The Ways Out: Utopian Communal Groups in an Age of Babylon

290 Pages·2019·120.275 MB·English

by  John R. Hall

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
UTOPIAS
Volume 4
THE WAYS OUT

THE WAYS OUT
Utopian Communal Groups in
an Age of Babylon
JOHN R. HALL
First published in 1978 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
This edition first published in 2020
by Routledge
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ISBN: 978-0-367-35357-5 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-367-85408-9 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-36203-4 (Volume 4) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-34461-9 (Volume 4) (ebk)
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Foreword to the 2019 Edition
The collective Zeitgeist in the twenty-first century is far more dystopian
than when Routledge & Kegan Paul first published The Ways Out in
its International Library of Sociology in 1978. Yet I think the book’s
relevance remains - as a basis for understanding utopian communal
alternatives, as a benchmark for mapping broader societal develop-
ments and their exhaustion of utopia, and as a surveyor’s device for
charting possible futures under the contemporary eclipse of modernity.
The slogan “make love, not war” bridges the social and counter-
cultural movements of the generational rebellion against “straight
society” that began in the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement, the New
Left, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and emerging feminist and gay
liberation movements brought massive political mobilizations. Medita-
tion, marijuana, psychedelics, organic farming, sexual liberation, tarot
readings, tie-dye fashion, geodesic domes, food co-ops - all found new
audiences. Yet the counterculture was a stew, not a coherent culture.
You might be a Christian anarchist, or perhaps a libertarian who
believed in astrology. Just “do your thing,” Bob Dylan told people.
Countercultural developments found their most intense expression in
communal living groups. Some were circles of friends sharing rent;
others embraced religious, utopian, or politically activist ideals. What-
ever their aspirations, communalists faced the challenges of actually
living together, and in ways that reflected their new sensibilities. Com-
munal groups became crucibles for forging novel, unconventional ways
of life.
Among studies of communal groups, The Ways Out is distinctive as
a comparative analysis that combines a social phenomenology of the
everyday lifeworld with Max Weber’s interpretive sociology of mean-
ings and social structures. This approach understands temporality as a
central axis along which social life is organized - for example, in the
eternal repetition of the good society or in the incremental progress
toward perfection. Using both temporal and social structural analysis,
The Ways Out identifies six theoretically coherent types of communal
groups: the commune centered in the unfolding here-and-now; two
“worldly utopian” types - the intentional association under rational
diachronic time of the clock, and the community centered in the col-
lective synchronic time of the ritually constituted here-and-now; two
types oriented to the “end of the world as we know it” - the pre-
apocalyptic warring sect and the post-apocalyptic other-worldly sect;
and finally, the ecstatic association that orchestrates personal and social
transcendence in the vivid present (202, Table 7.1).
If a number of communal groups have survived to the twenty-first
century (sometimes transformed into housing co-operatives), most
could not persist in a society based on geographic and occupational
mobility. Yet countercultural ideas and practices have diffused widely,
driven in part by capitalism’s tremendous capacity to coopt the inno-
vations - from organic foods, meditation, and postural yoga to social
technologies like “co-living.” The counterculture is no longer with us,
but its cultural possibilities have become woven into broader social life.
There is also a more fundamental connection between utopia and
society at large. It turns out that wider social formations are built upon
the same temporally structured social possibilities enacted in commu-
nal groups (see Figure 0.1). Given the parallels, societies as historical
complexes of temporally structured institutions and social practices
can be revealed through a “history of times” that supplements con-
ventional historical narratives mapped on a single “time of history”
(Hall 1980).
This approach yields new possibilities for social theory. Failed mod-
ern projects - systems theory, structural-functionalism, and marxism -
have left a theoretical void. Yes, there are benefits from the suspicion
toward general theory: leading sociologists have emphasized case analy-
sis over variable analysis, sought ways beyond the old agency/structure
binary, embraced the significance of culture, explored narrative analysis,
adapted pragmatist approaches to theorizing in situ, and, in some quar-
ters, retooled quantitative approaches under emergent epistemological
and ontological assumptions. A more grounded, action-centered, and
comparative sociology (Reed 2011) thus is finally addressing the “crisis
of the European sciences” that phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1970)
already identified in the 1930s. Yet despite the promising developments,
sociological theory presently lacks any integrated and comprehensive
conceptual framework for describing society’s domains, institutions,
and structures of formal organization, market, and community in rela-
tion to forms of lifeworldly action. A “structural phenomenology” that
theorizes alternative social temporalities provides such a framework -
by redirecting The Ways Out's typology of utopian communal groups
toward general societal analysis (Hall 2009).
Indeed, sketching societal developments of the past half-century via this
framework shows how utopian movements and the broader social order
interact. The two “worldly utopias” of fifty years ago - the diachronic
intentional association and the synchronic community - have become dys-
topias in the world at large. On the one hand, the upheavals beginning in
the 1960s were met in the US with counter movements - the “anti-cult”
Figure 0.1 A general model of meaningful temporalities that structure the
vivid present, with associated forms of typical social interaction in brackets.
Source: Hall (2009: 12), used by permission.
movement against new religions, and more broadly, the “culture wars,”
fueled on the right by evangelical Christianity, the antiabortion move-
ment, and anti-state domestic terrorism. These developments linked up
with a broader conservative retreat against globalization and into vari-
ous kinds of synchronic communities that forge solidarity through face-
to-face or mediated ritual. In short, people who feel threatened by the
new economy have shifted from class politics to status-group politics
(Bendix 1974) - white nationalism in the US, the UK, and Europe, and
ethnic majoritarian nationalism elsewhere. On the other hand, the capi-
talist rationalization of society has continued relentlessly and almost
completely unfettered, diachronically organized through the rise of
governmental policy expertise under neoliberalism (Mudge 2019) and
largely dominated politically by corporate elites acting in strategic time.
Communities of nationalism and the rational order of globally oriented
neoliberalism stand in direct opposition to each other.
In the twenty-first century, this political polarization is compounded
by a crisis increasingly understood in apocalyptic terms - climate change
(Hall 2016; Hall and Baker 2019). The linked challenges - nationalism,
globalization, and climate change - raise the fundamental question of
how to shape our collective fate when the promise of modernity seems
to have slipped away. How are we to achieve “real utopias” in a dys-
topian age? Addressing that question, according to Eric Olin Wright
(2013), involves critiquing existing social institutions and identifying
realistic alternatives for societal organization.
Structural phenomenology provides an important basis for pursuing
Wright’s agenda because it can be used to characterize both existing and
utopian social formations. Clearly, neither of the worldly utopias - the
community or the intentional association - offers a totalizing basis for
future society in the broader world. Any emerging social order will nec-
essarily be a complex of overlapping and interpenetrating groups and
institutions, interacting directly and through media. Given these circum-
stances, structural phenomenology can identify how groups and institu-
tions presently articulate across multiple temporal forms of action and
institutional domains, and how they might be reformed.
The domains of large-scale social organization encompass a wide range
of diachronic, rationally ordered formal organizations (especially state and
corporate ones but also political, ngo, and social movement organiza-
tions) and various synchronically ordered communities, including religions,
nations, and other “primordial” groups, invented or otherwise. There are
three major dynamics in relation to these domains. First, individual and
collective actors exercise power in conflict and competition in strategic time.
Second, in processes wider than Jurgen Habermas anticipated, formal
organizations and communities seek to “colonize” the lifeworld of personal
association. Finally, multiple groups undertake sometimes reinforcing,
sometimes conflicting projects of what Michel Foucault called “govern-
mentality” (Hall 2009: 125-29).
The societal crises of our era have their origins in part in failures
within specific domains of social action - notably, in formal organiza-
tions, communities, and strategic fields. Yet contemporary problems also
stem from breakdowns across domains, notably, in monopolizations of
strategic power that subordinate political, economic, and social institu-
tions and usurp personal agency. There are multiple emergent possibili-
ties of social order. The challenge is to move beyond the dystopian ones.
Formulating critical accounts of existing social institutions and practi-
cal utopian alternatives will require much further effort. My hope is that
the structural phenomenology initiated in The Ways Out can provide
useful tools for working beyond dystopia, beyond the post-apocalyptic,
to much-needed social reconstruction.
I dedicate this edition of The Ways Out to the memory of Guenther
Roth (1931-2019), who supported this project from the beginning as an
endeavor of critical sociology.
John R. Hall, 2019
References
Bendix, Reinhard. 1974. “Inequality and social structure.” American Socio- logical
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Hall, John R. 1980. “The time of history and the history of times.” History and
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Hall, John R. 2009. Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity.
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Hall, John R. 2016. “Social futures of global climate change: a structural phe-
nomenology,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 4: 1-45. DOI: 10.1057/
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Hall, John R., and Zeke Baker. 2019 (forthcoming). “Climate Change, Apoc-
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