THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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themselves. The capitalists were not, however, inclined to allow themselves to be rid of their disease by having their lives taken: there is no voluntary Icaria. Thus Cabet
experimented for bad and all, wholly against his doctrine, with settlement plans of the most minimal kind, exactly like Owen. Icaria was designed as a glorious workers'
state with a metropolis in the middle; it became in reality a laborious colony, established on the banks of the Missouri by communist pioneers. Despite steam power,
extensive mechanization, and attempted model factories it perished, swallowed up by swamp and prairie. In any case, Little Icaria was always conceived as a
substitute; the real Icaria lies on the Seine, was conceived as the perfect France of the decimal system and the departments, from which, after all the medieval mess or
confusion, even the accidents of private property have been removed.
Steam overturned things at that time more quickly and more thoroughly than anyone had dreamed. Not yet for the better, as far as the workers were concerned, for the
time being that was only a hope. It was championed particularly by Saint­Simon, he glows with praise of industrial life even more than Cabet. But then Saint­Simon
again interpreted this life, in so far as it was an active one, too broadly, too indiscriminately: he also utopianized the employer along with the worker. This contemporary
of Fourier did not have his dialectical perspicacity; thus he failed to notice the creation of misery by wealth, the contrast between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Thus he
backed a ‘working class’ per se, as the ‘working parts of the nation’; these also included, because their interest in profit did not seem to be idle at any rate, the
capitalists, peasants, workers, traders, employers, engineers, artists, scientists — all types without inherited feudal privilege belonged for Saint­Simon to the creative
part of humanity, and consequently to its future. Saint­Simon did not yet comprehend the bourgeoisie as a separate class. and hence, although all his life he wished to
stand on the side of ‘those who are most numerous and most poor‘, a peaceful balance between capital and work likewise seemed to him to be possible. What today
is demagogy or the harmonizing stupidity of the backmost table reserved for regulars, was at that time still bedazzlement by young, up­to­date industry, by the
modernity of all those who were occupied with steam power, with industry and progress. Workers and employers were simultaneously at the head of the development;
thus they stood out equally from rotten feudality. Property earned by one's own efforts, without the right of inheritance, was different from that handed down by titled
landowners, by parasites with twenty ancestors; the power of wealth by virtue of one's own labour was more progressive than the