Religion, Utopia and the Socialist Movement: Socialism in Britain, 1880-1900

Lead Research Organisation: University of Cambridge
Department Name: Sociology

Abstract

Socialism has had an uneasy relationship with religion and utopia. A concerted attempt was
made by the dominant currents of socialism in the twentieth century, the communist current and the
social democratic current, to draw a clear line between socialism, on the one hand, and religion and
utopia, on the other (Leopold, 2008; McLellan, 1987; Sassoon, 2010). It would seem, therefore, that
socialism should not contain religious and utopian elements. Hence, forms of socialism articulated
with both religious and utopian discourses would appear highly suspect. I aim, in my proposed
research, to consider whether this suspicion is justified by means of an in-depth study of British
socialism in the late nineteenth century. British socialism is a propitious case for my purposes
because it had a marked utopian and religious colouring (Yeo, 1977; Beaumont, 2005; Linehan,
2012). Specifically, the socialist thinker Edward Carpenter, the Fellowship of the New Life group
and the Labour Church all attempted to articulate their socialism in spiritual terms and by means of
utopian visions (Pierson, 1973; Mayhew, 1982; Manton, 2003).
My primary research aim is to examine the process by which utopia, religion and socialism
came to be articulated in the late nineteenth century and to determine whether there was anything
distinctive about the form of socialism produced through this articulation. On this basis, I aim to
assess whether the introduction of religious and utopian elements extended and deepened the
capacity of British socialism to oppose prevailing social relations, or whether it limited this
capacity. In this way, my overarching research question is as follows: What was the significance of
religious-utopian discourses for the British socialist movement and of what value were they for the
movement?

Publications

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Studentship Projects

Project Reference Relationship Related To Start End Student Name
ES/P000738/1 01/10/2017 30/09/2027
1950010 Studentship ES/P000738/1 01/10/2017 31/03/2022 Joe Davidson
 
Description My completed PhD dissertation is a social theoretical examination of the relationship between utopia and the future. Sociologists of utopia like Zygmunt Bauman (1976), Erik Olin Wright (2010), and Ruth Levitas (2013) have often associated visions of new and better societies with the future, such that the realisation of a fulfilled world is to be achieved via a progressive movement through time (see also Dawson, 2016; Goodwin, 1978; Jacobsen and Tester, 2012). In one sense, this is unsurprising. The rise of the modern time regime in the eighteenth century positioned the future as the realm of the new and the better. This triggered a temporalisation of the utopian form (Baczko, 1989; Koselleck, 2002). While utopias published in the early modern period were set elsewhere in the world, beginning with Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440 (1771), utopias start to be set in the future.
However, despite this strong association between utopia and the future, it is unclear whether it is still viable today. As scholars like François Hartog (2015), Aleida Assmann (2020), and Enzo Traverso (2017) argue, the future is not what it used to be. In the light of the social catastrophes of modernity and awareness of the failure of past attempts to enact a utopian break, the idea that the future will bring liberation appears naïve. All of this poses a challenge to utopia. If visions of new worlds have traditionally found their home in the future, then how does utopia ground itself in temporal terms in the current crisis of the future? How do utopians respond to the supporting condition of the modern time regime being pulled out from under their feet?
The aim of my thesis is to examine how the shifting status of the future has reconfigured utopian attempts to imagine new worlds. Its originality consists, first, in destabilising the traditional association between utopia and the future by demonstrating that there is nothing necessary about the imagination of new worlds in the time to come and, second, in demonstrating that the end of the future has not resulted in the end of utopia but rather its reconstitution in a new form. There is a specifically post-futural mode of utopianism that both acknowledges and subverts the crisis of the future.
To make this argument, I examine the history of the literary utopia, or fictional texts that imagine new and better worlds. There has been burgeoning interest in the value of fiction for social theory in recent years (see Vána, 2020; Watson, 2021). I adopt this innovative methodological approach in my dissertation by staging a series of dialogues between literary utopias and social theorists, working to excavate the hidden sociological content of the former by bringing them into contact with the latter. The dissertation begins by tracing the relationship between utopia and futurity in the golden age of modern time consciousness, between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, via readings of texts like William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) and W. E. B. Du Bois's "The Comet" (1920). In the second part of the study, I address the post-futural utopias that have emerged in the wake of the fall of modern time consciousness, focusing on texts like Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber (2000), and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020).
The key finding of my research is that the literary utopia, once read through the lens of contemporary social theoretical concerns, offers three key strategies by which social hope can be restated in the face of the collapse of the future. First, the refunctioning of mimesis, which focuses on disrupting the entanglement of novelty, repetition, and colonialism. Modern time consciousness confined novelty to certain peoples of the world, with others expected to follow the path established in the imperial core. Yet, the act of mutual copying can create a new figure that, despite belonging to neither party, piques each to transform itself. The confrontation between coloniser and colonised opens a path for the egalitarian distribution of the future. Second, the radicalisation of the never again demand, such that the memory of past catastrophes is reconciled with the realisation of a liberated society. If the modern time regime was defined by the opposition of hope and memory, contemporary utopians combine these two desires. The memory of past disasters, whether it is the Holocaust or the Middle Passage, is put at the heart of the utopian society, such that the forgetting of these events risks their repetition. In other words, it is only through a looping movement between past disaster and future utopia that the liberated quality of the latter is guaranteed. Third, the recuperation of undischarged possibilities, involving reclaiming the hopes proffered but not realised in the golden age of modern time consciousness. The dreams of new and better worlds that circulated in the past are a means of breaking through the pessimism and cynicism that defines the post-futural condition, allowing the hidden possibilities in the current conjuncture to be brought to the fore.
Exploitation Route There are a number of academic beneficiaries of my research on the relationship between utopia and sociology. First, and most obviously, the research benefits sociologists working on visions of new and better worlds. In particular, as noted above, sociologists have generally associated utopia with the temporal category of the future. However, I demonstrate that there is nothing necessary about this relationship, thus opening up a range of new possible utopian temporal maps for scholars to explore.

Second, the research benefits social theorists working on questions other than utopia. In particular, building on broader work on sociological fiction, I propose a methodology whereby fictional texts are read through the concerns of social theory. While my research has primarily focused on the particular genre of the literary utopia, this method could be used to understand a range of possible texts. By publishing in journals like Theory, Culture & Society and the European Journal of Social Theory, I have publicised the insights of my research to social theorists, something that will be reinforced by the publication of a monograph based on my PhD.

Third, scholars working in other disciplines will also benefit from the research. The field of utopian studies is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together scholars from sociology, literature, politics, and cultural studies. The association between utopia and the future is not specific to sociology; many scholars working on utopia straightforwardly align it with the future. My rethinking of the futurity of utopia thus provides a new framework for approaching the temporality of liberation beyond sociology. By presenting at the Utopian Studies conference and participating in research groups like the Dystopia Project, I have ensured that the benefits of my approach are known to this group of scholars.

The research will also benefit non-academic groups in two ways. First, there has been increasing interest in utopia in recent years, something demonstrated by the popularity of novels like Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020), films like Black Panther (2018), and memoirs like Akash Kapur's Better to Have Gone (2021). This suggests that there is a general audience interested in the themes of my research. I have engaged this audience by writing for media outlets that have a wide readership, with the aim of demonstrating the value of a utopian perspective for thinking about contemporary political and social problems.

Second, policy-makers will also benefit from the research. There has been much interest in alternative futures in policy circles in recent years. Think tanks like Autonomy and the New Economics Foundation have attempted to widen the understanding of the possible, while some local authorities in the UK have experimented with alternative forms of social organisation like universal basic income. My research speaks to this concern by suggesting a range of strategies by which to restate the possibility for social hope in the contemporary moment.
Sectors Government, Democracy and Justice
 
Description My research also has implications for the behaviour and understanding of non-academic groups. I have written several articles for venues designed for the general reader, including Tribune, Strange Horizons and the Ancillary Review of Books. Furthermore, I plan to pitch a journalistic piece based on my academic article for Memory Studies to The Conversation, which has shown a particular interest in questions of memory and culture. In this way, I have endeavoured to communicate my research to non-academic audiences. I have contributed to a resource, Utopian Acts' "Decolonising Utopia Resource List" (2019), which brings together theoretical and literary materials on utopia from Asia, Africa and South America. The aim of this resource is to encourage those interested in utopia to broaden and diversify their understanding of visions of new worlds by attending to marginalised texts and perspectives. I have helped to organise a number of events that have had a public-facing dimension. For instance, the keynote speeches at the Ships in the Proletarian Night conference, which I co-convened, from Dr Julia Nicholls and Professor Kristin Ross were free to attend via Zoom, advertised widely, and attracted a substantial audience.
First Year Of Impact 2021
Sector Government, Democracy and Justice
Impact Types Cultural,Societal