THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 479
and meaningful, that even their mistakes are instructive and their claims are binding. They make the claim to which Oscar Wilde's proposition refers: no map of the
world which does not contain the country of Utopia is worth looking at. The old social dreams painted the isle of abstraction and love; because of these two qualities
nothing was to be difficult on it either.
Utopias have their timetable
The dreams of living together in a better way were for a long time only thought out internally. Yet they are not arbitrary, not so completely free­rising as it may
occasionally appear to the originators themselves. And they are not disconnected with one another, as if they only had to be empirically enumerated like odd events. On
the contrary: in their apparent picture­book or revue character they show themselves to be rather precisely socially conditioned and coherent. They obey a social
mandate, a suppressed or only just evolving tendency of the imminent social level. They give expression to this tendency, even if mixed with private opinion, then with
the dream of the best constitution per se. Of course, the social utopias do not reflect the existing tendency with nearly the same tenacity or even sharpness typical of a
different form of anticipation: bourgeois Natural Right. Yet they are by no means independent of the surge towards the next level, despite all skimming, all romance of
an unconditional social happiness. They speak with consternation, even if seldom in concretely mediated terms, of what is imminent, they couch their communist final
happiness in forms of the next tendency in each case. This is so in Augustine, and clearly so in Thomas More and Campanella, in Saint­Simon. Augustine's work is
influenced by the incipient feudal economy, that of More by free trading capital, that of Campanella by the absolutist period of manufacture, and that of Saint­Simon by
the new industry. Although in a transparent way each time, with heaven on earth and nothing less in mind. Thus even utopias have their timetable, even the boldest are
tied to it in their direct anticipations. Differences in respective location also play a part, it influences the Englishman More and the Italian Campanella most decidedly.
More's utopia of freedom thus corresponds in its non­communist sections to the coming parliamentary form of English domestic politics, as does Campanella's utopia of
order to the absolutist one on the Continent. Such things show that however privately the dream rises it contains the tendency of its age and the next age expressed in
images, though in