The denial of utopia resulted in a triple repression within sociology: repression of the future, of normativity, and of the existential and what it means to be human. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 85

Wells challenges the one point of consensus, namely that sociology should be regarded as, and should aspire to be, a science. Looking back, he said ‘I insisted that in sociology there were no units for treatment, but only one single unit which was human society, and that in consequence the normal scientific method of classification and generalization breaks down’.10 It is an argument against reductionism, and for respecting the level of the social as something indivisible: ‘We cannot put Humanity into a museum, or dry it for examination; our one, single, still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing in the real world with which to compare it’. […] In consequence, ‘Sociology must be neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively and with an element of personality, that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature’. He distinguishes two appropriate literary forms. One involves ‘the fitting of “schemes of interpretation” to history’, anticipating later arguments following Clifford Geertz that sociology, like anthropology, is best understood as ‘thick description’. The second, both ‘smaller in bulk’ but altogether ‘under-rated and neglected’, is the creation and criticism of utopias. Wells suggests a project of utopography to map all the different versions of the ideal society, ‘a sort of dream book of huge dimensions’ and claims this ‘would be the backbone of sociology’. The role of utopia is two-fold, and in both cases the relation with sociology is interpenetrating rather than hierarchical. Given the indivisibility of human society and hence the impossibility of comparative method, utopia provides a virtual point of comparison. Max Weber would not have wholly disagreed with this, since he explicitly describes ideal types or conceptual models as utopias. For Wells, the comparison is also prophetic and normative, measuring what exists against the direction of social development and (simultaneously) against the ideal society. This underpins his view of social action and what sociology is: in A Modern Utopia, he defines sociology as ‘the study of the aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about which men’s sympathies will twine, and upon which they will base a large proportion of their conduct and personal policy’. He argues that the interpellation of utopias is inevitable, and should be explicit than implicit. […] "There is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what is, without considering what is intended to be. In sociology, without any possibility of evasion, ideas are facts. … I submit it is not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavour to disentangle and express one’s personal version of [the Social Idea], and to measure realities from the standpoint of that idealisation. I think, in fact, that the creation of utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology … Sociologists cannot help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia.” [Wells, ‘So-called Science’, pp. 367–8.] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 87

What is distinctive about Wells is that rather than devaluing literature relative to science he recognizes both sociology as utopia and utopia as sociology as legitimate and necessary forms of knowledge. He is right that building alternative scenarios and exploring the interrelationships between elements, structures, systems and processes does result in better understanding of both present realities and future options. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 91

The question of normativity is related to, but not identical with, that of scientificity. Utopia may be rejected as sociology either because of its literary form or because of its evaluative content. In the 1960s, undergraduates were taught that sociology was concerned with what is, not what ought to be, and that these could and should be rigorously separated. The distinction reprised Hobhouse’s inaugural editorial in The Sociological Review: ‘sociological thinking must start with a clear cut distinction between the “is” and the “ought”, between the facts of social life and the conditions on which society actually rests and the ideal to which society should conform’. Less attention was drawn to his following comments on the difficulty of the distinction, to his belief that sociology and social philosophy are intrinsically connected, or to his suggestion that it may sometimes be possible to deduce ought from is. Hobhouse is critical of the danger of collapsing what ought to be into representation of what is actually the case. Again, this suggests that if sociologists are not open about their aspirations for the future, their very silences make utopias. Neither Hobhouse nor Wells thought that the distinction between is and ought implied that sociology should be solely focused on the former. Endorsing the role of utopia as a proper mode of sociological orientation is not to collapse this distinction, but to admit normativity as a proper aspect of sociology itself. […] Wells is surely right that sociologists carry silent utopias in their work, both as substance and as inspiration. Utopia’s exclusion was never absolute, but its presence was persistently denied. It was not recognized as sociology, and the utopian content of sociology was seen as a serious flaw. But sociology contains repressed utopias. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 92

If we understand utopia to be a totalizing (though not therefore totalitarian) representation which is holistic, social, futurelocated, unequivocally better and linked to the present by some identifiable narrative, and one which embeds a view of human flourishing, then postmodernism is profoundly anti-utopian. These positions implied not just a loss of hope in the social, but a loss of belief in it. The quest for utopia in this reading is an irretrievably modernist, and therefore irredeemably flawed, project. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 98

Horkheimer argued in 1937 that traditional social theory was concerned only with explanation and understanding, whereas a properly critical social theory was oriented to critique and to social transformation. […] Horkheimer’s formulation implies a distinction from (and superiority to) ‘ordinary’ social theory and sociology, and that difference lies in the explicit normativity of critical theory, as well as its claims to greater explanatory power. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 98-99

Sociology is comfortable with utopia only as an element in the social imaginary that is the object of explanation. It repeatedly approaches utopia and retreats from it. And yet the impulse towards social transformation, there at the origin of the discipline, does not go away. The warm stream runs underground. Both the general diffusion of utopia across culture (in Bloch’s sense) and the parallels between sociology and utopia (in Wells’s sense) would lead us to expect this. For the excitement and promise of sociology lies in this presence; the disappointment lies in its recurrent repression and denial. Substituting sociology for politics in Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili’s defence of utopia, we might say that: "To be utopian … is the stuff of [sociology], and it first involves subjecting the [society] of the present to critique. Secondly, it involves imagining human communities that do not yet exist and, thirdly, it involves thinking and acting so as to prevent the foreclosure of social possibilities in the present and future.” Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 101-102