Julianne Werlin

In my book project, The World in Pieces: Society and Utopia in Early Modern Britain, I describe how seventeenth-century utopian writers responded to increasing social differentiation by creating new models of society, paving the way for later social theory. By the end of the nineteenth century, it would seem obvious to Emile Durkheim that 'organic solidarity,' the unity of a given society, arose like a deus ex machina from divided knowledge and divided labor, but in the seventeenth century, utopian writers used fictions and models to forge an idea of social coherence that could seem alarmingly elusive. Drawing on recent sociology well as theories of state formation, The World in Pieces illuminates a crucial moment at the origins of modern social thought in which utopian writers worked at the intersection of theory and fantasy to create a new sociological discourse.