Many things would be easier if we could eat grass. In this respect the poor man, kept as a brute animal in other ways, does not have it as good as that animal. Only the air is readily available, but the soil first has to be tilled, over and over again. In a stooping, painful posture, not as one grows choice fruit upright against the wall. The days of collecting berries and fruit, and of free hunting have long been a thing of the past, a few rich people live off a lot of poor people. Constant hunger runs through life, it alone compels us to drudgery, only then does the whip compel us. If our daily bite to eat was as certain as the air, then there would be no misery. As it is, bread grows like leaves on the trees only in dreams. Nothing of this sort exists, life is hard, and yet there has always been a sense of escape, and that it is possible. Since this escape route was not found for so long, dreamy courage swarmed out on all sides.
The roast pigeons
A body which is full should have nothing to complain about. Provided it does not lack clothing and shelter, almost everything in other words. Provided there is no lack of friends and provided life proceeds easily and peacefully instead of being the stormy ride accorded to most people. But only the fairytale, which is always instructive, and the fairytale of an ideal state can tell us about the Magic Table, and the Land of Cockaigne. Just as the fountain of youth reaches into medical wishful images, so the Land of Cockaigne reaches into social ones, is a cheerful prelude to them. All human beings are equal there, i.e. well off, there is neither effort nor work. Roast pigeons fly into people's mouths, every pigeon in the bush is already like one in the hand, all things and all dreams are ready to hand as commodities. Thus those in Cockaigne lead a pleasant life, they are no longer prepared to let the rich tell them how unenviable riches are. How unhealthy a lot of sleep is, how deadly leisure is, how much we need deprivation so that all life does not come to a standstill. The people have merrily embroidered on their most nourishing fairytale, their most obvious utopian model, and
even caricatured it: the vines are tied together with sausages, the mountains have turned into cheese, the streams are flowing with the best muscatel. The Magic Table and Indian magic meadows here exist as a public institution, as a state of happiness per se.
Lunacy and colportage even here
The fiery owl undeniably flies into these images too. It flies further than it did in the medical dreams, and an end to deprivation does not sound mad. But several world
improvers were paranoid or in danger of being so, in a way that is not wholly incomprehensible. Lunacy, as a loosening up for an invasion of the unconscious, for possession by the unconscious, also occurs in what is NotYetConscious. The paranoiac is often a projectmaker, and there is occasionally also a mutual connection between the two. So that a utopian talent slips off the rails in a paranoid way, indeed almost voluntarily succumbs to a delusion (cf. Vol. I, p. 92ff.). An example is furnished by one of the greatest utopians, Fourier; in his work th strangest images of the future grow alongside a sharp tendencyanalysis. Concerning not society but nature, in so far as it is included in our own harmoniously polite order and sings along with it as it were. Thus, as a bonus to social liberation, Fourier plans a North Pole Crown, that is to say a second sun which will provide the North with Andalusian warmth. The Crown emits a fragrance, warms and glows, an aura emanates from it which desalinates the ocean, in fact improves it into lemonade. Herrings, cod and oysters will immeasurably increase, by a shifting of the faulty position of the earth's axis, whereas the seamonsters will perish. These monsters are replaced by an antishark, an antiwhale, friendly paradisial creatures ‘who pull the ships when they are becalmed’. But on the land Fourier prophesies ‘an elastic conveyance, the antilion, with which a rider who sets out from Calais in the morning has his breakfast in Paris, spends his afternoon in Lyon and his evening in Marseilles’. Though — in the case of great utopians — we see that there is also method in their madness, not merely its own method but also the technological one of a later age: the antiwhale is the steamship, the antilion is the express train, indeed the motorcar. Just as foolish, just as anticipatory is Fourier's theory that man will develop a new organ, even though it will be on the end of a tail which he will grow (Daumier supplied a drawing of this fantasy). By means of this organ, people absorb the ‘ethereal auras’, are able to
contact the inhabitants of other stars, while the planets copulate. The ‘ethereal auras’ have since been received through the radio, although the rapport with the stars is still a shambles, the technological body and the copulation of the planets even more so. These fairytales are not so very different in appearance from those of Jules Verne, or at least from the starrily utopian colportages in Lasswitz, and especially Scheerbart. But all playfulness is lacking in Fourier; the paintpot of this seriousness stands in the realm of paranoia, not just in that of colportage, though of course this colportage is also coloured by paranoia. Is there not a sense of the fine element of madness that even tinged the liberal utopianizing Freemasons of the eighteenth century, the bourgeois with their set squares and pyramids? Is there not a kind of jester's cap perched on the whole ceremonial, on the preparations and symbols which are supposed to lead the young Mason towards ‘the realm of Astraea’? Even Saint
Simon, the great utopian, in his last works concerning the pope of industry, quietly touched on the delusion which occasionally threatens worldimprovers; his disciple Auguste Comte was completely lost in it, in his final phase. Comte extended SaintSimon's Church of Intelligence so far that not only humanity but also space and the earth were supposed to be worshipped. Humanity as the ‘Great Being’, space as the ‘Great Medium’, the earth as the ‘Great Fetish’; Clotilde, Comte's dead mistress, became the new Virgin Mary. These are the bizarre ideas which adorn some of the most energetic castles in the air. Yet, as noted above, they are also not wholly unrelated to colportage, that colportage touched on and occasionally incorporated in a fruitful way by the novel of an ideal state. Almost all older utopias use space
machines, almost all newer ones the timemachines of an exotic imagination, when they travel into the social dreamland. Many seek, in their titles at least, to give the happy island the sparkle of lurid colportage. Thus there is a ‘Kingdom of Macaria’,* an ‘Isle of Felsenburg’† which was so famous, a ‘Crystal Age’:‡ names like those of booths at a fairground in which mermaids from distant shores are displayed; even the secret tones of an invisible lodge, § a long way out, were not lacking. The fairytales of wonderlands, of wishful times and wishful spaces give a sparkle here;since Alexander the most beautiful utopias are set in South
* Samuel Hartlib, ‘A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria’, 1641.
† Johann Gottfried Schnabel, ‘Insel Felsenburg’, 1731–43.
‡ W. H. Hudson, ‘A Crystal Age’, 1887.
§ A reference to the title of Jean Paul's early novel ‘The Invisible Lodge’, 1793.
Sea islands, in a Ceylon of the Golden Age, in the wonderland of India. Sailor's yarns lend the trappings even to important social utopias, as in that of Thomas More;
happiness appears in this setting long before the times were ripe for it; for more than two thousand years the exploitation of man by man has been abolished in utopias.
Social utopias contrasted the world of light with night, broadly pictured their land of light, with the sparkle of justice in which the man who is oppressed feels uplifted, and the man who goes without feels content. The fact that this fantastically pictured state of affairs was so often conceivable only in colportage, as the sole remaining form of adventure and of evidently good victory, is not surprising. It is the state of affairs which even today the soldier in Brecht's ‘Threepenny Novel’ dreams has finally come about: ‘Baseness lost its high fame, the useful became famous, stupidity lost its privileges, people had no dealings with brutality any more.’ Once the islands of the sun are reached, through lunacy, sailor's yarns or even simply, in the latest social utopias, in the work of Bellamy or Wells, through magnetic sleep, then things are by no means so lively on them any more, apart from the splendours of nature, things are more normal. For one would think it is surely normal, or ought to be so, for millions of people not to allow themselves to be ruled, exploited and disinherited for thousands of years by a handful of upper class. It is normal for such a vast majority not to put up with being the damned of this earth. Instead, the very awakening of this majority is the utterly unusual occurrence, the rare event in history. For a thousand wars there are not even ten revolutions; so difficult is walking upright. And even where they succeeded, as a rule the oppressors turned out to be exchanged rather than abolished. An end to deprivation: this did not sound at all normal for an incredibly long time, but was a fairytale; only as a waking dream did it enter the field of vision.
New Moral Worlds on the horizon
Only far away from here does everything seem better, things are held in common. This is how the citizens live in the work of Thomas More: moderate work, not above six hours a day, the proceeds are distributed equally. There is no crime any more and no compulsion, life is a garden, cosy and noble happiness hang around openly.
Things are strict, however, in the great counterpart to More's Utopia, in Campanella's City of the Sun. The happiness of all is here set straight not by means of freedom
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
owners, merchants, bankers; thus the ‘Industrial System’ fell back behind Owen, who managed without these types. But SaintSimon's industrialist does not remain private, he becomes a public official, and society as a whole a Church of Intelligence. Exploitation is eradicated, because individual economy is eradicated, in its place blossoms the red dawn of planland, the blessed gift of industry — with a social high priest at its head.
All this consequently leaves the old land, more or less peacefully and rapidly. Comfort seemed to be most rapidly attained when new inventions also came to its aid.
The newer fairytales of an ideal state are often interspersed with them, More paints flat roofs and large windows of light into his dreamland, Campanella even motor
cars. There are also fairytales of an ideal state which do not so much picture social dreams as technological ones instead. As does Bacon's ‘New Atlantis’, the land beyond the Pillars of Hercules, beyond the known world. A happy people lives there, happy above all because it does not content itself with that which nature casts off as flotsam and jetsam as it were. But the Atlantians delve into the natural forces themselves, with senses sharpened to the extreme by instruments, and after they have taken a deep look they utilize what they have seen. New plants and working animals surround man, life is chemically prolonged, even the old dream of being a bird is realized there, by carriages which rise into the air. A social section of this novel, with its many open doors to tomorrow, remained unwritten; so it is not known by which means the Magic Table that has grown enormous only yielded good things, and not also, for hostile wishes, poison as well. Purely technological images of progress have thus always made progress appear too cheap, too linear; just as today, presented in isolation and with social change left out, they are delusions or means of deception. In the honest, yet abstract utopias the technologically supported belief in progress has very often facilitated the illusion of undisturbed success and advance.
Among all the utopians only one, Fourier, has maintained that even in the better future every phase has its ascending line, but also the danger of a descending one. An abstract utopia, even the socalled socialist state of the future, namely that which is only for our grandchildren, very rarely knows any real danger; even its victory, not just its path, then seems undialectical. This even though a more sorrowful than trusting mood undoubtedly hangs over the first and most famous, though coolest utopia:
that of Plato. Of course, unfriendliness is here transferred from the existing state to the ideal one anyway: the aversion of the upper classes to the masses. The wishful image does not serve the latter, the farmer class, they are to be kept in their
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
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