THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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from the unbroken continuation of which those sovereigns and creators in the kingdom described will emerge’ (Werke, Meiner, IV, p. 615). Though Fichte explains
little or nothing about practice: how and by what means it may come even to the beginnings of a closed commercial state, let alone such an enthusiastic art of reason. In
the Germany of that time no proletariat had yet appeared, and it was already a great deal for Fichte to admit and condemn the fact ‘that the combined mass of owners
could forcibly prevent the weaker individual from proclaiming his legal rights’ (l.c., p. 475). Even this slight hint of social revolution, as the expression of legal rights, was
abstract at that time, was almost as speculative as Fichte's entire design itself. Thus his designer is content with the fact that the whole thing ‘may remain a mere school
exercise without success in the real world’. He is astonished at existing conditions and finds in this astonishment that philosophical spur which could only become a
practical one much later on. Although Fichte considers his socialist conclusion, like all that have been correctly deduced, to be conceptually necessary, state socialism in
this world is still only considered to be abstractly possible, only to be ‘demanded by the rule of law’. Anything other than proposals and demands was not submitted by
Fichte's later disciples either, by Rodbertus for example, the ancestor of academic socialists. And even Lassalle, who was influenced by Fichte in many ways, did not
get beyond reformist agitation, despite proletarian contact. In fact, Lassalle endorsed the current state more than Fichte, especially the authoritarian Prussian state.
Workers' productive co­operatives with state credit were to form a transition to the future socialist society: Fichte's utopia certainly could be misused on behalf of this
substitute for revolution. But a socialism in the Germany of 1800 has a historical freshness and distinction which cannot be misused at all. It exhibits precisely the brilliant
naivety, the intuitive youthfulness, which were lacking in a Lassalle around 1860, and which were lacking in the later reformism even as an excuse. The closed
commercial state remains the first system, deduced from original rights and pictured in a utopian way, of organized work. More than this: Fichte' s work considers
socialism to be possible in a single, sufficiently large and autarkical country.
Federative utopias in the nineteenth century: Owen, Fourier
Misery did not remain idle in the meantime, it grew disturbingly. While its bearers had so far been peasants, they were now joined by the worker.