Moralising Space

The Utopian Urbanism of the British Positivists, 1855-1920

Matthew Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315449104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Amidst the soot, stink and splendour of Victorian London, a coterie of citizen-sociologists set out to break up the British Empire. They were the followers of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, a controversial figure who introduced the modern science of sociology and the republican Religion of Humanity. Moralising Space examines how from the 1850s Comte's British followers practised this science and religion with the aim to create a global network of 500 utopian city-states.

Curiously the British Positivists' work has never been the focus of a full-length study on modern sociology and town planning. In this intellectual history, Matthew Wilson shows that through to the interwar period affiliates to the British Positivist Society – Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison, Charles Booth, Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford – attempted to realise Comte's vision. With scarcely used source material Wilson presents the Positivists as an organised resistance to imperialism, industrial exploitation, poverty and despondency. Much to the consternation of the church, state and landed aristocracy they organised urban interventions, led ad hoc sociological surveys and published programmes for realising idyllic city-communities. Effectively this book contributes to our understanding of how Positivism, as a utopian spatial design praxis, heavily influenced twentieth-century architecture and planning.

1 The Positivist Imagination

Civic Virtue, Sociology and City Design

Amidst the soot, the stink and the splendour of Victorian London a coterie of citizen-sociologists set out to break up the British Empire. They believed that the city-region satisfied the complete conditions of intellectual, cultural, political and economic life. Wildly polemical and fiercely controversial in their social critiques this group determined to use their new science of sociology to answer the ‘question of modern times’, the ‘incorporation of Women and the Proletariate into Modern Culture’ (Comte 1876: 523; Branford 1908: 14; Higginson 1897). From the mid-1850s they developed a comprehensive system for urban-regional spatial design that promised to eliminate imperialism, slavery, incarceration, industrial exploitation, speculative building and all their concomitant consequences.

Reactions to the efforts of these sociologists ranged from bitter mockery and outright hostility to astonishing hyperbole. Approaching the zenith of their popularity during the 1870s they were denounced for kindling a republican ‘spirit as reckless, as cold-blooded, as well-leavened with political hate, as unscrupulous in the machination of turbulence, as ever possessed the revolutionaries of any age or nation’ (PMG 1871). Not everyone painted these citizen-sociologists as bloodthirsty revolutionaries, however. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels labelled them the proponents of a ‘Critical-Utopian Socialism’ who upheld a ‘fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science’. They drew on the ‘feelings and purses of the bourgeoisie’ in hopes of realising ‘castles in the air’, scoffed Marx and Engels (2002: 256). Notwithstanding Edward Pease (1916: 18), the founding member of the National Labour Federation and the Fabian Society, praised these citizen-sociologists’ works for rendering a complete image of a ‘new earth, free from all the inequalities of wealth, the preventable suffering, the reckless waste of effort, which we saw around us’. By the 1920s the ideas and practices of this group of citizen-sociologists had saturated the discourse of modern community design.

Now gone and forgotten these concerned citizens found unity in Positivism,¹ which was the creation of the French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Hailed as the philosophy of the nineteenth century Positivism is little appreciated today but had the lengthiest and widest impact in Britain (McGee 1931: 39–129; Marvin 1936: 162–84; Simon 1964, 1965; Dixon 2008; Farmer 1967). One of Comte’s devout British followers, the polymath Frederic Harrison (1913: xix), described Positivism as a complete system of life, a ‘scheme of Education, a form of Religion, a school of Philosophy, and a phase of Socialism’; people – not money, machines, prizes, praise or trendy architectural forms and fashions – were its centre. These are the chief distinctions between the movement of ‘Positivism’ presented in this book and the ‘positivism’, written with a lower case ‘p’, that commonly appears in many other studies.

At the root of Positivism was Comte’s two famous inventions, the science of sociology and a form of republican humanism called the Religion of Humanity. Comte and his faithful citizen-sociologists, the Positivists, believed that together this science and religion were an agency for transforming the world into a nested network of idyllic city-states or republics. Whether such a vision was to come to fruition or otherwise Comte’s champions thought that modern civilisation was on the cusp of radical change. This viewpoint was framed by the scientific observation of historical and contemporary events which led Comte to postulate by the 1830s his famous Law of Three Stages. This law holds that all societies evolve from a theological, to a metaphysical and on to a ‘Positive’ frame of mind. In Comte’s associated sociological interpretations and forecasts the social structures underpinning ancient titles and privileges were thus destined to collapse. In the wake of the inevitable implosion of all Western empires Comte and his followers were seeking to usher in a new social structure for the Positive Era.

For these reasons, by the late 1840s, Comte had envisioned a utopia called the Occidental Republic.² This book argues that, in following Comte’s vision, the Positivists set out with the intention to contribute to the realisation of its sixty deliberative eutopian city-states or republics across the West. Comte estimated that they were destined to emerge by the 1960s; 500 city-states, he thought, would appear worldwide by the year 2000. The details of the Positivist utopia, it must be emphasised, were nonetheless flexible, but the altruistic principle of love for space, earth and humanity was essential (Comte 1877b: 267–9; 1858: 337–57). Based on this principle alone Comte offered a provocative solution to a tumultuous age of revolution and expansion. His utopia pledged to eliminate the injustices perpetrated by the bourgeoisie, the crown, clergy and aristocracy. Unsurprisingly Comte’s works have been on the Vatican’s list of dangerous and forbidden books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, since 1864 (Pickering 2009a: 1).

Comte and his faithful followers believed that making the Occidental Republic would begin with the establishment of new spiritual institutions in each region. The essential space for catalysing the moral urban-regional revolution was the Positivist Society. It would serve at once as a people’s school, centre for regional sociology, institute of humanist scholarship and republican hall of social activism (Wilson 2015). These controversial spaces of ‘spiritual power’ would train and empower the body politic. Following Comte’s (1877b) utopian scheme the British Positivists established these hubs and used them for developing their intellectually critical, sociological survey practice, which informed their eutopian programmes for social reorganisation. The Positivists sought to resolve socio-spatial problems by coordinating volunteer civic groups in a process of ruling in turn in relation to the various spaces of the city-region. It was thus thought that in a radical, republican, gradualist and participatory fashion one could realise a network of idyllic regions or eutopias.

This book traces the deliberative eutopian urbanism of the Positivists in three phases. First we will examine its philosophical and epistemological origins in republican political thought. Then its formation as an applied humanitarian and ‘scientific sociology’ will come into view. Thereafter we will see it cast as an art of polity-making called City Design. In this manner we will grasp how the Positivists’ praxis framed the work of twentieth-century modernist designers.

It would be sensible at this juncture to unveil the key protagonists of this book, Comte’s British followers. Some of these figures are well-known. But never before have their works been presented as a coherent contribution to a common community design agenda. As an intellectual history of the British Positivist movement this study focuses on how three generations of intellectuals employed republican ideas in relation to particular sociological methods (historical and geographical; industrial and social; and rustic and civic) to address different but overlapping socio-spatial contexts (international, national and regional). In a nested chronological fashion, from imperial-level relations down to personal life, the Positivists built upon each other’s work (Figure 1.1).

Without further delay – in this book we will see that following the footsteps of his ‘master’ Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) Comte detailed a scientific moral philosophy from which he established the discipline of modern sociology and the Religion of Humanity. The Positivists considered Comte’s urban-oriented efforts a wholesome complement to the subsequent rural studies of Frédéric Le Play, the Saint-Simonian social scientist. We will then turn to the activities of Comte’s leading British advocates, starting with the Oxford don, Aristotelian scholar and founder of the British Positivist Society, Richard Congreve (1818–99). Following Comte’s sociological system, Congreve developed historical and moral-geographical surveys that tracked the links between domestic decline, militancy and contrived imperial unions. Comte and Congreve used these surveys as the basis for educating and awakening the local body politic – empowering them to protest imperialism, to advocate pacific international policies and to take ownership of public life. Such activities, it was thought, would culminate in the creation of independent communities.

We will then see Congreve’s brilliant student Frederic Harrison (1831–1923), stirred by Positivist thought, feelings and actions, set out on controversial investigations of national industrial problems. Harrison contended that active ‘spiritual institutions’ were vital to establishing collective responsibility, a living wage and environments with a sense of place. Influenced by the Positivists’ gospel of industry Charles Booth (1840–1916) determined to examine and eliminate the ‘evils’ of overcrowding, poverty and unemployment. Comparable to their seniors Harrison and Booth developed industrial and social surveys of British towns and used sociological ‘facts’ to substantiate social programmes for national social reorganisation. These programmes coordinated a series of interlinked reforms such as educational institutes, home colonies, trade unionism and infrastructural improvements as a step towards the establishment of an industrial republic.

The Positivist Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) synthesised his seniors’ sociological methods and used them as a preparatory for urban improvement projects including sociological institutes, university housing schemes and Positivist schools. His activism spurred popular discussions of British ‘town planning’. Geddes’ faithful protégé Victor Branford (1863–1930) subsequently developed his master’s ‘applied sociology’ in the direction of a socio-spatial discipline called ‘City Design’. On a personal level Geddes and Branford’s work aimed to spiritualise and emancipate the proletarian underclass from the fetters of the ‘dubious abstractions’ of political economy, empire, nation and parliament (Branford 1914: 13; Geddes 1915: 232; 1905). For these reasons they developed rustic and civic surveys that informed plans and policies for binding town and country units into Garden City-states.

The modern utopian question par excellence for Comte and his followers was the reconciliation of the notion of the large modern commercial republic with that of the ancient republic. They were seeking the realisation of a vast secular spiritual ‘Republic of the West’ connected to the Religion of Humanity and, nested within it, myriad city-states made sovereign temporally via a deliberative sociological praxis. Effectively this book will demonstrate that through the altruistic act of sociological survey the British Positivists created passionately disputed proposals intending to incrementally realise this eutopian scheme of nested republics (Figure 1.2). It would be well, then, to turn to Comte’s use of the terms republic and republicanism in relation to their wider tradition. Thereafter we will see how the moralising language of urban-regional civic virtue percolated into sociology and modern community design.

Positivist Republicanism

For Comte republicanism was a way of urban-regional life if, perhaps predominately, a state of mind. As indicated the catalyst for the global transformation of regional units into the eutopias or republics of the Positive Era was the Positivist Society. And it hosted a variety of activities including lessons in popular education, singing classes, civic rites of passage and festivals commemorating the heroes of humanity. These Positivist Society activities reinforced the ‘true principle of republicanism’, a state where ‘all forces … work together for the common good’ (Comte 1875: 123–4). The proclamation of a republic, Comte maintained, meant that each citizen altruistically devotes ‘all his faculties’ to ‘the public welfare’. Each regional Positivist Society strove to expand the discourse of ‘Communism’ by ‘showing its application to other departments of human life; by insisting that, not wealth only, but that all our powers shall be devoted in the true republican spirit to the continuous service of the community’ (Comte 1875: 124–7). This form of communism falls under the rubric of ‘utopian republicanism’ (Claeys and Lattek 2010; Claeys 1994). Under Positivist guises communism would not ‘supress individuality’ or the free press; it would ‘protect free thought’ and ‘resist political encroachment’ and corruption, claimed Comte (1875: 93–127). Achieving this condition, indeed, required something similar to what Marx and Engels later called the ‘withering away of the state’ (Vernon 1984); it demanded the deconstruction of the spiritual and temporal powers that took the form of global empires.

It must be emphasised here that, for Comte,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1 The Positivist Imagination: Civic Virtue, Sociology and City Design
• 2 Auguste Comte: Envisioning Utopia
• 3 Richard Congreve: A Systematic Policy for Imperial Devolution
• 4 Frederic Harrison: A Social Programme for an Industrial Republic
• 5 Charles Booth: Positivist Sociology and Limited Socialism
• 6 Patrick Geddes: A Culture Policy for Garden City-States
• 7 Victor Branford: City Design, the Third Alternative
• Conclusion: Altruistic Agencies: Positivism and Modernist Spatial Design
• Index