ABSTRACT
Much of the intellectual ground for the permanent core of radicalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was formed in the eighteenth century as the result of some significant changes in the contemplation of the Golden Age. Almost universally, radicals in the nineteenth century embraced the new technology, industrialism, commerce, trade, and the city as harbingers of the future. One striking element of the present repudiated almost uniformly by the radicals insofar as the future was concerned was the political state. The chapter discusses a few brief examples of the different ways the future as Golden Age could serve present aspirations among radical minds and movements in the nineteenth century. It deals with Saint-Simon, who is probably the first to sanctify industrialism, to see it as the natural and necessary emergent of the evolutionary past, and to endow it with millennial intensity.
