Thomas Reid’s ‘civilised controversy’: sociology of Utopia in the Scottish Enlightenment

Norbert Elias outlined three tasks for the sociological study of utopia. First, utopian fantasy images are a means to reconstruct the tensions, dilemmas and conflicts that were felt to be particularly acute at an earlier phase of the civilising process. Second, utopias provide ideal anticipatory solutions, desired or feared, possible or improbable, to such tension problems. Third, the oral or written communicability of fantasy images anticipates an audience, from small intimate circles to anonymous publics, capable of comprehending the utopian discursive form. The 1794 utopian scheme outlined by Thomas Reid, leading thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, is examined in terms of Elias’s sociology of utopia as a form of what he called ‘civilised controversy’. Reid’s utopia addressed the communicability of tension problems, fantasy solutions, and audience and field in threating conditions of repressive British reaction to the French Revolution. Reid’s utopia was neither a necessary consequence of prevailing intellectual
preconditions of social milieu nor an unrealistic fantasy image divorced from emergent social tensions. From More to Reid down to the present Elias’s utopia of ‘civilised controversy’ of democratic debate and expert judgement has been continually postponed by the short-term horizons of ‘reality-blind’ political, corporate and opinion leaders.