Between Sociology and Utopia

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.