THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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on doctor's orders or as a stimulant, disregard these customs.’ In fact there is even an illusion of liberalism at the point where the state is most seriously in evidence, on
the occasion of a death sentence: ‘The man found guilty must in this case make his peace with his accuser and witness by kissing and embracing them, as the doctors of
his illness so to speak. Moreover, the death sentence in Solaria is not carried out on any condemned man until he himself has become convinced by superior reasoning
that it is necessary for him to die, and until he has been brought to the point of wishing for the death sentence to be carried out himself.’ Rousseau's ‘Contrat social’
admittedly makes a similar demand, but the difference between the attitude of the latter and that of Campanella could not be greater. Rousseau wants to preserve selfdetermination
even in the act which destroys it, whereas Campanella uses liberality as an aid to the strongest triumph of authority. For the rightly condemned individual
here wants to see himself destroyed as a deviation, or in the language of the Church: laudabiliter se subjecit. Subjectivity precisely exists only in so far as it agrees to its
own extermination. That is, it is even deprived of the refuge of being able to be a rebel or a persistent heretic. Thus total conformism triumphs exactly where it seems to
suffer an exception; even in its humaneness, Campanella's ‘City of the Sun’ represents the most extreme antithesis to the utopia of freedom. Order is virtue itself and its
assembly: ‘The Solarians have as many authorities as we have names of virtues: magnanimity, bravery, chastity, generosity, cheerfulness, sobriety and so on. And they
are chosen for posts according to whether they betrayed the greatest tendency to this or that virtue even as children at school.’ Even in this harsh utopia, happiness
remains the summum bonum, but it is precisely the happiness of servitude, harnessed to a divine service which — with the total unity of spiritual and temporal power —
is the same as service to the state. So much for Campanella's future state, it contains an intoxication of constraint which is unparalleled, it surpasses Plato's ideal of
Sparta by using the whole Byzantine and Catholic hierarchy which had arisen since then. Apart from the distribution of property, life is only so bad because people are
not in their place, because mundus situalis, the mere situational state of life, totters into the situational accidents of its semi­nothingness. Because no concord prevails
and no agreement with the ruling celestial forces, no harmony with them; because the state is not on an even keel. This is time and again the basic contrast to the utopias
of freedom, in such various forms, from the Cynics to Thomas More, and ultimately to anarchism; in Campanella the contrast breaks out consciously.