Rendering Sociology. On the Utopian Positivism of Harriet Martineau and the ‘Mumbo Jumbo Club’

Résumé 0

Among the Victorians who contributed to British sociology were the social theorist Harriet Martineau and a peculiar trio of Oxford students called the ‘Mumbo Jumbo club’. Martineau published an English ‘condensation’ of Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), which introduced sociology to English readers. While under the watchful eye of the Oxford don Richard Congreve, Mumbo Jumbo read Martineau’s study with great enthusiasm, and it shaped their course as first-generation sociologists. Using an intellectual history method, this essay argues that as the first female British sociologist, Martineau pioneered an abolitionist-feminist approach to the discipline in such works as Society in America (1837). Meanwhile, on leaving Oxford, Mumbo Jumbo became the first British Positivist Society members. They not only translated but acted on the ideas in Comte’s Système de politique positive (1851–4), which their leader, Congreve, described as the ‘definitive construction’ of sociology. Whereas Martineau’s work offered an abolitionist-feminist framework for sociology, the Mumbo Jumbo trio — J.H. Bridges, E.S. Beesly, and Frederic Harrison — developed biologic-historical, socio-political, and urban-regional strands of sociological thinking respectively. While examining these sociologists’ lives and complementary methods, this essay argues that theirs was a distinctly utopian if critical, imaginative, and optimistic sociology, just as some people suggested was the discipline at the founding meetings of the British Sociological Society. Thus, the works of Martineau and Mumbo Jumbo, from compatible Comtean perspectives, aimed to transform thoughts and feelings into social actions for resolving societal issues and personal troubles.