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 For the next 34 years he expounded them in a mountain of books, pamphlets, and unpublished manuscripts; including Theory of the Four Movements and General Destinies (1808), Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Association (2 vols., 1822), and False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.

(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

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(1772–1837)

See company town.

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

• M. Spencer, Charles Fourier (1981)
• J. Beecher, Charles Fourier, the Visionary and his World (1986)

(shärl fūryā') , 1772–1837, French social philosopher. From a bourgeois family, he condemned existing institutions and evolved a kind of utopian socialism. In Théorie des quatre mouvements (1808) and later works he developed his idea that the natural passions of man would, if properly channeled, result in social harmony. To achieve this goal, many of the artificial restraints of civilization were to be destroyed. The social organization for such development was to be based on the “phalanx,” an economic unit composed of 1,620 people. Members would live in the phalanstère (or phalanstery), a community building, and work would be divided among people according to their natural inclinations. Fourier was not ready to discard capitalism completely; basically his ideal was an agricultural society, systematically arranged. His writings anticipated the 20th-century social problems resulting from mechanization and industrialization. Fourierism obtained a number of converts in France, and several newspapers spread the doctrines, but followers failed to establish any lasting colony there. After Fourier's death his principal disciple, Victor Prosper Considérant, tried to found a colony in Texas. Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley were the principal figures in the sudden and wide development of colonies in the United States. Brook Farm was for a time Fourierist. The most successful of the communities was the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, N.J.

Bibliography

See studies by N. V. Riasanovsky (1969), D. Zeldin (1969), and J. F. Beecher (1987).

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