THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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sake of a revolutionary new beginning. The old Romanticism had still lacked this agrarian­artisan longing; there was no cause for it as yet amongst the profusion of wellpreserved
country towns and the peaceful beauty of life. Seldom has a utopian homespun city appeared more tasteful than in William Morris, but seldom too has it been
directed at such a small circle, with its simultaneously naive and sentimental intellectual mixture of Gothic revival and revolution. The circle has admittedly increased
since the Gothic revival was obliterated and the aversion to the haste, enervation and artificiality of mechanical life grew along with this. Especially since the lost goods
of a more peaceful distant past have been sought by all kinds of mottled reactionary thinking in rectified capitalism, instead of in capitalism which has been surmounted
and driven to abrupt change. The bourgeois utopias now end; with his neo­Gothic Arcadia Morris supplied the last original, though redundant motif.
Unless we also include Carlyle and the obsession with heroes which he conjured up. This was likewise opposed to the industrial world, but only ostensibly, since this
exhorter did not so much look at grey misery from behind as look down on it from above. His puritanical sermons on working and not despairing were precisely
associated with the imperialist kind, which by no means want to shut down the factories but rather the class struggle. This plan is also relevant here; it was after all
Carlyle, in conjunction with Nietzsche, who contributed a lot directly after Marx to a utopian, and then terrible cult of the leader. Of course, Carlyle is still pure, is very
much a moral person, as they say, an individualist and later definitely a patriarchalist. He definitely sought ‘the happiness from which all life streams’ only in individuals,
but in those who make a fine combination. He suffered like Ruskin from the new factory civilization, and he coined the undoubtedly anti­capitalist phrase that cash
payment was the sole connecting link in modern society. He hated Manchesterist liberalism, described the misery of the English working classes and not just the ugliness
of the factory buildings, and utopianized a world which ‘is no longer surrounded by cold general laissez faire’. He understood the French Revolution as the
breakthrough of the industrial age and of its anarchy, but unlike Ruskin and Morris he did not evaluate it solely in negative terms but also positively, without any longing
for the stale Middle Ages: ‘French Revolution means here the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy against corrupt worn­out Authority.’
Above all, the power of industry cannot be removed by anything any more; Carlyle, with his puritan work ethic, is not sparing in his contempt for ‘the lazy and phantom
aristocracy