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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Louis J. Kern. "Fourier, Charles";
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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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