As others have said, these works have in common that they deal with an idealized society that is supposed to allow its citizens to avoid the wrongs of the societies the authors live in. However, there is also more to both of them than meets the eye. Readers often object to Plato's exclusion of poets from his ideal republic, and to other laws that seem too harsh. Some critics argue, though, that Plato wasn't actually saying a republic should be run this way; rather, the "republic" is a metaphor for how one should take care of one's own soul and moral character. Similarly, some aspects of society in Utopia are not ideal; for example, a Utopian must be granted permission by their ruler before traveling to another city. In integrating such extreme rules into his "ideal" society, More satirizes the impulse to imagine ideal societies as well as criticizing the society in which he actually lived. Both authors are doing one thing on the surface and another when examined closely.
Both Thomas Moore's Utopia and Plato's Republic are essentially speculative; that is, both write about societies that don't actually exist as a means of commenting on ones that do. In this way, both offer critical commentary about the way the political systems of their respective times could be made better.
Moore's Utopia, though, is a novel. It presents itself as fiction: a sea-voyage goes astray and the protagonists wash up on the shore of an unknown land. It's the stranger-in-a-strange-land plot. Once in this strange new place, the characters become acquainted with this new place just as we, the reader, do, and what they/we find is that the way things operate in Utopia seems downright fabulous. There's no war, no poverty, no greed, no crime. If only our world could be that way. Moore's saying it could be if only we lived under a different political/economic/social system.
Plato's Republic involves a bunch of toga-clad guys sitting around discussing "big" ideas, one of whom is Socrates, who is essentially Plato's mouthpiece. He has all the good lines. The question of the day is "What is justice?" and what follows is Socrates's long and winding account of what justice is on the sociopolitical and individual level.
The biggest similarity is that each of these books is about an ideal society and government. Both Plato and Thomas More are offering their visions (philosophical, not really prescriptive) of what an ideal society would look like. In short, their books address the same topic. It should be noted that their ideal societies look quite different, but this difference stems from another parallel between the two works. Both men were using their work to criticize their contemporary societies, which, they strongly suggested, were decidedly less than ideal. Plato's Republic, for example, proposes that the best government would be headed by a "philosopher king," who would govern fairly, according to his understanding of philosophical principles. This was a response to what Plato saw as the corrupt and incompetent democratic government of Athens, which had recently condemned Socrates. Thomas More, on the other hand, proposed a society in which the people would have some voice (albeit filtered through several layers of oligarchy). He also envisioned a society that we would call socialistic today, in which private property was basically nonexistent. His "utopia" was a direct response to what he viewed as the increasingly despotic rule of Henry VIII, who would eventually have him executed due to his opposition to the treatment of the Catholic Church in England.
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