THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Judaism. Thus it wants or wanted to escape from mustiness, pressure, and also the atmosphere of lazy scepticism. But the will towards rebuilding the whole of society,
that was usual in the great social utopias, is lacking. It is nevertheless remarkable that the programmes confined to groups have a certain specialist status: they know
their way around in their groups and undertake utopian gleaning there. Many elements from these specialized utopias were even included in Marxism, which did not
happen with any bourgeois full­scale utopia after Marx. These emancipatory plans are certainly not lacking in the short­sightedness which characterizes every mere
reformism, but they do lack or did lack deceit. They are thus as different from the bourgeois full­scale utopias of the present as the patch on a dress from the festive
garb of finished rags. Utopian remnants, as dished up by capitalist democracy and later by fascism, were sheer deceit, either of an objective kind, with private selfdelusion,
or of a thoroughly conscious, deliberate kind. One only has to compare with the specialized shortsighted character of the group utopias cited above the totally
bogus character of the bourgeois full­scale utopias which have recently sprung up. A future as envisaged by Moeller van den Bruck in his ‘Third Reich’, and Rosenberg
in his ‘Myth of the Twentieth Century’ is capitalism plus murder. Ernst Jfinger's imagined unity of workers and soldiers is the same demagogy in its tone of command
which Rosenberg demonstrated in blood and flickering flames. What Spengler called ‘Prussianness and socialism’ even around 1920 is a dream of the future which
rightly followed the decline of the western world. Even earlier, Kjellén, another utopian reactionary, had declared the ‘ideas of 1914’ to be superior to those of 1789,
indeed to be Prussian salvation, a ‘third Rome’ in Brandenburg; thus full­scale utopia had a fascist appearance. There remains the bourgeois­democratic future, with H.
G. Wells as its first champion. It certainly does not wear such a war­like death­mask as fascism. Instead it wears moral make­up, and feigns human rights as if the
capitalist whore could become a virgin again; Wilson's fate showed what comes out of this.* Freedom from fear cannot be brought by those who themselves represent
and produce the cause for fear; freedom as the utopia of western capitalism is chloroform. Thus the smaller or group utopias still stand out as honest exceptions to this,
they really wanted to reach the light. Once again a dream of the better life surfaced here, even if by unsuitable means, on soil that had
* Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), whose ‘Fourteen Points’ were the basis on which the League of Nations was established. They were presented at the Paris
peace conference in 1919.