The difference between the social and economic sciences as they exist in our world [Footnote: But see Gidding’s Principles of Sociology, a modern and richly suggestive American work, imperfectly appreciated by the British student. See also Walter Bagehot’s Economic Studies.] and in this Utopia deserves perhaps a word or so more. I write with the utmost diffidence, because upon earth economic science has been raised to a very high level of tortuous¹ abstraction by the industry of its professors, and I can claim neither a patient student’s intimacy² with their productions nor — what is more serious — anything but the most generalised knowledge of what their Utopian equivalents have achieved. The vital nature of economic issues to a Utopia necessitates³, however, some attempt at interpretation⁴ between the two.

In Utopia there is no distinct and separate science of economics. Many problems that we should regard as economic come within the scope of Utopian psychology⁵. My Utopians make two divisions of the science of psychology, first, the general psychology of individuals, a sort of mental physiology⁶ separated by no definite line from physiology proper, and secondly⁷, the psychology of relationship between individuals. This second is an exhaustive study of the reaction of people upon each other and of all possible relationships. It is a science of human aggregations⁸, of all possible family groupings, of neighbours and neighbourhood, of companies, associations, unions, secret and public societies, religious groupings, of common ends and intercourse¹⁰, and of the methods of intercourse and collective decision that hold human groups together, and finally of government and the State. The

分享到：