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.

Collective remittances, that is to say development initiatives carried out by immigrant groups for the benefit of their place of origin, have been attracting growing attention from both academics and policy makers. Focusing on hometown organisations, this book analyses the social mechanics that are conducive to collective transnationalism.

How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.

Investigating how international market actors create market morality on a global level, this book reflects on the unresolved questions and debates regarding the relationship between business and society. The author explores how market actors in international business communication are unified in their attempts to make markets moralised. Providing detailed case studies and empirical evidence based on interviews with practitioners, Moralising Global Markets is a useful read for anyone interested in international business, and for those researching morality, ethics and corporate social responsibility.

The decadence and depravity of the ancient Romans are a commonplace of serious history, popular novels and spectacular films. This book is concerned not with the question of how immoral the ancient Romans were but why the literature they produced is so preoccupied with immorality. The modern image of immoral Rome derives from ancient accounts which are largely critical rather than celebratory. Upper-class Romans habitually accused one another of the most lurid sexual and sumptuary improprieties. Historians and moralists lamented the vices of their contemporaries and mourned for the virtues of a vanished age. Far from being empty commonplaces these assertions constituted a powerful discourse through which Romans negotiated conflicts and tensions in their social and political order. This study proceeds by a detailed examination of a wide range of ancient texts (all of which are translated) exploring the dynamics of their rhetoric, as well as the ends to which they were deployed. Roman moralising discourse, the author suggests, may be seen as especially concerned with the articulation of anxieties about gender, social status and political power. Individual chapters focus on adultery, effeminacy, the immorality of the Roman theatre, luxurious buildings and the dangers of pleasure. This book should appeal to students and scholars of classical literature and ancient history. It will also attract anthropologists and social and cultural historians.

This book is about the life and times of Richard Congreve. This polemicist was the first thinker to gain instant infamy for publishing cogent critiques of imperialism in Victorian Britain. As the foremost British acolyte of Auguste Comte, Congreve sought to employ the philosopher’s new science of sociology to dismantle the British Empire. With an aim to realise in its place Comte’s global vision of utopian socialist republican city-states, the former Oxford don and ex-Anglican minister launched his Church of Humanity in 1859. Over the next forty years, Congreve engaged in some of the most pressing foreign and domestic controversies of his day, despite facing fierce personal attacks in the Victorian press. Congreve made overlooked contributions to the history of science, political economy, and secular ethics. In this book Matthew Wilson argues that Congreve’s polemics, ‘in the name of Humanity’, served as the devotional practices of his Positivist church.

This book explores how the concept of ‘region’ has evolved over time and shaped architectural culture and practice. It questions what the words ‘region’ and ‘regional’ mean for architecture, cities and landscapes past and present, and speculates on the forms they might take in the future. Region is explored in many thematic guises: as a real geographical site of evolving socio-economic activity; as a mythical locus of enduring value; as a gatekeeper of indigenous crafts and vernacular techniques; as a site of architectural and artistic imagination; as a repository of contested, conflicted and mobile identities. The contributing chapters take these themes from the theoretical and literary page through to architectural and urban practice, and from the scale of the domestic hearth through to the ocean archipelago and international law, enriching the long-standing trope of viewing architectural regionalism purely as a matter of style. Curated into four key thematic areas – Theorised Regions, Contested Regions, Heritage Regions and Future Regions – the book incorporates the values, concerns and approaches of a truly diverse international community of scholars, curators and practitioners, as well as the design work of international students tasked to explore what region means to them.