London: Allen & Unwin, 1940. Pp. 475.
Purpose, 7 (July/Dec 1940) 154-58
It must be affirmed, first, that the death of J. D. Unwin in 1936 – indirectly as the result of wounds received in the last war – was the most serious loss to English anthropology that could have happened; second, that his chief work, Sex and Culture, has an importance for sociologists and for theologians which has yet to be fully recognised. 1 After that, we can explain that Hopousia(as the sub-title should indicate) is a work of most ambitious scope – this is a volume of 475 pages – which Unwin left unfinished. 2 In the state in which he left it – the book is unformed, ill-proportioned, and somewhat miscellaneous – it might, indeed, had the author lived to finish it, have become several volumes, or divided itself into several distinct works. It cannot, therefore, be reviewed in the ordinary way; there are several parts of it which ought to be reviewed by different reviewers. Part of the book is concerned, as we should expect, with developing the inferences from his observations on sexual continence and social energy; a large part, perhaps the most fully written part, is occupied with monetary principles and fallacies; a good deal is hardly more than notes – though very interesting notes – on society and contemporary social ideas; and there is a section, the necessity of which in this work is not obvious, on modern astronomical theory about the place of our world in the cosmos. It is impossible to discuss Unwin’s views on all these subjects in one article. Book II (143-298) ought to be reviewed by an economist. I need only say of this part, that Unwin is on the right side; and that the importance of his economic opinions does not reside primarily in any rectifications of, or additions to, the theories of other economic reformers of whose writings the readers of Purposemay be presumed to be aware, but in the fact that he came to them independently from his study of sociology and not as an economist.
About the title of the book, we are told by the editor, Unwin had not settled his mind; and we may wonder whether in his final version he would 101not have dropped the very slight fiction for which it stands. 3 Hopousia (“Whereland”) is the name of an imaginary country with a self-contained and completely rational economy. But of the pictorial appeal which gives the point to this kind of invention there is very little: for the most part, Unwin’s method is a straightforward exposition of the rearrangements we ought to make in the internal order of any civilised society if we wish to develop, and to maintain indefinitely, the highest possible degree of social energy. (The limitation is only that the problems involved in the relations of this perfected society to other societies or nations, whether the latter are Hopousian or not, are deliberately ignored.) As to the forms in which this energy should manifest itself, the author is solicitous not to dogmatise; such a society might be organised for war, or for the arts. But it is impossible to extrude moral dispositions altogether; and Unwin’s are obviously those of the most civilised Briton, without any particular religious bias. His society will develop and combine the spirit of community and respect for the individual; he is averse to any form of State despotism; he attaches great importance to the maintenance of aristocracy; and he urges as much decentralisation as possible.
As the background of this book is the theory of sex and social energy expounded in Sex and Culture– a theory which for the benefit of those who have not read that...
