THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 476
but by means of an order which is planned down to the slightest detail. Despite even shorter working hours than in More, only four hours a day, and a communist
distribution of the proceeds once again, the beneficial burden of rules lies on every hour, and also on every pleasure. The rules are ascertained and upheld by savants,
particularly astrological savants; the City of the Sun is precisely fitted into the universe. It is a long way from here, via 1789, via the formal freedom and equality of all
which followed and turned into the cruellest misery, a long way to the utopians of the industrial age, to Owen, Fourier, Saint­Simon. Natural Right lies on this path, and
also Fichte's dream of a closed commercial state in which everyone possesses de jure, and thus in utopian terms in facto, the provisions and goods to which he has a
fundamental right. But in the meantime cash payment had become the sole link of society, a different link was sought, the forgotten one of fraternity for example. Owen
at first turned directly to the workers and remained active in their midst, not just as a factory owner. Private property, the Church and the prevailing form of marriage
destroy human happiness; in New Harmony they do not exist any more. The capitalists of distribution and production: merchant and factory owner, are regarded as
dispensable phenomena; bazaars are to arise in their place, in which the worker receives in exchange the commodity which other workers have produced and which he
needs, in accordance with the number of hours of work he has put in. Fourier, the other, harsher utopian, pre­Marxist in the sharpness of his analysis, Fourier
constructed the Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire not so much on philanthropy as on criticism. On criticism of bourgeois civilization, as the last order that has
appeared. It is the curse against which Fourier sets the vision of gentleness, of the disappearance of the fear of life. Fourier was the first to see how in present society
poverty springs from affluence itself; the remedy is a departure to communist islands, to the social islands which Fourier calls phalanxes; and they are all attuned to one
another as if under world­leadership. A kind of harmonic theory of passions completed the smoothly designed economy; the new world was to be as clearly tuned as a
harp. Owen and Fourier designed their state (more a happy group than a happy state) along federalist lines; in Saint­Simon, however, it appears in centralized form,
again closer to order than to individual freedom. Almost more fervid than in Owen and Fourier is the hatred here of unearned income and the misery it presupposes, of
the feudal and bourgeois men of private means, as painted by Goya and Daumier. All love is reserved for work, and the magic word for Saint­Simon is l'industrie. For
him workers are of course also the factory