THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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state flows from the ‘supreme principle of Christianity’. Fourier conceives his commune as a music of sheer Christian harmony, and the voices which clamour for this
higher federation are not only individual human beings, but also the individual drives within those human beings. Thus Fourier even designed a kind of anthropological
counterpoint, with twelve passions and no less than eighteen hundred characters; all of these flourish into a universal love of mankind, once society is attuned and
dissonant deceit removed. A rich unison altogether is the destiny of man, for himself and in relation to the world. ‘His industrial destiny is to harmonize the material
world; his social destiny is to harmonize the emotional­moral world; his intellectual destiny is to discover the laws of universal order and harmony.’ Accordingly,
Fourier's utopia constructs out sheer connections in which consonance necessarily reigns; utopia is medicine and instruction for agreement. Without poverty, without
that division into jobs which carves up man himself; here the federative commune, the happy structure could almost come from a kind of early Walt Whitman America,
though without capitalism.
Centralist utopias in the nineteenth century: Cabet, Saint­Simon
That which brings happiness instead of misery does not always need to be friendly itself. Likewise the plan which means to abolish the harshness of life is not always
soft. In Owen and Fourier the better life appears as individual and federative, its framework is loose. The centralists, however, who now emerge, closer to industry,
make freedom organized, and stress the power of solidarity. They do not think in terms of settlements but of large economic complexes, and instead of Owen's ‘district
councils’ a strict system of administration arises. One could even say that a stricter order arises in freedom again, freedom is no longer affirmed as economically
individual but solely as social, i.e. orientated towards common goals. It is thus more than indicative, it is decisive that the centralist utopians no longer furnish their
dreams with field, house and workshop, with a cast of peasants and craftsmen. But they affirm the collective means of production of industry, they deny only the
‘subjectivism’ with which these are used and administered. Cabet was one of the first to turn to workers in this way and was felt to be a spokesman of their powerful
future.