THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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no means intended to do without Christianity. It was not based on hierarchical architecture alone, but on a sharpened, thoroughly organized Christian humaneness. The
precursor of all these churches of the future or of intelligence was — despite Comte's anti­deist frame of mind — naturally a deist, and moreover in the spirit of socalled
natural religion: John Toland. In his ‘Pantheistikon’, 1721, he had not only already demanded, like all deists, a religion which by completely disposing of otherworldly
revelation ‘agrees with scientific reason’. Toland also erected to his natural god (‘the universe from which everything is born and to which everything returns’) a
cult of his own, that ‘of truth, freedom and health, the most valuable possessions of the sages’. And above all he installed, just like Comte, new saints and Church
Fathers, namely ‘the exalted spirits and the finest writers of all ages’. This is already the ‘Church of Intelligence’, Saint­Simon added the industrial pope in the age of
factories and Romanticism and of course certain continuing correspondences of bondedness which did not exist before: the correspondences between socialism and
church organization. Apart from this, the pathos of social organization, here also that of a social state industry, is conceived in a gloriously illiberal way all the same.
Saint­Simon's utopia is considerably closer to Campanella than to More and contains within it all the advantages and also dangers of a collective idea which is not
provided in its centralizing organization with democratic­federative elements, and does not in fact build up with them in a spirit of solidarity the strictness of the
organization itself.
Individual utopians and anarchy: Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin
Does not the life which is free of violence seem the best of all? Being one's own master, independent, unrestricted, growing wild, or at least growing to standards of
one's own. Even Saint­Simon said on his deathbed: ‘My whole endeavour is summed up in the one idea of securing for everybody the freest development of their
talents.’ The guardian, even the social one, who turns out to be the best is the one who, at a stroke, no longer exists. The anarchists, of course, who deliver this stroke
in utopian fashion, always display, despite all their defiance, petit­bourgeois behaviour. Not because of their background which is predominantly of this kind, but
because of their immediate goals; for these often seem to come from an ‘independent’ private world like that of a man of leisure. Stirner, more