Voyage en Icarie

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an edition from Paris 1848
Etienne Cabet

Voyage en Icarie ( French ; Travels in Icaria ) is a communist political novel from the 19th century in the form of a travelogue , the first in 1840 in Paris was released.

Its author is from Dijon Dating Étienne Cabet (1788-1856). Cabet went into exile in England for political reasons, where he met the social visionary Robert Owen . Under his influence, the lawyer and journalist began to write his novel. In Greek mythology, Icaria is the land where Icarus flew on the 'wings of longing'.

In the ideal community of Icaria, private property and monetary transactions are abolished, there are no longer any class differences . In this regard, the work is reminiscent of the Utopia of Thomas More (approx. 1478–1535), which the Iicarian philosopher explicitly refers to in his book Cabets in his argument for community of property . The economic constitution is strictly communist, there is only one owner: the republican state. The latter owns everything on and under the ground. The republic appears in the form of state committees as a super-entrepreneur who legally plans and regulates the entire sphere of production, distribution and consumption. The economic competence of the state ranges from the employment of workers to the choice of industrial sites and the promotion of technological modernization to the distribution of goods.

His typographically specially designed subtitle sums up Cabet's entire political, economic and socially utopian program in short slogans. In the form of a novel, Voyage en Icarie is in truth a treatise on morality, philosophy, social and political economy, the fruit of long work, immense research and constant reflection.

Cabet went to the United States with a group of followers in 1848 , where he established a communist colony based on the ideas developed in the work . The utopia with its ideal communist society became a source of inspiration for a large number of people. Various attempts at a community based on the Ikari pattern ultimately failed.

See also

literature

Editions and translations

  • Voyage en Icarie by Étienne Cabet au bureau du "Populaire" (Paris) 2e éd 1845. Digitized at Gallica
  • Etienne Cabet: Journey to Icaria . With materials for understanding Cabet compiled by Alexander Brandenburg and Ahlrich Meyer , translated by Dr. Wendel-Hipper (a pseudonym for Hermann Ewerbeck ). The volume contains a reprint of the Paris edition, Bureau du Populaire, 1848. Kramer (Library of Utopias), Berlin 1979. ISBN 3-87956-114-1
  • Trip to Icaria , trans. von Wendell-Hippler [ie Karl Gustav Allhusen], Paris, Im Bureau des Popular [recte Leipzig, Twietmeyer], 1847 ( Google Books )
  • Trip to Icaria. Magdeburg: no year (1893), published by Bernhard Harbaum
  • Trip to Icaria: selection . Documents of Humanity 20. - Munich a. a., 1919

Secondary literature

  • Shalom Wurm: Life in the Historic Communes. Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1977, ISBN 3-7663-0004-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Only a little later his Credo communiste ( The Communist Confession of Faith ) appeared digitized by Étienne Cabet (Paris 1841; published in German in 1842 and again in 1847).
  2. ↑ See the German translation of " Wendell-Hippler ", p. 448.
  3. ↑ See digitized version .
  4. ↑ Heinrich Lux suspects the Gdansk communist Hermann Everbeck to be the translator. See Heinrich Lux: Etienne Cabet and der Ikarian Communism , Stuttgart 1894, p. 289 digitized