THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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stupidity. Social utopias functioned as a part of the power to be amazed and to find the given so little self­evident that only changing it can clarify it. Changing it into a
state of society which, as Marx says, does not merely end the isolation from the political community, but the isolation from essential humanity. The social dreams have
developed with a wealth of fantasy, but at the same time, as Engels adds, with a wealth ‘of brilliant germs of ideas and ideas bursting out of their fantastic cloak’. Until
the designing of the future is concretely corrected in the work of Marx and brought into the truly comprehended timetable of a due tendency, so that it does not stop but
only now vigorously begins. Without the growing wealth of anticipations, of still abstract plans and programmes, which are now to be recalled, the final social dream
would not have come either. It is now to be found at the height of consciousness and thus becomes, really full of planning at last, social awakening.
II. Social Wishful Images of the Past
Solon and the contented medium
As long as we are children, we will not put up with a lot. A poor man who has been made to get used to pressure takes things differently. Only late in life comes a
feeling of how badly people behave and a glimpse of how things could be different. At first this glimpse is fugitive, evasive, the individual falls back on himself as quickly
as possible, without needs. Thus Bias said that he carried all his possessions with him; he did not need much and did not ask much of others. Life without luggage
appeared to be the best from both an economic and a social point of view, this sort of thing was never wholly forgotten. Friction becomes slight, envy and cheating
come to an end, there is no cause for either among those who are idle. Epigrams from the time of the Seven Sages were all of the same opinion in this respect, in a
figurative sense they all wish that man should be contented. He can be happy with a little and only with a little; too much property, says Solon, should be shared. It is
not riches that are desirable for us, but virtue, and that alone makes communal living easy. Nobody is to be considered happy before his death, this maxim also means
that there is no relying on riches, that they are advisable neither for an