THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 480
overshooting ones even here, images almost always overshooting into the ‘original and final state’. So much for the social mandate and coherence in the series of social
utopias; it is always stronger than the individual characteristics of the utopians. And utopias are taken even less from the drawers of a priori possibilities for instance,
independently of history, than they are from the depths of sheer private feeling. All possibilities only attain possibility within history; even the New is historical. Even the
Novum of an abolition of private property (which is anticipated by most social utopias, in that no longer topical section which transcends to the final level), even this
Novum is not a priori unalterable. It looks very different in the work of the not very liberal Plato than in that of Thomas More, and very different again in his work than
in that of Robert Owen. Not even the New itself, in its respective dimension, not even the utopian element, as pertaining to the superstructure, is invariant. The ‘future
ages’ which Jacob shows to his sons on his deathbed are not the same, either in their content or in their concept of the future, as those which the chiliast Joachim of
Calabrese had in mind in the thirteenth century, let alone those meant by Saint­Simon. What is invariant is solely the intention towards the utopian, for it is continuously
discernible throughout history: yet even this invariance immediately becomes variable when it gets beyond expressing the first word, when it speaks the contents which
are always historically varied. These contents are not at rest like Leibniz's possibilités éternelles, from which the anticipator selects now this one and now that, they
move solely in the history which produces them. Which is true of all utopian contents, not merely of the social­utopian ones of the best of all societies. The social
waking dreams themselves, of course, are not yet the most significant or profound amongst the structured ones, yet in return a utopian element develops in them at its
social base. Thus they do not merely exhibit the largest scope, but together with technological utopias they are also the most practical manifestation of human wishful
landscape. A proud one too; for social utopias, even in their tentative beginnings, were always capable of saying no to the despicable, even if it was the powerful, even
if it was the habitual. The latter is in fact subjectively even more of a hindrance for the most part than the powerful, since it presents itself more continually and therefore
less dramatically; since it numbs the awareness of contradiction, and reduces the cause for courage. But social utopias have almost always arisen in contrast to this
numbness, in contrast to that kind of habit which among despicable acts, especially among intolerable ones, constitutes half of moral unimaginativeness and the whole of
political