Abstract
Wells’s claim that ‘the creation of utopias — and their exhaustive criticism — is the proper and distinctive method of sociology’1 implies a different utopian mode from the hermeneutic exploration of desire and of what is missing. If Bloch allows for the expression of utopia to be fragmentary or fleeting, Wells points to an outline of a good society set out with some degree of institutional specificity — in other words, the imaginary reconstitution of society — embedding a normative claim of how society should be. But hermeneutic and constructive methods are connected, for the imaginary reconstitution of society is always essentially an attempt to establish the institutional basis of the good life, of happiness, and the social conditions for grace. This chapter demonstrates the interpenetration of sociology and utopia around the end of the nineteenth century. Chapter 5 shows how the institutional development of sociology, whose onset in the early years of the twentieth century formed the context of Wells’s claim, forced the separation of these modes of thought. It led to the expulsion of utopian currents, entrenching the polarities between is and ought, between science and utopia, between thought and feeling, as well as separating the understanding of social life from environmental concerns and limiting the critical power of social theory.
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Notes
H. G. Wells (1906) ‘The So-called Science of Sociology’, Sociological Papers 3: 367.
C. Wright Mills (1959) The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press) pp. 6–7.
Gregor McLennan reprises these questions in 2011: G. McLennan (2011) Story of Sociology: A First Companion to Social Theory (London: Bloomsbury).
L. L. Bernard and J. Bernard (1943) Origins of American Sociology: The Social Science Movement in the United States (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co.).
R. Aron (1968) Main Currents in Sociological Thought I (Harmondsworth: Penguin) pp. 89, 96.
Cited in V. Geoghegan (1987) Utopianism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1987) p. 17.
E. Durkheim (1964) The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press) p. 353.
E. Durkheim (1962) Socialism (New York: Collier Books) p. 221.
See E. Durkheim (1964) The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press) [1895];
T. Benton (1977) Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
C. P. Gilman (1998) Women and Economics (New York: Dover) [1898] pp. 31–2.
D. Hayden (1982) The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
M. Beaumont (2005) Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (Leiden: Brill).
K. Kumar (1978) Prophecy and Progress: The Sociology of Industrial and Post-Industrial Society (London: Allen Lane and Penguin).
M. Beaumont (2012) The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang).
S. E. Bowman (1962) Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet’s Influence (New York: Twayne).
W. Lepenies (1992) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p. 139.
Cited in A. Macdonald (2003) ‘Introduction’ in Edward Bellamy (2003 [1888]) Looking Backward 2000–1887 (Ontario: Broadbent) pp. 20–1.
Ibid., p. 72. The later Equality differs on this point. See E. Bellamy (1897) Equality (London: William Heinemann).
AA Morris (1902) News from Nowhere (London: Longmans Green and Co.) [1891] p. 80.
N. Kelvin (ed.) (1987) The Collected Letters of William Morris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) Volume II, 1881–84, p. 45. The context of this remark was a letter to Frederic Harrison, President of the English Positivist Committee. Morris was declining an invitation to attend a lecture by the leader of the French Positivists, Pierre Lafitte, on the grounds that his French was not adequate to ‘follow an intricate address’.
See R. Levitas (2005) ‘Beyond Bourgeois Right’, The European Legacy, 9(5): 605–18.
H. G. Wells (1905) A Modern Utopia (London: Chapman & Hall) p. 2.
W. Lepenies (1992) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
R. Crossley (2011) ‘The First Wellsians: A Modern Utopia and Its Early Disciples’, English Literature in Transition, 54(4): 444–69.
C. Taylor (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) pp. 161, 171, 172.
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© 2013 Ruth Levitas
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Levitas, R. (2013). Between Sociology and Utopia. In: Utopia as Method. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314253_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314253_4
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