FOURIER, CHARLES

FOURIER, CHARLES (1772–1837), French social theorist.

Charles Fourier can best be described as the nineteenth century's complete utopian. A social critic who advocated "absolute deviation" from existing philosophies and institutions, he surpassed Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in the intransigence of his rejection of his own society. A psychologist who celebrated the passions as agents of human happiness, he carried to its ultimate conclusion the utopian denial of original sin. A social prophet who designed work schedules, dinner menus, and nursery furniture for his utopia, he was obsessively concerned with giving precise definition to his conception of the good society.

Central to Fourier's thinking was the belief that in a rightly ordered world there would be no disparity between our desires and our ability to satisfy them. All basic human drives were meant to be expressed, he argued, and most social ills were the result of instinctual repression. Fourier's utopia was an attempt to spell out precisely the kind of society that would have to exist to make possible the economic, social, psychic, and sexual liberation of humanity.

The key institution in Fourier's utopia was the Phalanx, a community of 1,620 men and women of varied tastes, inclinations, ages, and social backgrounds. Within this community, work and play would be organized in small groups (and "series" of groups); children would be raised collectively; and all activities would be organized according to the "dictates" of the passions, those innate drives that Fourier regarded as the basic forces in the social universe.

Fourier was an autodidact who spent much of his life working as a traveling salesman and clerk for silk merchants in the city of Lyon. His utopian ideas first took shape in the 1790s as part of a larger "theory of the destinies" that he began to formulate in the hope of filling the intellectual and moral vacuum created by the French Revolution. His first book, the Théorie des quatre mouvements (1808) was ignored, and a second book, the Traité de l'association domestique-agricole (1822) was ridiculed in the Paris press. Still, in 1816 Fourier acquired a disciple, a functionary at the Besançon prefecture named Just Muiron.

With Muiron's encouragement and financial assistance Fourier moved to Paris in 1822, and he spent the rest of his life seeking the support of a wealthy patron who would subsidize the creation of an experimental community or "trial Phalanx," which would demonstrate to the world at large the merit of his theory. The patron never appeared, but by 1832 Fourier did manage to attract a group of disciples committed to spreading his ideas and applying them in a model community.

After Fourier's death in 1837 the leadership of the Fourierist movement was assumed by Victor Considerant (1808–1893), who popularized Fourier's theory and established a daily newspaper. Considerant's great accomplishment was to create an audience for Fourier's ideas and to bring them within the orbit of the existing socialist movement. In the process, however, Considerant and his colleagues transformed Fourier's doctrine, weeding out the "extravagant" sexual and cosmological speculations and shifting the emphasis from instinctual liberation to the organization of work.

Only one practical application of Fourier's ideas had much success in France. This was the Familistére or stove factory created by Jean-Baptiste Godin (1817–1888) at Guise, which survived into the twentieth century. In America, however, some twenty-five Fourierist phalanxes were established in the 1840s and a few more later. The most famous, Brook Farm, attracted numerous writers and intellectuals, one of whom, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), left a wry portrait of the community in his Blithedale Romance.

fourier's legacy

For more than a hundred years after Fourier's death, scholars focused on the question of his socialism. Was he a socialist, they asked, given the fact that he called for the payment of interest on invested capital and the retention of some forms of private property? And what was the relation of his thought to the "scientific socialism" of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)? More recently attention has been given to Fourier's psychological writings and notably his analysis of love and repression. He has been seen as a precursor not of Marx but of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)—or at least of the radical Freud recovered in the 1950s and 1960s by Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown.

Fourier has also rightly been seen as an early male feminist. His writings include vigorous pleas for the emancipation of women, and his insistence that "the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress" became a battle cry of early radical feminism.

Although Fourier was long viewed primarily as a "precursor," his reflections on attractive labor, female emancipation, and instinctual liberation are now recognized as original contributions to social theory in their own right; and he is seen as a thinker who probed deeply and imaginatively into the problem of the relationship between the human instincts and human society.

See alsoCommunism; Owen, Robert; Socialism; Utopian Socialism.

bibliography

Beecher, Jonathan. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley, Calif., 1986.

Beecher, Jonathan, and Richard Bienvenu, eds. and trans. The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Boston, 1971.

Fourier, Charles. The Theory of the Four Movements. Edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.

Guarneri, Carl J. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.

Jonathan Beecher