THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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since the end of the Middle Ages’. Nevertheless, the same friend of the victims of industry, the same enemy of both liberalism and feudalism, produced out of blazing
ignorance one of the most reactionary late utopias; in so far as this sort of thing can still be called utopia, let alone ‘eutopia’, the land of happiness. Carlyle was the first
to posit the leader­workforce­relationship, and hence the industrial neo­feudalism which was slyly rampant even before the days of fascism and merged with it in a
systematic and violent manner. He was the first to posit the ‘captain of industry’; despite Saint­Simon, who had underestimated the proletariat and had likewise
advocated that the big employers should become the leaders of the nation. But in the days of Saint­Simon it was still possible to believe in the weakness of the working
classes, whereas Carlyle lived in the middle of the period of social struggle and heightened proletarian class consciousness. And then Saint­Simon considered the
exploitation by employers to be a remnant of the actual and only age of oppression, the feudal one, which would vanish from industry with progressive political
liberation, whereas Carlyle thought that liberalism itself was the root of all evil and therefore — applied feudalism to it. The way was thus prepared for the fascist theory
of elitism (the demigod who earns a lot): Carlyle sees his ideas of leadership and proletarian vassalage in thoroughly individual terms; there thus arose the paradox of an
individualistic neo­feudalism. His later works in particular (‘Past and Present’, 1843, ‘The History of Frederick II of Prussia’, 1858) give way in a utopian manner to
enlightened industrial despotism. In ‘Past and Present’ he conjures up the noble employer, who is summoned away from ‘Midas­eared’ Mammonism towards the
exemplary heroism kindled by prophets, poets, and statesmen.* Welfare institutions are prophesied, cheerful communal evenings of the patriarchal entrepreneur with his
worker­children; we all know the outcome. Even Carlyle himself did not cherish very great expectations with regard to such an ethicizing relationship between employer
and employee; he writes in his ‘French Revolution’, and he writes this not just as a puritan: ‘In such prophesied Lubberland,† of Happiness, Benevolence, and Vice
cured of its deformity, trust not, my friends.’ The beginning of winter thus descends on the
* The passage from Carlyle Bloch seems to have in mind here is: ‘in whirlwinds of fire, you and your Mammonisms, Dilettantisms, your Midas­eared philosophies,
double­barrelled Aristocracies shall disappear!’
† Bloch uses the word ‘Schlaraffenland’ to translate Carlyle's ‘Lubberland’. Elsewhere in Bloch we have translated ‘Schlaraffenland’ as ‘The Land of Cockaigne’.