UTOPIAN ECONOMICS
§ 3
The difference between the social and economic sciences as they exist in our world[1] 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 tortuous abstraction by the industry of its professors, and I can claim neither a patient student's intimacy 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 necessitates, however, some attempt at interpretation 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 psychology. My Utopians make two divisions of the science of psychology, first the general psychology of individuals, a sort of mental physiology separated by no definite line from physiology proper, and secondly 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 aggregations, of all possible family groupings, of neighbours and neighbourhood, of companies, associations, unions, secret
- ↑ 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."
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