Utopianism and Social Planning in the Thought of Kagawa Toyohiko
1970; Sophia University; Volume: 25; Issue: 3/4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2383545
ISSN1880-1390
Autores Tópico(s)Japanese History and Culture
ResumoS INCE the formulation of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels in I848, European Socialism has been uncomfortably divided into two contending factions, one pejoratively labeled 'utopian', the other more hopefully designated as 'scientific'.1 Mustering all the conviction and certainty the doctrines of nineteenth-century positivism could lend his cause, Marx rather arbitrarily classified the progeny of Fourier, Proudhon, and the Saint-Simonians as romantic dreamers and haughtily dismissed their schemes for communitarian reforms as wholly inconsonant with the structure of that Socialist state abuilding through the ordered workings of the historical dialectic.2 Even today the dispassionate analyst of left-wing social movements finds it difficult to deny the strong element of fantasy and wish fulfilment ineradicably woven into the fabric of Western utopian thought. Yet, side by side with the desire for release from the cares of the mundane world, and the undeniable emotional quality of the reaction to the machine which characterized early nineteenth-century utopian socialist thought, from the first futuristic spatializations of More and Bacon through the technocratic projections of Voltaire and Saint-Simon a suppressed penchant for social planning has interfused the writings of such heralds of a brave, new age. Perhaps, indeed, the expression of a displaced eschatological imagination, this utopian bent for social engineering eventually bore fruit in the cooperative experiments of Robert Owen, the social schemes of William Morris, the prophetic plans for reform of such Christian Socialists as Charles Kingsley and F. D. Maurice, eventually achieving its culmination at the turn of the twentieth century in the more structured blueprintings of the British Fabians and their prodigies, the Anglo-Guild Socialists. While the early writings of the Anglo-Guildsmen exhibit that romanticization of preindustrial communal institutions and commiseration over the disappearance of medieval forms which would justly earn them the 'utopian' label,3 by the eve of World
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