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Date:
Fri Mar 31 17:18:46 2006
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[log in to unmask] (Humberto Barreto)
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American National Biography Online  
 
Fourier, Charles (7 Apr. 1772-10 Oct. 1837), utopian social  
theorist, was born Charles Fourrier in Besancon, Franche-Comte,  
France, the son of Charles Fourrier, a wealthy cloth merchant,  
and Marie Muguet. He received a solid classical but otherwise  
indifferent education at the Jesuit College de Besancon (1781-1787)  
and therefore was essentially an autodidact. It was expected  
that as the sole surviving son he would succeed his father as  
head of the family firm, and he began his apprenticeship in the  
cloth trade at age six. In temperament and sensibilities, however,  
he was unsuited to commercial life; he found its necessary chicanery  
morally repugnant. Nevertheless, with the death of his father  
(1781), and in accordance with the terms of his will, Charles  
was compelled to enter a commercial career by age twenty or forfeit  
a substantial patrimony of 42,932 livres. Since his writings  
remained largely unremarked until 1832, and generated, in any  
case, no reliable source of revenue, Fourier ironically relied  
on what he called "the jailhouse of commerce" for support throughout  
his life. He was by turns a mercantile clerk, a traveling salesman,  
and a courtier marron (unlicensed broker).  
 
Fourier's life was played out on a grand historical stage. The  
events of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, the Bourbon  
Restoration, and the revolution of 1830 affected his personal  
life and fortunes, but seem to have little direct impact on the  
convoluted exposition of his ideas that found expression in his  
writings. He lost heavily in an ill-fated venture as a purveyor  
of colonial goods to Lyon, and he barely escaped execution by  
Jacobin forces when they purged that royalist stronghold in 1793.  
He was caught up in the levee en masse of the republic and served  
in the Army of the Rhine (1794-1796). By 1799, through a series  
of inauspicious investments, virtually all of his inheritance  
had been dissipated.  
 
By 1799 as well, out of the chaos of revolutionary politics  
and the disappointments of his personal experience, Fourier had  
emerged with the fundamental insight that would provide the foundation  
for all of his later work--"the calculus of the mechanism of  
the passions." The calculus was an interactive system of three  
"distributive passions"--the cabalist or intriguing passion,  
the butterfly or alternating passion, and the composite or enthusiastic  
passion--that insured the gratification and equilibration of  
all other human passions, and made possible the formation of  
the "passionate series," which constituted the theoretical foundation  
of Fourier's utopian association, the phalanx.  
 
Fourier had glimpsed a vision of a perfectly calibrated, harmonious  
world, one of "natural or attractive association." In this imagined  
world, the free pursuit of individual happiness and instinctual  
gratification would automatically subserve the commonweal. The  
conflict between work and desire would disappear through the  
social device of natural association within the "passionate"  
or "progressive series"--groups comprised of people with shared  
interests and personal characteristics that would provide both  
order and freedom through a perfectly balanced contrast of sex,  
age, wealth, temperaments, tastes, talents, and education. Fourier  
spent the rest of his life extending his critique of contemporary  
civilization, devising schematic outlines and systematic compendia  
of his ideas in order to reach a wider audience, and seeking  
a wealthy patron who would make it possible to establish a working  
model of his idealized community.  
 
During much of his lifetime, Fourier's works were largely ignored  
or, occasionally, noticed with scorn and incredulity. As he himself  
was acutely aware, his lack of fortune and formal education meant  
that he was disparaged as a provincial philosophe manque. Throughout  
his life he resented his treatment at the hands of the Parisian  
literati, who persistently ignored what they disdainfully termed  
his "inventive genius" and who saw in him only a "near illiterate"  
and a "scientific pariah." Contemporaries were troubled as much,  
however, by style and content as by Fourier's status. They found  
his work obscure (riddled with neologisms), unintelligible, and  
extravagantly fantastic--in his new order human beings would  
evolve to an improved physical state, attaining a height of seven  
feet, developing an archibras (a powerful tail tipped with a  
claw-like hand), and living for 144 years. His ideas of social  
change, especially his celebration of the instincts over reason,  
sexual liberation (he sought the emancipation of sexual expression--explicitly  
championing homosexuals, lesbians, sadomasochists, and fetishists--and  
the full integration of sexuality into collective life), and  
the emancipation of women (he argued that social progress could  
only occur in the context of an equitable treatment of the female  
population), scandalized many of his contemporaries.  
 
It was not until the 1820s that Fourier had any substantial  
following, and then only among the provincial bourgeoisie. A  
schism among the followers of utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon  
in the early 1830s drew adherents to Fourier and led to the establishment  
of the Fourierist movement in France. A journal, the Phalanstere  
(1832-1834), was established, and a model Fourierist community  
(a phalanx)--the Societary Colony--was established in Conde-sur-Vesgre  
(1833-1836). Fourier also had a following in Romania and, through  
the popularization of his ideas by Albert Brisbane (1809-1890),  
the social reformer, Fourierist disciple, and editor of the Phalanx  
(1843-1845), enjoyed the greatest practical trial of the phalanstery  
system in the United States, where some forty-odd phalanxes were  
established between 1843 and 1858.  
 
The popularity of Fourierism in the United States was due chiefly  
to Brisbane's conversion of Horace Greeley, editor of the New  
York Tribune, to the cause. Greeley placed a regular column (entitled  
"Association") in his paper at the disposal of Brisbane for the  
promotion of Fourierism. The Tribune promoted the organization  
of associationists (as early American Fourierists were called)  
through editorials, announcements of meetings, and advertisements  
for publications.  
 
The Fourierist movement grew rapidly in the United States through  
the organization of conventions of associationists. The growth  
of the movement was enhanced by its early advocacy of the abolition  
of slavery--both wage and chattel. But perhaps the greatest attractions  
of Fourierism were its seeming simplicity (as presented by Brisbane),  
its secular organization, and its relative moderation--avoiding  
the kind of socioeconomic organization that led contemporary  
historians of the utopian movement in the United States to describe  
these settlements as "communistic societies."  
 
American phalanxes had an average lifespan of about two years;  
only two--the North American Phalanx (Red Bank, N.J., 1843-1855),  
and the Wisconsin Phalanx (Fond du Lac County, 1844-1850)--lasted  
more than five years. The most important Fourierist journal in  
the country was the Harbinger, published by Brook Farm, which  
functioned as a Fourierist community between 1844 and 1847. Like  
the overwhelming majority of the utopian communities founded  
in the United States in the nineteenth century, most phalanxes  
had collapsed by 1855.  
 
Some selectivity was exercised in admitting members, since most  
American phalanxes required a probationary period of one year  
prior to acceptance to full membership. Life in most phalanxes  
centered around agricultural production, though all attempted  
to foster education and to cultivate the mind as well. Work was  
allotted according to preference, and wages were determined by  
a scale that awarded the highest pay for the most repulsive or  
exhausting jobs.  
 
Though Fourierist communities are often categorized as utopian  
socialist experiments, they were really individualist, joint-stock  
ventures, often closer to anarchistic than communistic in operation.  
The egoistic dissentions and disgruntlement that surrounded the  
dissolution of Brook Farm were illustrative of the unrestrained  
individualism that overwhelmed the communal ideals of the Fourierist  
experiment in America.  
 
As a social thinker, Fourier was a transitional figure, reacting  
to the ultrarationality of the Enlightenment and presaging the  
elevation of the instinctual in the Romantic age. He saw himself  
as the Newton of social law and the human passions, arguing that  
"the law of series is the unique rule of universal movement,  
the key to all the sciences because it balances the physical  
forces and the passionate energy of the soul" (Theorie des quatre  
mouvements et des destinees generales [1808]). In essence, this  
"law" required the division of the labor force into organized  
task groups or series--an office work series, for example--based  
on the "passional attractions" or instinctual preferences of  
the labor force for one or another task. Many modern communal  
societies employ this "law," which today might be better understood  
as a psychological insight, as the basis for their organization  
of collective work.  
 
Aspirations to a universal system aside, however, Fourier can  
perhaps best be understood as a satiric moralist in the tradition  
of Jean de La Fontaine, Bernard de Mandeville, Jonathan Swift,  
Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the marquis de Sade. His  
acute critique of contemporary society and his vision of a better  
world, like theirs, often grew out of a mordant sensibility to  
the foibles and vices of civilization. He divided human history  
into three stages, which he called savagery, barbarism, and civilization.  
The latter did not compare well with the earlier stages, being  
characterized by war, plunder, rapine, and duplicity. The world's  
sickness, he maintained, was graphically represented by 130 species  
of poisonous snakes, an "exact replica" of the "130 effects of  
calumny and perfidy" that comprised these "deceitful societies"  
(Le Nouveau monde industriel et societaire).  
 
While Fourierism remains largely a historical curiosity, Fourier's  
attempt to legitimate desire and to reconcile the social order  
and instinctual life remains a fundamental preoccupation of social  
theorists. Fourier's monomaniacal absorption in his own theories,  
his paranoia about the threat of the theft of his social "invention,"  
the opaqueness and hermetic nature of his prose, his bitter animosities  
arising out of his frustrations in life, and the personal jealousies  
and idiosyncrasies that even at the height of his popularity  
in France estranged him from his own disciples, certainly contributed  
to his relative obscurity among major social thinkers. Not surprisingly,  
Fourier died alone, apparently at his own desire, in a rented  
room in Paris. He was buried in Montmartre cemetery.  
 
Bibliography  
 
Fourier's papers, comprising ninety-eight cahiers and correspondence,  
are in the Archives de l'Ecole Societaire (Archives Nationales)  
in Paris. A collection of periodical and pamphlet literature  
by Fourier and about Fourierism may be found in the Fonds Fourieristes,  
Institut Francaise d'Histoire Sociale, Paris. Fourier's most  
important works include Traite de l'association domestique-agricole  
(2 vols., 1822), La Fausse industrie morcellee, repugnante, mensongere,  
et l'antidote, l'industrie naturelle, combinee, attrayante, veridique,  
donnant quadruple produit (2 vols., 1835-1836), Le Nouveau monde  
amoureux (1967), and L'Ordre subversif: Trois textes sur la Civilization  
(1972). Though the bulk of his work has not been translated,  
a rudimentary grounding in his thought for English readers may  
be derived from Albert Brisbane, Social Destiny of Man; or, Association  
and Reorganization of Industry (1840); Charles Fourier, The Passions  
of the Human Soul and Their Influence on Society and Civilization,  
trans. John Reynell (2 vols., 1851); and Jonathan Beecher, The  
Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love,  
and Passionate Attraction (1971), the most extensive modern anthology.  
Charles Pellarin, Charles Fourier, sa vie et sa theorie, 2d ed.  
(1843), is an essential biographical source. Roland Barthes,  
Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), has a penetrating and insightful  
section on Fourier. The definitive modern biographical source,  
also offering acute critical insight, is Jonathan Beecher, Charles  
Fourier, the Visionary and His World (1986). The most comprehensive  
treatment of Fourierism in the United States is Carl Guarneri,  
The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (1991).  
 
Louis J. Kern  
 
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Citation:  
Louis J. Kern. "Fourier, Charles";  
http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-01109.html;  
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.  
 
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