Communities have good schools and hospitals. Education is compulsory, and every student learns at least one trade. Food is given out at public markets and community dining halls. Children, after their earliest years, leave home and are brought up by public authorities. The rulers are selected by secret ballot from among the best-educated citizens.
Lawyers are unnecessary because there are so few laws. .
More's book shares two primary characteristics of all utopian literature. It criticizes the present as an unhappy time, and it proposes an alternative society in which the state is exalted over the individual. Although More's book is fiction, it came so soon after the discovery of the Americas that utopia began to take on the sense of a real place a new Garden of Eden in the West where humanity could begin anew. In later centuries utopian literature often presented what were then regarded as realistic programs for ideal human societies. Other utopias were based on religion, politics, and science and technology. .