This exploratory article offers a reinterpretation of Thomas More’s Utopia by looking at the political role of writing and speech. By using Abensour’s concept of the oblique way, it aims to underline the predominant role of orality in More’s literary strategy. Three underestimated influences are thus shown through that angle: the problem of logographia in Phaedrus, the rhetorical use of a distancing topology in Cicero’s De Republica, and the modern discourse on the New World’s “peoples without writing.” We will see how this tension between writing and orality is transversal to Utopia’s reflection on the political. By its oral writing, the Utopia produces discursive effects similar to other authors of the sixteenth century (Machiavelli, La Boétie): it offers a heuristic thought on possibility and a critique of the political order of its time.