THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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and the later one can no longer be rescinded. The first epoch is that of the happy early communist age of instinct, the second that of piracy and direct barter economy,
the third that of patriarchy and the development of trade, the fourth that of barbarism and economic privileges. The latter continue in the fifth epoch (which still largely
coincides with the fourth): in the age of capitalist civilization, which is the present. It epitomizes Fourier's historical force that he does not criticize this present like all
earlier utopians from the standpoint of an ideal state, but as a product of degeneration at that very time and place, as an intolerable intensification of barbarism. Fourier
proves ‘that civilized order raises every vice practised by barbarism in a simple way to a complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical mode of existence’; in this
historically sound fashion, he becomes not just a satirist, but a dialectician. Although Fourier does not represent, any more than Owen, the class interests of the
proletariat in the sense of the class struggle, he does not believe that bourgeois society can be improved as such or through its own resources. Without any knowledge
of Hegel, and more than a generation before Marx, Fourier discovers the extraordinary proposition that ‘in civilization poverty springs from affluence itself’. Misery is
no longer regarded (as it is in the work of bourgeois economists even decades later and even in America today) as a temporary condition which would be removed as
a matter of course by the cornucopia of growing riches. On the contrary, misery is the dialectically necessary reverse side of capitalist splendour, posited along with it,
inseparable from it, growing with it; that is why capitalist civilization never can nor will eliminate poverty. The same dialectical genius made Fourier keenly alive to the
tendencies which are forcing their way to maturity and to sudden change within the present ‘incohérence industrielle’ itself. As far as the more immediate future of
capitalism is concerned, Fourier predicted as early as 1808 the ultimate end of free competition, the formation of monopolies. With a quite incredible perspicacity he
prophesied, in an age which had only just broken the guild barriers and saw the beginnings of free competition, the bankruptcy of economic liberalism. Fourier hoped
here that even before the formation of monopolies a social upheaval would abolish ‘commercial anarchy’ and grant mankind a guaranteed existence beyond capitalism.
This guarantee was also inherent in the tendencies of capitalist civilization, so that Fourier stipulates: ‘Civilization in itself, in accordance with the will of nature, strives
towards guaranteeism.’ Clearly though, Fourier's historical­dialectical mediation broke off here, at the end of his critique, and prophecy; purely subjective wishful
fantasy dictated its images to the