As regards Fourier, all that Herr Dühring knows or takes into account is his fantasies of the future, painted in romantic detail. This of course "is far more important" for establishing Herr Dühring's infinite superiority over Fourier than an examination of how the latter "attempts occasionally to criticise actual conditions" {282}. Occasionally! In fact, almost every page of his works scintillates with sparkling satire and criticism aimed at the wretchedness of our vaunted civilisation. It is like saying that Herr Dühring only "occasionally" declares Herr Dühring to be the greatest thinker of all time. And as for the twelve pages devoted to Robert Owen, Herr Dühring has absolutely no other source for them than the miserable biography of the philistine Sargant, who also did not know Owen's most important works -- on marriage and the communist system.
Herr Dühring can therefore go the length of boldly asserting that we should not "assume any clear-cut communism" {301} in Owen. Had Herr Dühring ever even fingered Owen's Book of the New Moral World , he would most assuredly have found clearly expressed in it not only the most clear-cut communism possible, with equal obligation to labour and equal rights in the product -- equal according to age, as Owen always adds -- but also the most comprehensive building project of the future communist community, with its groundplan, front and side and bird's-eye views. But if one limits one's "first-hand study of the writings of the representatives of socialist idea-complexes" {XIII} to a knowledge of the title and at most the motto {294} of a small number of these works, like Herr Dühring, the only thing left to do is make such a stupid and purely fantastic assertion. Owen did not only preach "clear-cut communism" {301};for five years (at the end of the thirties and beginning of the forties)he put it into practice in the Harmony Hall Colony [113] in Hampshire, the clear-cut quality of whose communism left nothing to be desired. I myself was acquainted with several former members of this communist model experiment. But Sargant knew absolutely nothing of all this, or of any of Owen's activities between 1836 and 1850, and consequently Herr Dühring's "more profound historical work" {XIII} is also left in pitch-black ignorance. Herr Dühring calls Owen "in every respect a veritable monster of importunate philanthropy" {261}. But when this same Herr Dühring starts to give us information about the contents of books whose title and motto he hardly knows, we must not on any account say that he is "in every respect a veritable monster of importunate ignorance", for on our lips this would certainly be "abuse".
The utopians, we saw, were utopians because they could be nothing else at a time when capitalist production was as yet so little developed.
They necessarily had to construct the elements of a new society out of their own heads, because within the old society the elements of the new were not as yet generally apparent; for the basic plan of the new edifice they could only appeal to reason, just because they could not as yet appeal to contemporary history. But when now, almost eighty years after their time, Herr Dühring steps on to the stage and puts forward his claim to an "authoritative" {1} system of a new social order -- not evolved out of the historically developed material at his disposal, as its necessary result -- oh, no! -- but constructed in his sovereign head, in his mind, pregnant with ultimate truths -- then he, who scents epigones everywhere, is himself nothing but the epigone of the utopians, the latest utopian.
He calls the great utopians "social alchemists" {237}. That may be so.
Alchemy was necessary in its epoch. But since that time modern industry has developed the contradictions lying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable; that the new productive forces themselves can only be maintained and further developed by the introduction of a new mode of production corresponding to their present stage of development;that the struggle between the two classes engendered by the hitherto existing mode of production and constantly reproduced in ever sharper antagonism has affected all civilised countries and is daily becoming more violent;and that these historical interconnections the conditions of the social transformation which they make necessary, and the basic features of this transformation likewise determined by them, have also already been apprehended.
And if Herr Dühring now manufactures a new utopian social order out of his sovereign brain instead of from the economic material available, he is not practicing mere "social alchemy". He is acting rather like a person who, after the discovery and establishment of the laws of modern chemistry, attempts to restore the old alchemy and to use atomic weights, molecular formulas, the quantivalence of atoms, crystallography and spectral analysis for the sole purpose of discovering -- the philosopher's stone.
II.
