THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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with Owen, Fourier, and Saint­Simon, did the picture change again, when More and Campanella found worthy successors. For the ‘natural system’ of capitalism was
disturbed by quite astonishing problems, Ricardo and Sismondi developed the first theories of crises within this system. It was therefore precisely the economic
tendencies of the age which slowly started to find that a good many things in the old communist cloud­cuckoo­land were not quite so remote or fictional. But between
Campanella and Owen there is characteristically a space almost devoid of original social utopias, in keeping with the requirements of bourgeois emancipation. As has
become clear, Natural Right came much closer to them; it is much nearer to ideology, even if by no means coinciding with it. The inheritance of Natural Right: the
thought­out facultas agendi — was not amassed by social utopia, it is merely entered into by that utopia, under banners which are not capitalist any more.
On the whole, as noted above, the dream in search of justice was by no means lavish. Instead it remains conceptual, never departs from hard work and cold theoretical
effort. A novel of an ideal state may perhaps still have been able to develop the theory of an original social contract, but not the strict conclusions on which Natural
Right intrinsically depends. In any case, the original contract is not essential to Natural Right; after all, the former is first found in Epicurus, who needs no Natural Right
at all, whereas the copious Natural Right of the Stoics knows nothing of a contrat social. In any case, the theory of a contract is the weakest in terms of logic in Natural
Right: since the contract, as a highly developed instrument of law, already presupposes the whole legal sphere which is first supposed to be formed and legitimated by
the contrat social. So what is and remains essential to Natural Right is not the original contract, this component that seems as if it is from a prehistoric novel of an ideal
state, but the rational construction of the best constitution — with an axiom of nature, with a nature based on principles and capable of being deduced, not with a
tropically fruitful and transfigured nature, as on the sunny islands in the novel of an ideal state. The rational unity of Natural Right thus demanded the development of all
conclusions from a single principle if possible (the will for usefulness or the will for community or the will for security); it did this in the strictest deductive fashion, in
accordance with the law of non­contradiction and of sufficient reason. The model for classic Natural Right was mathematics, and Natural Right came closest to this
example among all the geometrically treated sciences of this period. Certainly, the social utopias were constructive too, but loosely, they were