ABSTRACT
Utopias by definition, critical of the society extant at the point of their composition. For the writers of some of the radical utopias in Western intellectual history, the issue of work and its abolition formed a central element of their critique. The ideas of the utopians have certainly had an influence on radical sociologists/social theorists such as Marcuse and Gorz. Their influence on mainstream sociology, including the sociology of work, is perhaps less marked, but the actual extent of utopianism's influence on sociology, both critical and mainstream. Morris views Bellamy's utopia as one dimensional, and typically bourgeois. Bellamy's pronouncements on work are singled out for the harshest of criticism. Morris considers Bellamy's utopia to be 'State Socialism'. Edward Bellamy's book Looking Backward can be distinguished from the work of Fourier and Etzler in the first instance, since whereas our French clerk and our German engineer composed their utopias in the form of the treatise, Bellamy's was framed as a novel.
