ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a tale of two projects: the Fabian Society project, as understood by its early exponents, and the information society project, as articulated by Daniel Bell and partially operationalized through such movements as the World Summit on the Information Society. The Fabian Society claims to be the world's oldest extant socialist society. It was founded on 4 January 1884 in the drawing room of London stockbroker Edward Pease, as a society dedicated to 'help on the reconstruction of society' and to 'obtain information on all contemporary movements and social needs', thereby combining from the very beginning concepts of information and social reconstruction. Fabianism as a school of political thought is best known for its gradualism. But arguably as much a Fabian hallmark as its doctrine of the 'inevitability of gradualness' was its privileging of facts. Information was bent to a strategy of social engineering, a programme of, possibly, 'social epistemology'.
