THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Marx even teaches a ‘restoration of man’. Except that this human element or the complexities of a realm of freedom as a whole are not rigid genera, but ensembles of
social conditions, and above all that they do not stand behind history as an unchangeable essence, existing like a Golden Fleece which only has to be fetched from
existing Colchis after it has been described and depicted. This was the plan of the abstract utopias, but not in fact their only one: the intention towards the better world
itself is by no means discharged, it and it alone is a major invariable in history. Without such anticipation in general there is no undisappointability, no belief in the goal,
no distributable abundance of belief. ‘And even if Marx rightly assigned the stimulus to the new life decisively to the homo oeconomicus, to the control of points of
economic interest, in order to conquer the paradisial order, beyond the world and assumed to be all too Arcadian, of rational and at heart chiliastic socialism in a harsh
manner and with a worldly­wise struggle against the world: one surely does not die merely for a thoroughly organized production budget, and even in the very
Bolshevist fulfilment of Marxism the old Taborite­Joachite type, aggressive towards God, of radical Baptism recognizably recurs, with a still hidden, secret myth of the
What For, for which chiliasm nevertheless constantly figures as a prelude and a corrective’ (Ernst Bloch, Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution, 1921, p. 128).
The abstract element is the defect, the remorseless and unconditional element is the power of great old utopian books. And as a condition of this unconditional element
they almost always named the same thing: Omnia sint communia, let everything be in common. It is a credit to pre­Marxist political literature to possess these isolated
and rebellious enthusiasms among its many ideological insights. Even if they did not seem to contain a shred of possibility, and naked appearances, and all the more so
those cloaked in ideology, contradicted their reveries. After all, the society projected within them managed without self­interest at the expense of others and was to
keep going without the spur of the bourgeois drive for acquisition. For thousands of years this hope of the social utopias in particular was passed off as particularly
unworldly and much laughed at. Until this sort of thing actually started to begin in a vast country, instead of on a dream island; whereupon the laughter stopped. So
there was ultimately also insight in these enthusiasms after all and despite everything a great deal of reality: at first one which was still immature, which confined the
better world to an abstractly pictured, immediately anticipatory system in the mind of its creator, but then a forcibly prevented reality which, however difficult its birth,
finally breaks through. Since Marx the abstract