THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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kingdom of the sun. He still characteristically ended the dedication to Richelieu of his work ‘De sensu rerum et magia’, newly published in 1637, with a messianic claim,
not with courtly flattery: ‘The city of the sun, devised by me, to be established by you’; in this arrogant hope Campanella also welcomed the birth of the future Louis
XIV, who was later actually called the Sun King. Looking at it in more detail, the work about the ‘City of the Sun’ is a meticulous account given by a widely travelled
Genoan to his host. The Gubernator Genuensis relates how on a voyage round the world he landed on the island of Taprobane (Ceylon) and fell into the hands of a
band of armed men who had conducted him to the City of the Sun and explained its institutions to him. For all its boldness and the usual novelistic trappings, the
account has a feel of technical engineering about it: the civitas is constructed like a contemporary plan of fortifications by Vauban. On the whole, Campanella's utopia
must be understood in conformity with the world system of its creator; apart from Bacon and the Fichte of the ‘Closed Commercial Statev, Campanella is the only
philosopher among the more modern utopians. It was no accident that the ‘Civitas solis’ was published as the appendix to a ‘Philosophia realis’, that is, as a
paralipomenon, but also as a means of putting to the test a natural and moral philosophy. Just as man is a likeness of God, so is his extension, the state; accordingly, this
social utopia descends from the supreme being to the state and seeks to show that the latter, conceived as perfect, resembles the radiations of a divine solar system.
The communist features of such a utopia of domination may cause surprise; only in fact it is not a utopia of freedom at work here, but one of impersonal order,
conceived in terms of an international state. Its thorough administrative organization was reflected in a model island, and the contradiction between a universal kingdom
and an island city is suppressed. Life runs like clockwork in a military monarchic fashion, the strictest punctuality and pre­orderedness demonstrate their technical
efficiency in terms of time, administration and economy. The incipient manufacturing system, which brought together workers and technological means of production in
large workshops, is utopianized along the lines of state socialism. On the other hand, Campanella transfigures the Hispanicization of the continent at the time, the
deliberate intolerance (though with contents of his own, not with those of the Inquisition). A state socialism appears, or rather: a popish one, with a lot of Byzantine and
astrological pathos behind it. With the pathos of the right time, the right situation, the right order of all people and things; a commanding centre establishes order in a
classless but extremely hierarchical way.