the familiar look grotesque. The distance is the point. By pretending to be shocked, the text gives readers permission to feel shock at their own norms - and to notice the quiet violence hiding inside “esteem.”
The rhetorical trick is the inversion: “even men for whom it was made” are valued less than the metal they minted into meaning. More doesn’t attack greed as an individual vice; he targets the social technology of value-making. Gold is “made” valuable by human consensus, then that consensus hardens into a hierarchy where humans become disposable inputs. It’s a tidy description of how markets can turn from tools into gods.
Context matters: Utopia (1516) arrives as Europe is flooding with New World bullion, monarchies are centralizing, and enclosure is throwing people off land in the name of efficiency. More stages this astonishment as a travel report from an imagined society to make the familiar look grotesque. The distance is the point. By pretending to be shocked, the text gives readers permission to feel shock at their own norms - and to notice the quiet violence hiding inside “esteem.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
|---|---|
| Source | Thomas More, Utopia (1516), Book 2 — passage describing Utopians' astonishment that gold, though useless in itself, is so highly esteemed. |
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