The Rise and Fall of the Proletarian Utopias

Extract

Proudhon once remarked—and Cortéz eagerly took up the idea—that in the Western world all great intellectual and moral issues derive, fundamentally, from theological sources. In the past, and even today, Western thought has received and is receiving a tremendous impetus from the secularization of religious and theological doctrines. The Christian doctrines of salvation, of the kingdom of God, of the visio beatifica in a Paradise of happiness and perfect concord, have always led men not only to envision but even to plan an earthly millenium. With the rise of anthropocentric humanism the theological bases of these conceptions were swept away. Man and his powers superseded them. Man, endowed with reason, freedom and a desire for happiness, was made the focal point of history and of nature.