THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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place instead. A military state is dreamed up which is also an inward one, with Brahmans of this world at its head. It is the idealized Doric state, even though crowned
with philosophy, from which Sparta was far removed. And the ‘Let everything be in common’, which is not lacking in Plato, and indeed through him became the most
distinguished utopian catch­phrase, this dangerous phenomenon was confined to the two upper classes; it was a monastic privilege, not a democratic demand. Thus the
restraint in this utopia, though admittedly at the cost of its being the most reactionary, is not one in the fairytale sense at all, in the sense of the Golden Age. And there is
restraint even in the second most famous utopia of the ancient world, in Augustine's City of God. It was of course originally designed in its salvation for Adam and Eve,
but their Fall prevented it, and since then the City of God has been making a pilgrimage on earth. It cannot appear as an earthly state, for it embraces only the chosen
few, it is a Noah's Ark. Its peace is threatened and lonely, sunk into the ocean of sorrow and injustice of which the world consists. But neither Plato's restraint, which
was certainly dearly paid for with its reactionary foundation, nor the pessimistic restraint of Augustine have deeply affected the carefree nature of the social­utopian
image of happiness. The novels of an ideal state very often saw all contradictions resolved by their prescriptions, health has become paralysed in them as it were. No
fresh questions, no different countries appear in the margin any more, the island, although a future one itself, is largely insulated against the future. This is connected in
many ways with technological optimism, as noted above, but it is ultimately connected above all with the contraction which the utopian has undergone in this its most
obvious expression: utopia was confined to the best constitution, to an abstraction of constitution, instead of being perceived and cultivated in the concrete totality of
being. Thus apart from levity or fanatical abstraction the utopian has also received from the novel of an ideal state a departmental character totally inappropriate to its
raw material which permeates all spheres. Instead utopian organization, that is, the intended complete satisfaction of needs, without the empty wishes which are to be
forgotten, with the profound wishes which are still to be wished and the gratification of which leads to the so unbluntable happiness of an ever­increasing intensification
of human profusion, must be comprehended as a Totum on which the social utopias themselves depend. And into which they also finally wanted and had to overshoot
within their department, with socially radical, necessarily good conditions in mind. This Totum ensures that the old fairytales of an ideal state are still new