71c4d485ac261971155e0533b54e5849 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

which time a socialistic society has been established, and Paris and the great cities hâve ail dwindled away, The air is more heavily populated than the earth itself, and technology enables every man to live in ease and comfort. There is Httle that is original in this delineation, but what is of interest in this work is that Anatole France first tears down what he is about to build up. Like Wells, he constructs a utopia and offers a critique of utopias as such.

The scène of the book opens in Rome, It first unrolls backwards toward the stone âge and its vision of the future, which we know as antiquity. Then it moves forward to antiquity's vision of the future, ail a part of our own past. Finally the scène moves to the présent and our own image of the future. Through his historical reconstruction of the future anticipations of past âges, he indicates the relativity of ail visions of the future.

To establish this relativity, he uses the ingenious device of having the Romans tell an anecdote concerning the appearance before the tribunal of a certain Jew named Saul or Paul of Tarsus. The story arouses much amusement. Does this man really want to establish a religion for slaves? This is really too funny. But man will surely develop a new and purified religion for an eternal Rome, replacing Jupiter with Hercules.

The author points out that at the time no one could foresee that the lïttle incident mvolving Paul wouîd influence two thousand years of history. In the course of his argument, Anatole France doles out equal quantities of skepticism about and belief in man's power to predict his own future. The mocking doubt attacks the tenability of the very vision of world peace which his own utopia depicts.

The third and last utopia to be discussed in Theodor Hertzka's Freiland (1889).' ' This appeared one year after Bellamy's Looking Backward, and the two are often coupled as sociaiistic utopias. But Hertzka belonged to the ultralibéral Manchester School. Freeland is primarily an économie project, based on the premises of classical économies and the unregulated opérations of individual self-interest.

This is a new note for the utopia.

Hertzka brings some new materials into his social construction: Owen's and Fourier's voluntary association, Proudhon's crédit banks, Henry George's common ownership of land, Cabet's central économie planning, and a generous portion of influence-optimism.

11 Translated as Freeland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1894). This really belongs together with an ensuing work entitled Reise nach Freiland (Freeland Reuisited, 1893).

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