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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2017
H. G. Wells was one of the most celebrated writers in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Famed for his innovative fiction, he was also an influential advocate of socialism and the world-state. What is much less well known is that he was a significant contributor to debates about the nature of social science. This article argues that Wells's account of social science in general, and sociology in particular, was shaped by an idiosyncratic philosophical pragmatism. In order to demonstrate how his philosophical arguments inflected his social thought, it explores his attack on prevailing theories of race, while also highlighting the limits of his analysis. The article concludes by tracing the reception of Wells's ideas among social scientists and political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Although his program for utopian sociology attracted few disciples, his arguments about the dynamics of modern societies found a large audience.
I'd like to thank the following for their valuable comments on the paper: Sarah Cole, Simon James, Krishan Kumar, Patrick Parrinder and the Modern Intellectual History referees. Eliza Garnsey provided superb research assistance. Invaluable financial support was provided by the Leverhulme Trust. All the usual disclaimers apply.
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34 Wells to Branford, [May?] 1905, Foundations of British Sociology Archive (FBS), Keele University, GB 172. The Martin Wight chair was initially shared by Hobhouse and Edward Westermarck.
35 Wells to Balfour, 10 May 1905, in The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, 2: 72. Wells made a case for the state endowment of “talent” in Mankind in the Making (London, 1903), chap. 10.
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62 Wells, “The So-Called Science,” 192, 202. For further critiques of Spencer see Wells, A Modern Utopia, 38; Wells, New Worlds, 112.
63 Wells, “The So-Called Science,” 193. See also Wells, A Modern Utopia, 184, 213; Wells, First and Last Things, 40. Frederic Harrison, the leading British positivist, declared that Wells (and Shaw and Chesterton), could “hardly be accepted as ‘the sources’ of scientific sociology.” Frederic Harrison, review of C. Masterman, The Condition of England, Sociological Review 2/3 (1909), 396. Wells would have concurred.
64 As Martha Vogeler notes, here Wells mischaracterized Comte. Martha Vogeler, “Wells and Positivism” in Parrinder and Rolfe, Wells under Revision, 181–91, at 185.
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70 Wells, “The So-Called Science,” 201.
71 Ibid., 203. So too were Atkinson's Primal Law, Andrew Lang's Social Origins, even Gibbon's Decline and Fall and Carlyle's The French Revolution, though the latter two displayed a “greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque elements in history” (203).
72 Wells, “The So-Called Science,” 206.
73 Ibid., 204.
74 Ibid., 205. See also Wells, A Modern Utopia, 217.
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79 Wells, A Modern Utopia, 215, 216–17, 219.
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