15

p More than a century ago the emergence of Marxism marked the beginning of scientific forecasting of the development of society. The theory of scientific communism brought about a radical change in the development of ideas on the future of mankind.

p Increasing attention is paid in discussions on the future of mankind to the question of whether this or that conception responds to the demands of modern science and the retention in bourgeois social thought of vestiges of prescientific conceptions belonging to former ages. So there is more need for a study of ideas on the future of mankind, beginning with their development in social thought before the emergence of Marxism.

p What we mean here is basically the pre-history, the gathering of the prerequisites for scientific forecasting. Material about this is to be found primarily in sources on the history of social Utopias and the philosophy of history. But since the subject of interest to us is not either the history of Utopias or the philosophy of history (statements about the future are found both in general philosophy and natural science, as well as religious works and fiction), the researcher’s field of vision must include works on the following additional subjects: the history of socio-political and economic theories (not falling within the history of social Utopias); the history of philosophy and natural science (not falling within the philosophy of history); the history of religion; the history of literature, and also ethnographic and archaeological material.

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p Marxist literature has dealt comparatively thoroughly (thanks mainly to the works of V. P. Volgin and other historians) with the problem of pro-Marxian Utopian socialism. The recently completed six-volume History of Philosophy and also a number of other works on various aspects of the history of philosophy in various periods and on individual philosophers are of great assistance to the researcher. The same also applies to the recently published courses on the history of political and economic theories.

p Soviet scholars have made considerable progress in the elaboration of the problems pertaining to the history of natural science and the history of religion. But much work in these spheres still lies ahead.

p It would be impossible in this chapter to try to trace, even in general outline, the whole process of the development of ideas on the future in pre-Marxian social thought. The aim of the chapter is more modest: to outline the main problems encountered by the researcher in this branch of the history of social thought, namely, problems concerning the formation of ideas on the future in primitive thought, the development of religious conceptions of the future, utopianism and its evolution, and finally the problem of the formation of prerequisites for scientific forecasting in the narrower sense—in the sense of the direct historical sources of the latter.

p Presentism in primitive thought.  [16•1  Before examining the development of ideas about the future it is essential to dwell .on the point of departure of the study—on the condition of isocial thought (or, to be more precise, primitive thinking), which preceded the emergence of the ideas in question. Thanks to archaeologists and ethnographers we are now able to judge this condition with a reasonable degree of objectivity from two groups of sources: the material of archaeological excavations (primarily those of primitive burials), and the material of ethnographic studies of the life of tribes whose cultural level judging by archaeological information is comparable with that of primitive mankind at the various stages of its development (particularly 17 material relating to customs, religions and folklore). Of special importance to us is primitive mythology.

p The sources show that only after long development did primitive thought conceive the idea of the past and ( considerably later) the future as categories different from the present. In the early stages of the development of primitive society the problem of the duration of time appears not to have been perceived by man. Figuratively speaking, his mental vision was capable of embracing only the events “of the moment" and not of extending to the events of the past and certainly not to those of the future. The material of the Neanderthal burials (Middle Paleolithic) enables us to assume the emergence of concepts more or less definitely distinguishing the present from the past.

p But even at later stages when mythology had been formed, including legends about the origin of the earth and man, life beyond the grave and the human destiny (discussed below), a characteristic feature of primitive thought attracts the attention: the past and future are thought of to a greater or lesser extent (depending on the level of development of thought) as being the same as the present. This, incidentally, made it seem possible to “predict” the future and even “influence” it with the aid of magic.

p The mythological ancestors of the tribal community led more or less the same way of life as the actual tellers of the myths. According to these myths, the deceased members of the tribe continued to hunt in a world beyond the grave which did not differ essentially from the earthly world. The material of primitive burials, in which objects essential for the dead person to continue in the afterlife the same way of life as on earth were discovered, bears this out fairly conclusively.

p This feature of primitive thought, which was wholly determined by the conditions of life of the tribal community (in particular, the very slow, almost imperceptible changes in these conditions during the course of many generations) is stressed by all Soviet specialists.  [17•1 

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p This likening of the past and future to the present ( presentism) in primitive thought attracts the attention to the problem of the specific features of the latter. The wellknown works of Lucien Levy-Bruhl on this subject  [18•1  have been seriously criticised. There is a great need for special works to study the problem comprehensively, from the Marxist standpoint.

p Religious conceptions of the future. The accumulation of early ideas about the future is closely bound up with the evolution of primitive mythology from the fairy-tale myths which explained (in fantasy, of course) the most simple phenomena of nature, to the myths which explained the establishment of tribal morals and customs and, finally, to the myths explaining the origin of man and the world as a whole, and also the fate of the dead. Whereas the first are, as a rule, hardly connected at all with religious concepts, then not properly developed, and the second are connected sporadically (mainly with totemism and other forms of primitive religion), the third are definitely linked with the fairly developed views of a religious character.  [18•2  Thus, the main sources for studying early ideas about the future are material on the history of mythology and, closely related to it, the history of religion.

p The questions as to how the existing orders, people themselves and the world as a whole appeared and also where the dead “depart” did not arise from idle curiosity. The answers to them were of great importance for the life of the tribal community. They had a bearing on the authority of the 19 elders, the education of the young in the traditions of the established order, behaviour towards the dead, in a word, on all the many aspects of the community’s way of lifeAll this encouraged the primitive thought, which for a long time did not venture beyond a narrow set of concrete, empirical concepts connected with the needs and impressions of the moment, to tackle the fairly abstract problem of the possibility of a different order of things.

p As a result human thought advanced considerably in this direction even in primitive society: the idea arose of original chaos out of which the existing world was formed; images were created of so-called cultural heroes—mythical ancestors who were accredited with the discovery of fire, the invention of tools, the establishment of the existing order. Finally there gradually arose ideas of “other worlds" to which the dead “passed over”, beginning with fantastic lands (or islands) somewhere far away on earth and ending with equally fantastic worlds in the sky and under the earth. All this ideological arsenal subsequently equipped modern religions.

p Here we are interested not in the role of this set of concepts in the history of religion, but in the idea of the possibility of the existence of “a different world”. This was a considerable achievement in the development of human thought from the concrete to the abstract—the embryo of the concepts which arose later of a future which could and must be different from the present.

p True, it was a vast distance from the idea of “another world" to the concept of “another future”. As already mentioned, the “afterworld” of primitive religions was a copy of the earthly one. The afterworld of modern religions has not departed very far from that. Whereas in the religions of the North American Indians the hunter’s soul speeds over the snow’s soul on the skies’ soul in pursuit of the moose’s soul in the “hereafter”, the paradise of the antique myths, the Bible and the Koran, is also very similar to the palace gardens of the slave-owners, and hell to the dungeons where slaves toiled away or languished after suffering infernal torture aimed at quelling the rebellious spirit.

p However, ideas about a “different future" gradually gained ground in spite of religious dogma, because they corresponded to the urgent requirements of the ideological 20 struggle which accompanied the disintegration of primitive society and later the development and crisis of slave-owning society.

p In the course of this struggle the ancient religious philosophical thought worked out a whole complex of ideas conducive to the development of views about the future as something different from the present. These included the idea of retribution in the afterlife for one’s behaviour on earth, the idea of Providentialism—divine providence which determined the course of events independently of human will, and the idea of Messianism—the future coming of the Saviour or Messiah who would radically change the existing order for the better. Other conceptions linked with the idea of Providentialism were elaborated, namely, that of the historical process as the cyclic alternation of different socio-political orders (within the framework of the experience of past centuries) with a recurring cycles of catastrophes on a world-wide scale (the flood, etc.) and that of the motive forces of this process as a struggle between the superhuman forces of good and evil, which was to end in the triumph of justice. Finally, a conception linked with the idea of Messianism arose, namely eschatology—the doctrine of the inevitable coming of the “end of the world" after which the world would be totally transformed.

p The process of formation of religious conceptions of a “different future" was a long and complex one. Even Buddhism, the basic dogmas of which developed in the 5th to 3rd centuries B.C. and which made use of many of the great achievements of early Indian philosophy, allows of no other future than the eternal transmigration of souls and the final return of the world to the initial state of “non-being”. But alongside this, even in Egyptian religion of the second millennium B.C., we observe the appearance of Providentialist, Messianic and eschatological ideas which, in the following millennium, were developed in the Mazdaic (old Persian) and Judaic religions from which they were subsequently accepted by Christianity and later Islam.  [20•1 

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p It has now been proved that the basic tenets of Christian eschatology were worked out in antique religious literature of the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C., when apocalyptic moods became widespread during the impending crisis of slave-owning society, and each year the “end of the world" was expected.  [21•1  Throughout the first three centuries A.D. in the ideological struggle which reflected the convulsions experienced by the antiquity, Christian eschatology included the Chiliast (Millenarianist) doctrine that Christ would return to earth to rule for a thousand years and assumed the character of a distinctive “history of the future”. The “second coming" of Christ was expected at any moment and the establishment of “Christ’s Millennium" in which Jesus and the resurrected righteous would rule people justly, and Satan and the powers of darkness would be deprived of the opportunity to harm people. Then, at the end of the thousand years it was believed that the Satanic forces would revolt, and be finally defeated, that there would be a “ universal resurrection of the dead”, “the end of the world”, “the day of the last judgement" and a completely new state of “eternal bliss" for the righteous and “eternal torment" for the sinners.  [21•2 

p For all the obvious absurdity of these fantastic, highly unscientific ideas, one should not forget that the religious conceptions of the future exerted a colossal influence on the masses and were a powerful ideological weapon in the sociopolitical struggle. In particular, Messianic and eschatological expectations were the ideological banner of many slave uprisings at least from the 2nd century B.C.  [21•3  These expectations gave strength to the communities of early Christians 22 during the terrible persecutions in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. They also had a very strong influence on the whole culture of late antiquity.

p But the fourth century witnessed the sudden decline of eschatology. The Christian church became established instead of persecuted; the former Messianic and eschatological expectations with their explosive ideological content directed against the existing order became “superfluous”, and the “second coming”, expected year in year out, simply did not take place, so it was necessary to find an explanation for this. In addition, the most glaring discrepancies were discovered in eschatology itself, obvious even to the believers of those times. They resulted from the mechanical mixing of old (mostly Judaic) and new religious concepts.  [22•1  Thus, the idea of divine predestination contradicted the idea of man’s free will, i.e., the possibility of falling into sin contrary to the will of God, and the ideas of the “end of the world”, “the day of the last judgement" and particularly “Christ’s Millennium" contradicted that of the immortality of the soul, for Christians believed that after a person’s death his soul immediately went either to heaven or to hell and, therefore, neither “Doomsday”, nor “the Last Judgement" nor the “Millennium” had any significance for it. Here too explanations were needed.

p As a result Chiliasm was declared to be a heresy. In the writings of Saint Augustine (354–430) a prominent place was given to the doctrine of the eternal struggle between the realm of Satan, “the earthly city" and “the city of God”, embodied on earth by the church. The latter was destined to triumph, but in the indeterminate future, so that the problem of an impending “Doomsday” was replaced by the problem of “the salvation of the soul" of each person by means of communion with the church. Augustine also tried to solve the insoluble task of reconciling the ideas of Divine predestination and human free will.

p For many centuries Augustine’s teaching determined the main tenets of official Christian eschatology.  [22•2  These tenets 23 were developed in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) which, to this day, are canonical for Catholicism. Orthodox and Protestant eschatology differs from Catholic eschatology only in inessential details.

p In the meantime Chiliasm, repressed by official church ideology which was now hostile to it, continued to smoulder in the numerous heresies of the Middle Ages and then, in the late Middle Ages (roughly from the 13th century), flared up again in the maturing crisis of West European feudalism.

p The advent of the Enlightenment dealt a severe blow to church ideology. Chiliasm and related eschatological views became the property of a few individual sects and ceased to serve as the banner of anti-feudal movements. Their place was taken by new conceptions of a Utopian character, far more effective as ideological weapons, which are discussed below. As for Chiliasm, it “revived” again in the last century and exists to this day. but now as the ideplogical weapon of the reaction in its struggle against the forces of progress.  [23•1  Eschatological Chiliast views form the basis of the dogmas of the modern Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other sects.

p It should be noted that religious conceptions about the future have not remained unchanged. “It is precisely because the roots of religion are social, because religion serves as the fantastic reflection of external forces dominating people in their everyday existence, that eschatology and Chiliasm even when they proceed from a single literary source (such as, for example, the Revelation of St. John, which served early Christianity, medieval sects and the Adventists), are subjected to historical revision: the eschatology and Chiliasm of the early Christians differ from the corresponding ideas of the medieval anti-feudal sects, just as the latter differ from the eschatological Chiliast views of the Adventists."  [23•2 

p It is not possible to describe here the evolution of eschatology over the centuries. Meanwhile the study of religious conceptions about the future is important not only because 24 these conceptions are the first that go to form the pre– history of scientific forecasting, but also because, as mentioned above, they played an important role in the social struggle of past millennia.

p Studies of this nature are also relevant because religious conceptions about the future had a great influence on the philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular, on the philosophico-historical conceptions of Leibnitz, Lessing, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. They exerted an equally strong influence on Utopian thought, particularly on the works of Saint-Simon and Fourier, Owen and Weitling. Without studying them it is difficult to understand certain reactionary trends in modern Western philosophy, such as the conceptions of Berdyaev and Toynbee. Some bourgeois historians and philosophers tendentiously portray Marxism as a special type of eschatology, and this in itself demands that attention be paid to the latter, since an analysis of it reveals the complete untenability of such fabrications. Finally, the study of religious conceptions about the future is important with respect to extending anti-religious propaganda: there can be few such vivid examples of how religious dogmas are incompatible with common sense as in this sphere which is of interest to a large public.

p Utopism, its types, forms and evolution. Alongside religious conceptions about the future and in close connection with them, there developed conceptions of another character—Utopian ones, not yet scientific, but no longer religious. They differ from the latter in that the “different future" of people is determined here not by superhuman forces, but by people themselves, their reason and actions. This is a fundamental difference. And this is why, in spite of many similar features and connections between religious and Utopian conceptions about the future, it is wrong to confuse them, as has been done, for example, by Karl Mannheim and other bourgeois sociologists, who unreservedly rank Chiliasm with the Utopias.  [24•1 

p Analysis of Utopian conceptions of the future is complicated by the fact that in historico-philosophical literature (including Marxist works) the definition of the concept of a 25 Utopia, the principles of classifying Utopias, and the main trends in the evolution of utopistic views continue to remain debatable.  [25•1  Without going into detail on these questions, each of which deserves special examination, we shall confine ourselves to a few general remarks of a purely preliminary nature.

p With regard to the concept of utopia (in the historico– sociological sense), it would seem more acceptable to define it as an arbitrary idea, not directly connected with Providentialism, about the desired future of the world and mankind, an idea which is not based on a scientific interpretation of the objective laws of development of nature and society. This definition proceeds from Lenin’s famous thesis about utopia in politics as the type of wish that can never come true—neither now nor afterwards, a wish that is not based on social forces and is not supported by the growth and development of political, class forces.  [25•2  It reflects the substance of a utopia and makes it possible to distinguish this concept from the similar, but not identical concepts of eschatology, fantasy, didacticism,  [25•3  etc.

p Most Utopias deal with problems of a future society and come under the heading of social Utopias. However, some concentrate on problems of science and technology, technical questions of town planning, provision of medical services, etc., with little or no reference to the social side of the question. Such Utopias, it is true, did not develop on the whole until the second half of the 19th century. However, in their embryonic, primitive form they can also be found earlier.  [25•4  The various types of Utopias similar to the above-mentioned may conveniently be classified under the general heading of technical. More often, however, one finds Utopias in which social problems are only slightly less prominent than technical ones. This type comes under the intermediary heading 26 of socio-technical.  [26•1  There are also pacifist Utopias. Finally, there is the special heading of anti-utopias which, unlike Utopias, draw arbitrary pictures of an undesirable future for the world and mankind.

p The basis for the classification of social Utopias is not the form of the Utopian works or the secondary peculiarities of their content,  [26•2  but the basic principle: which social system is reflected or portrayed in the given Utopia. From this point of view social Utopias may be divided into those which idealise primitive society (communal ones), slave-owning, feudal, bourgeois and socialist.  [26•3  Each type, in its turn, may be divided according to the same principle into groups and sub-groups. Thus, according to the classification proposed by V. P. Volgin, socialist Utopias may be divided into socialist ones (proclaiming the principle “to each according to his labour”) and communist ones (“to each according to his needs”). Bourgeois Utopias contain petty-bourgeois ( egalitarian, egalitarian-cooperative, etc.) Utopias.  [26•4 

p This type of classification is determined by the principles expounded by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in which a description is given of types of feudal, petty-bourgeois, “true”, bourgeois and critical-utopian socialism. Naturally, the above-mentioned types of Utopias are of a concrete historical character, i.e., by virtue of the principle on which it is based the classification in question acquires meaning only within the framework of definite historical epochs.

p An additional difficulty in analysing Utopias is produced by the question of their form. It would be wrong to regard as Utopias only “state novels" or socio-political treatises of 27 the same type as the well-known works by Saint-Simon and Fourier. Indeed, as is no less well-known, elements which constitute the essence of the utopia are found in works which, generally speaking, cannot be classed as Utopias themselves. We also find them in eschatological, Ghiliastic works (in Miintzer, say, who developed clearly Utopian views in a purely religious form), and in many works of pure fantasy, beginning with folk tales and ending with science fiction, in the afore-mentioned books of instruction for sovereigns and in works of social satire (such as Rabelais and Swift).

p Such complexity makes it advisable to understand the concept of utopism as the type of approach to the problems of the future in which Providentialism essentially loses its significance, and a scientific understanding of the objective laws of the development of nature and society has not yet been attained. This interpretation of utopism makes it possible to analyse more profoundly the views not only of the Utopians, the authors of full-scale Utopias, but also all manner of other writers who cannot be unreservedly classed with the Utopians, but whose works contain elements of utopism.

p Seen from this angle the history of Utopian thought appears not as a collection of Utopias arranged in a chronological order, but as the process of evolution of utopism, developing logically in accordance with changing economic and socio-political conditions, and reflecting the concrete historical ups and downs in the class struggle. This makes it possible to contrast the Marxist analysis of the history of social Utopias, characteristic of Soviet historical literature, all the more sharply with the picture of the process in question as a simple filiation of ideas independent of the sociopolitical struggle in each epoch, which is characteristic of non-Marxist literature.

p Examining the evolution of utopism, we find that it consists of two stages: ascent and decline, the dividing line between them being the appearance of scientific sociology, a scientific approach to the problems of historical development, scientific communism—the appearance of Marxism. Until this division there was a struggle in Utopian thought between progressive trends, which urged man forward along the road to progress, and reactionary trends which fought to 28 preserve the existing order or even return to the order of the past. The struggle proceeded in accordance with the socio-political struggle, i.e., in accordance with historical progress. The progressive Utopias invariably remained overwhelmingly predominant at this stage. At the stage of decline the struggle between the two trends continued, but on the whole utopism became a reactionary force, a force objectively striving to preserve the bourgeois or semi-feudal orders, and resisting the onset of scientific communism under the banner of Marxism-Leninism.

p Since the socio-economic development of individual countries proceeds at different rates, however, and the conditions for the spread of Marxism in this or that country emerge at different times, the dividing line in the evolution of utopism is not chronologically fixed, but varies according to the rise in the level of social development. As a general rule, this dividing line manifests itself fully when the country in question enters the period of a developed working-class movement: for the countries of Western Europe it appeared in the middle of the 19th century and for Russia about the 1880s.

p The examination of the evolution of utopism in the present chapter is confined to the middle of the 19th century. The comparatively full study of the history of socio-political doctrines (particularly Utopian socialism) in Marxist literature,  [28•1  makes it unnecessary to give a detailed examination of this process here. We shall, therefore, deal with only a few main points.

p As mentioned above, Utopian views do not simply vary from one writer to the next, but have definite social roots. Two important points emerge from this: firstly, the question arises of the popular origins of Utopias, of folklore with its protest against social injustice and its dreams of a better future as the primary source of Utopias. The study of this question, to which A. L. Morton devoted a special chapter in his book The English Utopia,  [28•2  is all the more important as by no means all Utopias have been preserved (particularly 29 those of antiquity and the Middle Ages), so that those which have survived must be examined not in isolation, but in the light of the development level reached in Utopian thought. In this respect the folklore “background” of each epoch is extremely important for a thorough analysis of the work of each Utopian writer. Secondly, the level of development of Utopian thought depends directly on the level of socio– economic and cultural progress of the country in question. The emergence and flourishing of utopism require a definite minimum level in the development of philosophy and also religious conceptions of the future, in close connection (and opposition) with which utopism develops. At the same time, as history shows, the excessively strong development of religious conceptions of the future under militant clericalism results in Utopias being stifled by eschatology, and social convulsions of great force are required to force religion to weaken its ideological grip and open up the way for utopism.

p Utopism first flourished in the second half of the first millennium B.C. in the antique world and China, where the level of philosophical thought was extremely high and religion did not oppress it as strongly as in Egypt, Persia and India. The social Utopias of Plato, Zeno, Euhemerus, Jambulus, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mo Ti and other Utopian thinkers of the ancient world have long since been accepted in historical literature as specimens of the great accomplishments of Utopian thought. Recent studies have revealed more fully the importance of the Utopias of Ancient Rome in the first century B.C. and the Taoist utopia in China during the 2nd and 3rd centuries A. D.  [29•1 

p Utopism in the ancient world is seen to possess the following characteristics.

p Contrary to the assertions of R. Pelman and other supporters of the modern trend in bourgeois historiography, there were no Utopias of a bourgeois character and certainly 30 none of a socialist nature in existence during this period. All the Utopias either idealised primitive society (Lao Tzu, Euhemerus, Jambulus), or “rationalised” slave-owning society (Plato) and feudal society (certain late Chinese Utopias of this period). This “rationalisation” of slave-owning and feudal societies was conceived as the return in this or that respect to the old order, in the spirit of an idealised tribal system (retaining slave-owning or feudal relations). This is understandable, because the Utopias of the ancient world reflected the ideological struggle taking place in the disintegration of primitive society and the establishment of class society. Protest against social oppression, on the one hand, and attempts to extinguish the fire of the class struggle that had broken out, on the other—all this produced pictures of an idealised past as a desirable future.  [30•1 

p However, even within the period in question, the level of development of utopism did not remain the same. V. P. Volgin points out the substantial difference between Utopias of the Hellenist period (from the 3rd century B.C.) and those of the preceding period. Comparing the Utopias of Plato and Euhemerus or Jambulus, he writes, we see, in particular, a shift of thought from the organisation of consumption to the organisation of production.  [30•2  This important process in the development of utopism in the ancient world requires’ special examination.

p Finally, the direct connection of the Utopias of the ancient world with the socio-political struggle of that epoch is most evident. Important social reforms, such as those of Lycurgus, Clisthenes, Solon, Agis, Cleomenes and Brothers Gracchus, encouraged the development of utopism, dealing severe blows to presentism and Providentialism, and showing that the existing order could be changed, not by superhuman forces, but by people themselves. It is significant that many of the utopists (including Plato) tried to put their theories into practice. Together with religious ideology, the ideology of utopism helped to inspire a number of popular uprisings, beginning with that of Aristonicus in Pergamum 31 (2nd century B.C.) and ending with the “yellow bands" in China (2nd-3rd centuries A.D.). It is known, for example, that Aristonicus tried to establish on earth the “City of the Sun" which Jambulus described in his utopia.

p The second stage in the evolution of utopism is the period of the Middle Ages. The dominance of religious ideology at this stage brought about a sharp decline in the level of utopist thought. Militant clericalism over a period of almost 1,500 years precluded the appearance of any significant social utopia in Europe (including Russia). All that one can detect during this period are isolated elements of utopism in folklore, and also in religious and secular literature. In the 9th to 12th centuries Utopian thought in the Near and Middle East showed a certain flourishing which is reflected in the works of Al Farabi, Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufail and Nizami.  [31•1  However, the subsequent decline of utopism continued until the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. There was also hardly any progress in utopism up to this time in China, India and other South-East Asian countries.

p The third stage in the evolution of utopism is linked with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, covering the period from the 16th to the first third of the 18th century (roughly from Thomas More’s Utopia to Jean Meslier’s Le Testament and Voltaire’s Lettres Anglaises ou Philosophiques). This period is covered comparatively well in Soviet literature.  [31•2  We shall merely point out that this stage is marked by a strong upsurge of utopism and the appearance of such outstanding Utopian writers as Thomas More, Thomas Miintzer, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, James 32 Harrington, Gerrard Winstanley, Denis Vairasse, Jean Meslier and others. It is interesting to note that Utopias of the slave-owning kind finally disappear, and feudal Utopias are pushed into the background by bourgeois and socialist ones, the latter predominating. Utopism (together with religious conceptions of the future) becomes the ideology of the bourgeois revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries.

p At first glance, it would seem that there is not any substantial change in the level of Utopian thought during this stage. More’s Utopia is in no way inferior to those of Campanella and Vairasse, nor is Mvintzer’s to Winstanley’s, although they are separated by more than a century. However, this largely correct impression is somewhat one-sided: a more profound analysis shows how utopism gradually gained strength, freeing itself from the grip of eschatology and adapting itself better to the needs of revolutionary struggle (in the case of Winstanley, for example). A direct result of the development of science and technology was the utopia of Francis Bacon, inconceivable earlier, which posed the problem of the connection between social, scientific and technological progress. All this had a considerable influence on subsequent stages in the evolution of utopism.

p The fourth stage covers the remaining two-thirds of the 18th century (roughly speaking, from Meslier to Babeuf).. It differs from the preceding one basically in the following respects. First of all, one observes a sharp break with religion and its eschatology, which is seen already in Meslier who stands, as it were, on the dividing line between the two stages. Secondly, one finds the use of fine achievements in philosophic thought by the founders of modern West European philosophy (Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, etc.), whose ideas do not appear in the works of Utopian writers until this stage. To the aid of utopism came the ideology of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Holbach, Helvetius, Diderot, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Jefferson, Franklin, Novikov, Radishchev and others), which began to influence Utopian thought even at this stage. Utopias began to assume the more precise character of concrete programmes of political struggle. This applies not only to the Utopias of Morelli and Mably, but particularly to those of the French Revolution, above all to Babeuf. Even Rousseau’s communal type of utopia in 33 concrete socio-political conditions objectively assumes the character of a petty-bourgeois, egalitarian utopia, becoming one of the ideological banners of the revolutionary forces.

p Feudal Utopias reappear at this stage, which reflects the ideology of the feudal reaction. But bourgeois and particularly socialist Utopias remain overwhelmingly predominant.

p Finally, the fifth stage covers approximately the first half of the 19th century (from Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen to Blanc, Cabet, Dezarny and Weitling, inclusively Herzen and Chernyshevsky in Russia). Like the preceding one, it has been fairly closely examined in Marxist literature  [33•1 . We shall, therefore, again confine ourselves to its main distinctive features. These, to our mind, are the following: attempts at a critical reappraisal of the French Revolution, in the course of which the untenability of utopism became particularly obvious; attempts to link utopism with the incipient movement of the working class (hence the different types of “socialism”, the feudal, petty-bourgeois, German, or “true”, bourgeois and critical-Utopian socialism, mentioned in the Manifesto of the Communist Party); and attempts to use not only the ideology of the Enlightenment, but also classical philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), and classical bourgeois political economy (Smith, Ricardo, Sismondi and others)—attempts which, like the preceding ones, were unsuccessful until the emergence of Marxism.

p All this raised the level of Utopian thought considerably. One observes attempts to discover the logic of the further development of society (Saint-Simon), to advance from “ideal”, once and for all given pictures of a future society to an original, by no means Chiliastic “history of the future" (Fourier), attempts to link the conceptions of social, scientific and technological progress more deeply than Francis Bacon had done earlier (Saint-Simon, Cabet).

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p As a result, Utopian thought at this stage of its development exhausted itself, as it were, and faced a crisis. The question of genuine scientific forecasting came to the foreground. Some elements of this forecasting can be found in the works of the great Utopians of the West and especially in the works of Herzen and Ghernyshevsky.

p The role of philosophical conceptions of the historical process in the development of ideas on the future. We have made a separate examination of religious and Utopian conceptions of the future only for ease of analysis in this chapter.

p In fact, however, they both developed not only in close connection with each other, but equally closely linked with philosophical conceptions of the historical process, the latter serving simultaneously as both the theoretical basis and synthesising generalisation of the other two. The history of the philosophy of history (in the broadest sense—from ancient times to the present day) is a subject of special study of vast complexity. This sphere of the history of development of social thought has been examined far more intensively in Marxist literature than the history of religious thought and social Utopias (not falling within Utopian socialism),  [34•1  although there are still no special Marxist works dealing with the problem as a whole. Here we shall touch only upon the main trends in the development of. conceptions of the historical process and only to the extent to which they have influenced ideas about the future, only as a third connecting component of these views, so to say.

p Views of history as a process subject to certain definite laws can be found in embryonic form even in the social thought of the Ancient Orient. By the middle of the first millennium B.C. these ideas had already assumed the character of philosophical systems, and over the following centuries there grew up (originally in a primitive form, naturally) all three conceptions of the historical process which still exist to this day: the conception of the degradation of mankind from some sort of the “Golden Age" in ancient times to the decline and approaching collapse of human culture; the conception of the cyclic development of 35 the historical process—the endless rises and falls of human culture in an endless rotation of one and the same stages of development; and finally, the conception of progressive development from the lower to the higher, the latter, it is true, in a most primitive, embryonic form, which is generally seen as the ascendant stage in the development of the given cycle.

p The view of present events as a stage in the eternal evolution of the world in the past, present and future is found in early Indian, early Chinese and early Greek philosophy of the middle of the first millennium B.C. It appears in the teaching of the philosophical schools of the Charvakas and particularly the Sankhya in India (7th century B.C.), and in the teaching of Lao Tzu, Confucius, Plato and Aristotle. As far back as c. 800 B.C. in Greece Hesiod expounded in mythological form the conception of regression from the “Golden Age”. Plato and Aristotle, Mencius (372–289) and Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145–86) developed the conception of cycles, trying to discover the laws behind the origin of each cycle and to find the factors determining this process ( geographical, economic, and juridical), here, on earth, regardless of the “will of the Gods".  [35•1  From the conception of the “Golden Age" there emerged the theory of the natural state which served as a new stimulus for utopism.  [35•2  This conception, developed by the philosophical school of the Cynics and later the Stoics, was opposed by the schools of the Sophists, and subsequently of Democritus and Epicurus, which proclaimed the idea of social progress.  [35•3  Both the Stoics and Epicureans came up against the problem of determinism in the historical process, and the latter developed the theory of the social contract which, in itself, was an encroachment upon the then prevalent idea of Providentialism.  [35•4 

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p The conception of cycles was developed in such detail in the works of Polybius (3rd-2nd centuries B.C.) that some Western historians of sociology regard all subsequent theories of this kind right up to Gumplowucz, Pareto, Spengler, Pitirim Sorokin and Toynbee as nothing but a rehash of his views. In Roman philosophy the conception of the “Golden Age”, which continued to occupy a dominant position (Seneca, Cicero, Virgil, Tibullus and Ovid), was strongly challenged by the idea of social progress developed by Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura. Lucretius tried not only to draw up a complete picture of the historical process as the development from the lower to the higher, but also to find out that people’s needs, their experience and culture are the motive forces of progress.  [36•1 

p The philosophical views of Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius represented a great advance in the development of antique thought. It was no accident that the conceptions of regress and cycles dominated antique thought: the former proceeded from observing the painful process of the disintegration of the tribal system and the fierce social struggle accompanying the establishment of a class society; the latter was determined by the very slow pace of historical progress in the ancient world, for the complex zigzags of social development were naturally perceived as endlessly recurring cycles. An extremely high level of philosophical thought was needed in order to distinguish the line of progress behind the complex peripeteia of history.

p The militant clericalism of the Middle Ages stifled for a long time all conceptions of historical development except that of regress—regress by virtue of man’s “Fall from Grace" and by Divine predestination, regress which was to culminate in the “end of history" and the transition to the completely different state of the world beyond the grave.  [36•2  Only towards the end of this period does one catch a new glimmering of the idea of progress (technical) in Roger Bacon and a new, more profound treatment of the 37 conceptions of cycles by Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who again tried to solve the problem of historical determinism by studying the influence of geographical and other factors.

p The age of the Renaissance again brought the conceptions of cycles and progress to the fore. The former was developed in the writings of Machiavelli (1469–1527) and particularly Vico (1668–1744), who still refers to Divine providence, but at the same time grasps the idea that by force of objective laws, which exist independently of human will, all peoples without exception pass through definite stages of development, which he saw not as circles, but as spirals.  [37•1  The latter conception gradually gained even more influence, finding eminent supporters in Bodin and Montaigne, Francis Bacon and Descartes, Spinoza and Fontenelle, Leibnitz and Lessing. A fierce dispute broke out among the thinkers in this trend between those who tried to explain progress as before, by Divine providence (Bodin, Leibnitz and Lessing), and those who in effect rejected the idea of Providentialism, seeking the roots of progress in material factors (Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Descartes and Spinoza).

p The clericals (Bossuet and others) sought in vain to defend Providentialism. The Encyclopaedists, particularly Voltaire, dealt them blow upon blow. Voltaire marked the beginning of the development of the philosophy of history in the true sense of the term. The idea of progress broke out the fetters of Providentialism with growing intensity. Turgot, Condorcet, and Godwin explained progress not as Divine providence, but as the perfection of human reason. Turgot sought to prove the inevitability of progress by the influence not only of geographical but also biological and psychological factors. Condorcet referred to scientific and industrial advance, population growth and the development of political institutions. God-win emphasised the unlimited capacities for the development of human reason.  [37•2  Increasingly extensive use was made of the theories of natural condition and historical determinism to support the conception of progress. This conception became one of the most important components of the ideology of the French Revolution. The direct connection between these views and the pictures of 38 a happy future which were painted by the great utopists in the first half of the 19th century is obvious.

p It would, however, be incorrect to depict the development of the philosophy of history in the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century simply as the triumph of the conception of progress over the dogmas of Providentialism. The process was far more complex. Not only did the champions of the idea of progress encounter growing resistance from the theological reaction (Joseph de Maistre, Louis Bonald and others), who challenged the legality of this idea in principle. The main point was that the idealist world outlook of the great philosophers and historians of that period who worked out the conception of progress contained a very curious intertwining of providentialist and anti-providentialist views.

p Thus, Herder looked for objective laws in the development of society, but reduced them simply to geographical factors, accepting the decisive influence of God on the fate of mankind. As a result he saw human development as a process rooted in nature, but sought to reconcile this somehow with the idea of Providentialism. He proclaimed the continuity of progress and at the same time tried to reconcile it with the conception of cyclic development.  [38•1 

p The influence of the religious view on the historicophilosophical conceptions of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel is well known. Kant’s ideas of social progress and the laws of social development are mixed up with ideas of a teleological nature, and the essence of the matter is not changed by the fact that in place of Divine providence we find here a “plan of nature" which is carried out in the course of human history.  [38•2  The historico-philosophical views of Fichte, who tried to reconcile the conception of progress with the most reactionary socio-political principles,  [38•3  were highly contradictory. Schelling’s thesis that man “can and must create his own history himself" exists alongside his other thesis that history is the “revelation of the absolute".  [38•4  39 Engels devoted two special works to an examination of how Schelling’s “seething mind" was threshing about in the “snare of religion".  [39•1  The imprint of eschatology is clearly apparent in the philosophy of history of Hegel, who acknowledged progress in the past, but refused to acknowledge it in the present and future, and who saw world history as “the highest manifestation of the world spirit”, but regarded the Prussian monarchy as the peak of socio-political development.  [39•2 

p In spite of these contradictions, understandable for that period, the importance of the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for the views on the future is enormous. The element of utopism in their works was considerable, as is well known. Kant and Fichte were the authors of detailed Utopias. Nevertheless as utopists these thinkers played a comparatively secondary role in the development of ideas on the future, but as philosophers their role in it is one of primary importance. They made a great contribution to the methodology of analysing the historical process as a lawgoverned and dialectical one (seen, it is true, still from an idealist viewpoint), which played a great role in the emergence of scientific forecasting from the viewpoint of historical materialism. Particularly great in this respect were the services of Hegel, given special mention by Engels.  [39•3 

p Prerequisites for the scientific forecasting of the future. Towards the middle of the 19th century the social Utopias, above all Utopian socialism, reached a stage in their development at which it became possible to turn from Utopian pictures to a scientific study of the prospects for human development. Philosophy (including the philosophy of history) discovered the dialectical laws of the development of nature and society, and substantiated the conception of historical progress (still from an idealist viewpoint). Political economy came very close to discovering the decisive role of economics, social production, in human progress. Apart from this, great discoveries in the natural sciences revealed a completely 40 different picture of creation and historical progress from what had been drawn before. Finally, historical science had by this time succeeded in systematising the basic facts of world history and describing such an important factor in historical progress as class contradictions and class struggle in society.

All this at the given level of economic and cultural development in a period when class contradictions had become very acute and the working-class movement much stronger led to the emergence of the truly scientific dialectico– materialist sociology of Marx and Engels with its logically based theory of historical progress, embracing the economic, social, political, intellectual and moral progress of society.