Fourierism

FRANÇOIS-MARIE-CHARLES Fourier (1772–1837) is the epitome of an individual whose life is much less interesting than his ideas or the movement he inspired—Fourierism—in the United States and Europe in the middle of the 19th century. In fact, it is probably a compensation for his mundane life that Fourier's writings are pregnant with romantic impulses and nonsensical flights of the imagination (including a theory on the copulation of planets) alongside a penetrating critique of the bourgeois institution of marriage and the social consequences of laissez-faire capitalism.

The son of a provincial clothing merchant, Fourier held many jobs in retail such as bookkeeper, clerk, and salesman. Thus, he was exposed to the “crimes of commerce” and felt compelled to pen a social philosophy to overcome the vices of “civilization,” a word he used in a pejorative sense. According to Fourier, human nature was driven—analogous to Isaac Newton's law of gravitational attraction—by “passionate attractions” such as taste, love, ambition, and the need for variety. Unbridled capitalism and middle-class conventions, however, distorted human passions in socially destructive ways, [Page 168]leading to warfare, poverty, and repressive moral codes such as the monogamous relationship. The solution Fourier advocated was to establish voluntary communal agricultural communities—so-called phalansteries or phalanxes—where the human passions would be emancipated and channeled toward socially productive activities. The phalanx was to be a cooperative of ideally 1,620 people in order to supply individuals of diverse natures with a suitable partner of the opposite sex. In his views on sexual freedom, the worth of children, and especially the emancipation of women, Fourier was a forerunner of his times and a precursor to radical feminism. Thus, he believed that “the degree of feminine emancipation is the natural measure of general emancipation.”

Charles Fourier and his followers sought to create a utopian society that eradicated social inequality.

Fourierism as a social movement was more influential and widespread in the United States than in Europe. In France, it shaped the philosophy of socialist feminists of the 1840s, such as Flora Tristan, whose goal was to attain gender equality and worker emancipation by creating self-governing labor unions. Fourier's principle disciple was Victor Considérant, who, until his exile from France in 1854 (he went to create a phalanstery in Dallas, Texas), advocated for a peaceful solution to the “social question” that would include the human right to work. Fourierism in the United States context flourished until the Civil War, because it built upon traditions and tendencies already embedded in the American social and political landscape.

American Fourierism set itself apart from other social movements of antebellum America for three reasons. First, Fourierists offered a critique of America's social problems from a sociological rather than a moralistic approach. Second, they sought to eradicate social inequality with a modern and rational blueprint for the ideal society, not simply an escapist agrarian utopia. Third, American Fourierists were committed to “universal reform,” uniting all classes and creeds for the cause of societal harmony.