| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: François-Marie- Charles Fourier |
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| Biography: François Charles Marie Fourier |
The French socialist writer François Charles Marie Fourier (1772-1837) was the prophet of a utopian human society.
Charles Fourier was born at Besançon on April 7, 1772. He studied at the local Jesuit high school, after which his family apprenticed him to various commercial concerns. During the early years of the Revolution, Fourier lived at Lyons, where he fought on the counter-revolutionary side and lost his inheritance in a series of business failures. Drafted in 1794, he was discharged for illness in 1796. He spent the remainder of his life in Lyons and Paris, earning a livelihood at odd jobs, living in cheap rooming houses, preaching his "universal harmony," and waiting for the financier who would subsidize his utopian community, but who never appeared.
Fourier first set forth his ideas in an article entitled "Universal Harmony," published in the Bulletin de Lyon (1803). For the next 34 years he expounded them in a mountain of books, pamphlets, and unpublished manuscripts; including Theory of the Four Movements and General Destinies (1808), Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Association (2 vols., 1822), and False Industry, Divided, Disgusting, and Lying, and Its Antidote (2 vols., 1835-1836). Although these works were written in a bizarre style that often defied comprehension and incorporated many eccentric ideas, they gradually gained Fourier a small coterie of disciples.
Fourier believed he had discovered the laws that govern society just as Isaac Newton had discovered the laws of physical motion. Among people, Fourier thought, the analogy to gravitational attraction was passional attraction, a system of human passions and their interplay. He listed 12 passions in humans, which in turn were combined and divided into 810 characters. The ideal community should be composed of 1,620 persons, called a "phalanx," which would exhibit all the possible kinds of characters. In such a phalanx, if all activities were properly ordered, the passions of the individuals would find fulfillment in activities that would redound to their benefit. Fourier described in detail the ordering of these communities, the members' life routines, the architecture, even the musical notation. Moving from social reform to cosmological speculation, he also described the way in which the creation of such a harmony on earth would create a cosmic harmony.
One Fourierist experiment was attempted in France (without his approval) during his lifetime but quickly failed. Fourierist disciples appeared in time all over Europe and in the United States. Fragments of his ideas were eventually taken up by socialists, anarchists, feminists, pacifists, and educational reformers. Fourier died in Paris on Oct. 10, 1837.
Further Reading
Nicholas Riasanovsky presents a full discussion of Fourier's work in The Teaching of Charles Fourier (1969). Other views of his ideas and their early-19th-century environment are found in J. L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), and Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (1962).
Additional Sources
Beecher, Jonathan, Charles Fourier: the visionary and his world, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
| Political Dictionary: Charles Fourier |
(1772-1837) French social theorist who belongs to the traditions of nineteenth-century utopianism and socialism, and who was a savage critic of bourgeois ‘civilization’ and its values. Fourier's vision of a harmonious future was essentially communitarian, like that of his contemporary Robert Owen. He advocated social experiments on the scale of between 1,500 and 1,800 people who would live in a ‘Phalanx’ organized to make labour both productive and attractive to workers (for example, through frequent changes of occupation and routine), and whose basic physical, mental, and even emotional needs would be met through processes of mutual support and democratic self-government. Women would achieve true equality with men, and a sexual revolution would liberate both men and women from the oppressiveness of the traditional family structure. A Fourierist movement enjoyed some success in both France and the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, and even Marx and Engels, while dismissing Fourier as a utopian (i.e. non-scientific) socialist, expressed admiration for his originality, and made use of many of his ideas, in particular his theory of attractive labour.
— Keith Taylor
| Architecture and Landscaping: François-Marie-Charles Fourier |
| French Literature Companion: Charles Fourier |
Fourier, Charles (1772-1837). Born in Lyon of a rich family which lost its wealth during the Revolution, Fourier was an eccentric Utopian socialist whose peculiar style, sharp criticisms of the horrors of civilization, and exultation of desire and complexity, continue to excite interest. Applying Newton to the social world, he proposed that in a harmoniously organized society attractions would be proportionate to destinies and the 13 passions would all be satisfied—those of the five senses, of honour, friendship, love and parenthood, of concordance, of intrigue, and the ‘butterfly’ passion for variety (in work or sex), plus unityism (the opposite of egotism). Such harmony could only be realized by organizing society into phalansteries of around 1, 620 members each, where equality would not be practised but where a complex system of shifting hierarchies, occupations, and relations would be created, all of which Fourier described in great detail. Providing a synthesis of Rousseau and Sade, he offered many telling illustrations (Nero would have made an excellent butcher) and many wild fantasies (the ocean would become as lemonade). His wry humour is sometimes hard to evaluate. He worked out his proposal in great detail, including minute descriptions of the architecture and the daily rhythm of life in the new world of harmony.
His pioneering attention to the problems of motivation in education and work, to what was to become vocational testing, astound, as do his pre-Freudian insights into the mechanisms of the passions (the limits placed on their expression by ‘civilization’ produce perversions); he was a profoundly original thinker. The full sexual amplifications of his theories were only revealed with the publication of his Nouveau Monde amoureux (1967). La Théorie des quatre mouvements (1808) is the first exposition of his system, which hardly varied thereafter. Le Nouveau Monde industriel (1829) is his most clear and concise work but leaves out his cosmogony (the planets copulate). Categorizing endlessly, ceaselessly indulging in neologisms, Fourier's tone is also quite idiosyncratic, with unexpected shifts from the serious to a comic which is at times wry, at times hilarious. He had many followers, in France, England, and elsewhere. In the United States, at Brook Farm, Arthur Brisbane tried to put his principles into practice. Other attempts to found phalansteries were equally abortive, except for the much-modified ‘familistère’ at Guise which survived into the 20th c. He was much appreciated by the Surrealists and again during May 1968; Barthes wrote about him in Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971).
[Frank Paul Bowman]
Bibliography
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Charles Fourier |
Bibliography
See studies by N. V. Riasanovsky (1969), D. Zeldin (1969), and J. F. Beecher (1987).
| Wikipedia: Charles Fourier |
François Marie Charles Fourier (7 April 1772 – 10 October 1837) was a French utopian socialist and philosopher. Fourier is credited by modern scholars with having originated the word féminisme in 1837;[1] as early as 1808, he had argued, in the Theory of the Four Movements, that the extension of the liberty of women was the general principle of all social progress, though he disdained any attachment to a discourse of 'equal rights'. Fourier inspired the founding of the communist community called La Reunion near present-day Dallas, Texas as well as several other communities within the United States of America, such as the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and Community Place and five others in New York State.
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Fourier was born in Besançon on April 7, 1772.[2] Born a son of a small businessman, Fourier was more interested in architecture than he was in his father's trade.[2] In fact, he wanted to become an engineer, but since the local Military Engineering School only accepted sons of noblemen, he was automatically ineligible for it.[2] Fourier later was grateful that he did not pursue engineering, for he stated that it would have consumed too much of his time and taken away from his true desire to help humanity.[3] In July 1781 after his father’s death, Fourier received two-fifths of his father’s estate, valued at more than 200,000 francs.[4] This sudden wealth enabled Fourier the freedom to travel throughout Europe at his leisure. In 1791 he moved from Besançon to Lyon, where he was employed by the merchant M. Bousqnet.[5] Fourier's travels also brought him to Paris where he worked as the head of the Office of Statistics for a few months..[2] Fourier was not satisfied with making journeys on behalf of others for their commercial benefit.[6] Having a desire to seek knowledge in everything he could, Fourier often would change business firms as well as residences in order to explore and experience new things. From 1791 to 1816 Fourier was employed in the cities of Paris, Rouen, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux.[7] As a traveling salesman and correspondence clerk, his research and thought was time-limited: he complained of "serving the knavery of merchants" and the stupefaction of "deceitful and degrading duties". A modest legacy set him up as a writer. He had three main sources for his thought: people he had met as a traveling salesman, newspapers, and introspection. His first book was published in 1808.
In April 1834, Fourier moved into a Paris apartment where he later died in October 1837.[8]
On October 11, 1837 at three o’clock in the afternoon, Fourier’s funeral procession began from his home to the church of the Petits-Peres.[9] The ceremony was attended by over four hundred people from all trades and backgrounds.[9]
Fourier declared that concern and cooperation were the secrets of social success. He believed that a society that cooperated would see an immense improvement in their productivity levels. Workers would be recompensed for their labors according to their contribution. Fourier saw such cooperation occurring in communities he called "phalanxes," based around structures called Phalanstères or "grand hotels." These buildings were four level apartment complexes where the richest had the uppermost apartments and the poorest enjoyed a ground floor residence. Wealth was determined by one's job; jobs were assigned based on the interests and desires of the individual. There were incentives: jobs people might not enjoy doing would receive higher pay. Fourier considered trade, which he associated with Jews, to be the "source of all evil" and advocated that Jews be forced to perform farm work in the phalansteries.[10]
Fourier characterized poverty (not inequality) as the principal cause of disorder in society, and he proposed to eradicate it by sufficiently high wages and by a "decent minimum" for those who were not able to work.[11]
He believed that there were twelve common passions which resulted in 810 types of character, so the ideal phalanx would have exactly 1620 people. One day there would be six million of these, loosely ruled by a world "omniarch", or (later) a World Congress of Phalanxes. He had a touching concern for the sexually rejected–jilted suitors would be led away by a corps of "fairies" who would soon cure them of their lovesickness, and visitors could consult the card-index of personality types for suitable partners for casual sex. He also defended homosexuality as a personal preference for some people.
Fourier was also a supporter of women's rights in a time period where influences like Jean-Jacques Rousseau were prevalent. Fourier believed that all important jobs should be open to women on the basis of skill and aptitude rather than closed on account of gender. He spoke of women as individuals, not as half the human couple. Fourier saw that “traditional” marriage could potentially hurt woman's rights as human beings and thus never married.[12]
Fourier's concern was to liberate every human individual, man, woman, and child, in two senses: Education and the liberation of human passion.[13]
On Education, Fourier felt that "civilized" parents and teachers saw children as little idlers.[14] Fourier felt that this way of thinking was wrong. He felt that children as early as age two and three were very industrious. He listed the dominant tastes in all children to include, but not limited to:
Fourier was deeply disturbed by the disorder of his time and wanted to stabilize the course of events which surrounded him. Fourier saw his fellow human beings living in a world full of strife, chaos, and disorder.[15]
Fourier is best remembered for his writings on a new world order based on unity of action and harmonious collaboration.[2] He is also known for certain Utopian pronouncements, such as that the seas would lose their salinity and turn to lemonade, and in a prescient view of climate change, that the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean in a future phase of Perfect Harmony.[14]
The influence of Fourier's ideas in French politics was carried forward into the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune by followers such as Victor Considérant.
Numerous references to Fourierism appear in Dostoevsky's political novel The Possessed first published in 1872. In it Fourierism is used by the revolutionary faithful as something of an insult to their brethren and those within the circle are quick to defend themselves from being labeled a Fourierist. Whether this is because it is a foreign ideology or because they believe it to be archaic is never made entirely clear.
Fourier's ideas also took root in America, with his followers starting phalanxes throughout the country, including one of the most famous, Utopia, Ohio.
Kent Bromley, in his preface to Peter Kropotkin's book The Conquest of Bread, considered Fourier to be the founder of the libertarian branch of socialist thought, as opposed to the authoritarian socialist ideas of Babeuf and Buonarotti.[16]
In the mid-20th century, Fourier's influence began to rise again among writers reappraising socialist ideas outside the Marxist mainstream. After the Surrealists had broken with the French Communist Party, André Breton returned to Fourier, writing Ode à Charles Fourier in 1947.
Walter Benjamin considered Fourier crucial enough to devote an entire "konvolut" of his massive, projected book on the Paris arcades, the Passagenwerk, to Fourier's thought and influence. He writes: "To have instituted play as the canon of a labor no longer rooted in exploitation is one of the great merits of Fourier," and notes that "Only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only under its sun, can one conceive of Fourier's fantasy materialized."
In 1969, the Situationists quoted and adapted Fourier's Avis aux civilisés relativement à la prochaine métamorphose sociale in their text Avis aux civilisés relativement à l'autogestion généralisée.
Fourier's work has significantly influenced the writings of Gustav Wyneken, Guy Davenport (in his work of fiction Apples and Pears), Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Paul Goodman.
In Whit Stillman's film Metropolitan, idealist Tom describes himself as a Fourierist, and debates the success of social experiment Brook Farm with another of the characters.
David Harvey, in the appendix to his book Spaces of Hope, offers a personal utopian vision of the future much like Fourier's ideas.
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