An Essay On Political Myths

When, under the tutelage of the "Fathers" Enfantin and Saint-Amand Bazard, the disciples of Saint-Simon were initiated into the exemplary "proletarian" life, they were re-enacting the ways of the first Christians. Styling themselves as "apostles," by way of justifying their doctrines, they invoked the authority of myth. The "City of God" referred to in their vows was no Utopian invention, but the "New Jerusalem," the recreation of the original city; the New Book summarizing the ideology of a radical renovatio, was the sacred text of a New Christianity. To the avowed Saint-Simonians, the Golden Age was not the source of some irrepressible nostalgia, but rather the promise of a social perfection that must be realized upon Earth in the more or less immediate future. The pilgrims of Ménilmontant were not unfamiliar with the myth of the Three Ages : did not one of them translate into French Lessing's "incendiary" essay on The Education of the Human Race? (Even while that new interpretation of millennial prophecy by the Calabrian abbot was, through Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, infiltrating into libertarian socialism and Marxism

Art · Literature · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Law