THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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character of utopias has been overcome; world improvement occurs as work in and with the dialectical coherence of the laws of the objective world, with the material
dialectics of a comprehended, consciously manufactured history. Since Marx, mere utopianizing, apart from still having a partial active role in a few struggles for
emancipation, has turned into reactionary or superfluous playful forms. These do not lack a seductive quality of course, and are at least useful for diversion, but this is
precisely why they have become mere ideologies of the existent, beneath a critical­utopian mask. The work of the genuine social dreamers was different, honest and
great; this is how it must be understood and taken to heart, with all the weaknesses of its abstractness and its all too nimble optimism, but also with its constant
insistence on: peace, freedom, bread. And the history of utopias demonstrates that socialism is as old as the western world, much older in fact in the archetype which
continually accompanies it: the Golden Age.
III. Projects and Progress Towards Science
Topical remnants: bourgeois group utopias
Previous sociable dreams were not separately inviting. They did not concern themselves with a particular, or smaller group. Instead they wanted to cure the whole of
society, the lives of everyone, even if a single discontented stratum was to see to this. But now groups appear on their own and peel themselves, with supposed or
genuine individuality, out of the whole in order to seek and picture ahead what is specifically best for them. They separate themselves in a longitudinal section which is
supposedly to go through all classes; they were linked by organic and national characteristics. And of course by those of oppression or persecution, like young people,
the female sex, and especially the Jews. Quite late social utopias thus arose here, alongside Marx so to speak, those of a group emancipation. It operates as the youth
movement, as the women's movement, and as Zionism; gulfs lie between them, but also the common element of feeling oppressed in existing society by virtue of a single
characteristic. The programme of these groups does not contain revolution but secession, exodus from a manifold ghetto. What they strive for and dream of is of course
an influence on society, in a way a new virtue pouring out of youth, womanhood, and national