- Bell 1968. Charles Fourier: Prophet of Eupsychia
- Roelofs 2015. Fourier and Agriculture
- Bowles 1960. The Reaction of Charles Fourier to the French Revolution
- Silberner 1946. Charles Fourier and the Jewish Question
- Leopold 2011. Education and Utopia: Robert Owen and Charles Fourier
- Levi 2015. Charles Fourier Versus the Gastronomes: The Contested Ground of Early Nineteenth-Century Consumption and Tastes
- Beecher 1985. Parody and Liberation in The New Amorous World of Charles Fourier
- Butler 2003. Morality, Economy, and the Nature of the World: Fourier and Thoreau
- Zonderman 1982. George Ripley's Unpublished Lecture on Charles Fourier
- Katsaros 2012. A New World of Love
Bell, Daniel 1968. Charles Fourier: Prophet of Eupsychia. The American Scholar 38(1): 41-58. [JSTOR]
The revolution that must come, they proclaim, must be not only political but sexual as well. For Marcuse, it will liberate Eros, ontologically defined; for Brown, it wil reinstate polymorphous-perverse pleasures; for the British psychoanalyst Laing, following the French moralist Michel Foucault, it will erase the distinction between sanity and madness. (Bell 1968: 41)
Never heard of Norman O. Brown and R. D. Laing. Just as well, one was a freudo-marxist and the other followed French thinkers like Sartre.
If Henri de Saint-Simon, the compatriot with whom he is mistakenly linked, was the prophet of technocracy, then in the new cultural Zeitgeist Fourier may be considered the guru of the New Left. In the strong cultural recation to technocratic modes of thought, with their emphasis on rationality and economizing techniques, there is today the resurgence of emphasis on feeling, sentiment, emotion, and the "natural man" who will live by sensation and impulse, unencumbered by restraint and denial. (Bell 1968: 42)
"Passion" not listed.
Although both Owen and Saint-Simon clearly were men of the nineteenth century in their concern with education and with industry, Fourier, just as clearly, was a throwback to the eighteenth century, and particularly to Rousseau. The ties between the two are extraordinarily strong, although Fourier makes little mention in his writing of Rousseau. For Fourier only Newton and Columbus (in the symbolic sense) were acknowledged as forebears. (Bell 1968: 42)
"The Civilized order [is] that labyrinth of duplicity and misery, the aspect of which caused Rousseau to exclaim: "These beings whom we see aroud us are not men; there must be some perversion, the cause of which we cannot penetrate.""" (Fourier 1876: 21) - this he quotes again verbatim on page 61.
As in Rousseau, and the romantic denouncers of civilization, the fraternal life for Fourier can take place only in small communities whose members would know each other personally. The village and the small town of the Middle Ages are compared favorably with the modern big city, in which the individual lives presumably in anonymous isolation. "No more capital cities, no more big cities," cries Buonarroti, Babeuf's comrade-in-arms and the historian of the "Conspiracy for Equality," the first pronunciamento of political communism in modern times. Large cities, echoes Fourier, are a symptom of public ill-health. (Bell 1968: 43)
Is 1600-1800 people in one enormous building a "small community"?
Yet it is not communal living alone that is the answer. After all, in the small town and village public opinion exercises full control over human behavior, and public opinion, operating through such regulatory techniques as shaming and gossip, can enforce as cruel a conformity as any regulated army. The true salvation of man, the only basis of happiness, is the complete release of the passions. Repression is responsible for the evils of civilization; the abolition of repression is the condition of the free expression of the personality. (Bell 1968: 43)
The note about the regulative or normative function of gossip is spot on. "The complete release of the passions" on the other hand indicates that Bell didn't really grasp the meaning of the word and took it more in the sense of "strong sexual feelings towards someone". Is "complete release" harmonious?
Family life, the key social institution of the civilized state, was Fourier's most compelling example of an unnatural institution, holding men in its iron grip, bringing misery to all its members. All utopias promise freedom, but most of them are utilitarian, concerned with household arrangements, the organization of labor, and the sharing of goods; even where there is a full equality for women, monogamy is the usual, permissible social practice. Only the Marquis de Sade and Fourier, as Manuel observes in a study of French utopias, "would open wide the floodgates of promiscuous sexual encounters to those who desired them." (Bell 1968: 44)
Book I or "Abstract Theory" in Brisbane's translation deals exactly with those utilitarian concerns. Where's the good stuff about promiscuous sexual encounters others, too, have hinted at?
In his time, the world was in the fifth of the first eight stages, having passed through what Fourier called Sectes Confuses, Sauvagerie, Patriarcat and Barbarie. Ahead lies Garantisme, the realization of human rights, Sociantisme, or Association and beyond that Harmonie; and since human history so far has gone through only five thousand years, Harmonie would reign for another thirty-five thousand. (Bell 1968: 45)
Here Bell omitted quotation marks and citation to Alexander Gray, but such omittances were acknowledged in a footnote on the first page. Gray's whole chapter on Fourier looks informative. Here, for example, I am surprised at the French labels. "Sectes Confuses" is probably Brisbane's "Disordered Series", but Patriarcat?
Apart from the occult Pythagoreanism, the effort to escape from the occult Pythagoreanism, the effort to escape from the "bondage of incoherence" often founders on Fourier's eccentric style, which is so difficult that at times it is impossible even to grasp the simplest meanings of his words. Frank Manuel writes:The works in which Fourier phrased and repharsed the system he had invented are full of neologisms, repetitions ad nauseam, and plain nonsense. There is an eccentric pagination, numerous digressions, and interpolations break the argument. [...] The neologisms are particularly irritating because they require interpretation, a guess at his meaning and are virtually untranslatable. Silberling's Dictionnaire de sociologie phalanstérienne is useful only to those who have already been initiated into the secret world. Fourier was conscious of the fact that he was pouring forth a torrent of newfangled words, and in his manuscripts he occasionally indulged in light self-mockery on this account. "Hola, another neologism! Haro on the guilty one! but is this any worse than doctrinaire?"If, for Fourier, words were imperfect, music represented the "harmony of the spheres." (Bell 1968: 46)
I wish I knew what he meant by this. I detected no "Pythagoreanism" in Brisbane's translation but that may be why (it's a translation). The quote originates from Frank Manuel's The Prophets of Paris (1962) about Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte.
The stars that rule our lives also have their passions, and from the copulation of the planets will spring not only other stars and planets but also plants and animals. A new race of animals, or anti-animals, will appear whose traits will be the opposite of their present one. All harmful beasts will have disappeared and in their place will be animals that will assist man in his labors or even do his work for him. There will be anti-lions and anti-crocodiles, on whose backs we shall be able to travel huge distances in no time, and the anti-hen who in six months would lay enough eggs to pay off the English national debt. An anti-beaver will see to the fishing, an anti-whale will move sailing ships, an anti-hippopotamus will tow the riverboats. With no more than a few hours of daily work, men will be free to occupy themselves with play and with developming their intellectual, moral and artistic facilities to an extent hithero unprecedented in history. But more, in this garden of delights men and women shall live for one hundred and forty-four years, and of these one hundred and twenty will be spent in the active exercise of love. This, then, is the vision of the natural man, in the fulfillment, for the first time, of his new and unnatural powers. (Bell 1968: 47)
None of this made it into Brisbane's compendium. As to the question of age, some few lucky ladies born around the time Brisbane's translation was published lived up to 120 years of age. With the advance of medicine, whole populations living up to 140 is not impossible.
Next are the "group" passions, four in number, also called the affective passions because they derive from men's gregariousness. These consist of the desire for friendship (sometimes rendered as respect or honor), the drive of ambition, the need for love, and the repose of family. Men have always known these needs, although they have become cruelly distributed under civilization. (Bell 1968: 48)
Out of 12 passions the first 5 are the senses (taste and touch are active, sight and hearing are passive, and smell is mixed). Here are the next four, which are essentially social.
Finally come the three distributive or serial passions, the unique discovery of Fourier, that will flower only in the next, higher stages of society. These are men's passion for intrigue or discordance (which is labeled cabalist), the need for variety and change (which is called butterfly, or alternating), and the desire for concordance (which Fourier calls composite). (Bell 1968: 48)
These sound like (1) need for drama, (2) neophilia, and (3) talk with your partner.
The cabalist is the love of intrigue and competition. In Garantisme, or the first stafe of Association, groups will be set against groups in all types of contests to generate satisfactions. Intrigue will infuse added zest into routine jobs; it will turn work into mystery and play.The cabalist is a favorite passion of women; they are excessively fond of intrigue, the rivalries and all the greater and lesser flights of cabal. It is a proof of their eminent fitness for the new social order, where cabals without number will be needed in every series, periodical schisms in order to maintain a movement of coming and going among the sectaries of the different groups.There is something of the butterfly in all persons. But only the grubby caterpillar locks itself within the walls of the cocoon; the butterfly, from the first moment of its emergence, flits from flower to flower, using only "attraction" as its guide. Men do not want to be tied down to long hours, or to the drudgery of a single job. In the phalanstère, therefore, men will work at a single task only up to the period of maximum interest (about two hours) and then change to a different sort of job in order to revive their spirits and broaden their talents. And if consistency in vocation is undesirable, it is equally galling in sexual matters as well. If men should not be tied down to the drudgery of a single job, why should they be bound to a single woman? Men become stale and bored when chained by a bond of matrimony. Consequently, in the higher forms of Association men will find their pleasure in the fulfillment of their butterfly nature in all ways of living: to be hunters in the morning, fishermen in the afternoons, and lovers of different women at night. (Bell 1968: 49)
The "cabalist" part sounds like an anecdote about a woman who made her own girl-power company which soon went out of business because of the constant intrigue and in-fighting. Curious that we are told of men getting bored of the same woman and looking for variety but the same is not said of women. Even an author who makes everything about sex is unable to imagine sexual liberation for women?
From that first éclaircissement to his death thirty-eight years later, Fourier devoted himself to the exposition, elaboration, reiteration, and greater elaboration of the Newtonian "psycho-physics" which was the root of his system. (Bell 1968: 55)
So that's what it's called. McDougall formulated Fourier's passional attraction quite succinctly: "a striving towards or away from that object" (McDougall 1916: 26).
Roelofs, Joan 2015. Fourier and Agriculture. World Review of Political Economy 6(3): 403-424. [JSTOR / DOI: 10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.6.3.0403]
In the early 20th century, political and revolutionary Marxism had become "hegemonic" over other socialist theories. Perhaps now the others can re-emerge. The strange and brilliant Charles Fourier certainly deserves more exposure. We need not institute every detail of his schemes, and we can note some serious [|] omissions. His wilder fantasies need not be taken literally; they indicate the dysfunctions and miseries that a socialist society must remedy. "Socialism" originally referred to concern with the entire range of society's injustice, including capitalism. However, the early socialists did not assume that the economic base was the source of all other unhappiness. (Roelofs 2015: 403-404)
This guy framed Marxism and Fourierism as the primary socialisms of the 19th century. Perhaps it is time for a resurgence of Fourier and others. As to the question of "economic base" as the source of all other unhappiness, I'm not so sure this wouldn't apply to Fourier. In his chapter on money it comes across as if all social ills could be remedied by one simple fix, creating a "true currency" that would correspond to exchangeable products and thus couldn't be hoarded or artificially inflated.
His ideas are especially relevant to an era in which hard work is disdained and perpetual play desired, when the lust for luxurious consumption defies environmental sustainability at the same time that it leaves people "never content, constantly gnawed by desires despite being surrounded by opulence" (Fourier 1996: 279). (Roelofs 2015: 404)
Disdaining hard work and desiring perpetual play are probably universals. Our age is increasingly characterized by only hard work, for productivity is constantly increasing while wages stay level for decades upon decades, and perpetual play is not only possible but a whole generation of "gamers" is currently emerging - people whose whole life is engulfed in a series of virtual contests and amusements.
Fourier's plan would vanquish the miseries of "civilization," which includes but were not limited to those created by industrial capitalism. Early socialism, even that of Marx and Engels, charted far more social ills than surplus value extraction. Fourier designed a society which not only allowed for great abundance and luxury (with minimal resource use) but also permitted the full expression of all human passions. Complete harmony was possible without the need for repressing any human desires or reforming humankind. Indeed, Fourier called his ideal society Harmony. He believed that people were born with certain personality types, based on their dominant passions. He posited 12 basic passions; the 5 sensual appetites; 4 appetites of the soul: friendship, love, family, and ambition; and 3 distributive passions: the cabalist (love of intrigues), butterfly (love of change and contrast), and composite (desire to combine pleasures of sense and soul). (Roelofs 2015: 406)
"Full expression" much preferable to "complete release".
Obviously, Fourier's understanding of human nature fell far short of modern science. However, he was on the right track with his concern for the incentives needed to construct and maintain a socialist society. Thus, he proposed that private profit, property ownership, and unequal consumption could exist in his ideal society, without serious harm to anyone. He was also being practical, making a bid for investors to finance a phalanstery. Indeed, some of the later Fourierist communities, all short-lived, were funded by resident and non-resident investors. (Roelofs 2015: 407)
Fourierism wouldn't succumb, for example, to the Canadian psychologist's caricature of communism where everyone is materially equal.
A wide variety of occupations would exist in Harmony; Fourier imagined that they would be developed to the highest standards. Thus,The doctors of the phalange will be specialists in preventative medicine: their interest is to see that no one falls ill. In Harmony, doctors (and dentists) will always work as a team in a group. They will be collectively remunerated in proportion to the general health of the phalange, and not according to the number of ailments or number of patients treated. (Zeldin 1969: 72)Dirty work would be joyfully pursued by the "Little Hordes," teams of children who (according to Fourier) have a penchant for filth, noise, and disgusting tasks such as removing reptiles from the road. (Roelofs 2015: 408)
This bit about preventive medicine is just painful to read during this pandemic. Medicine workers are "front-line heroes" but their wages are cut because hospitals usually make most of their profits from unnecessary procedures like plastic surgery and the like. I bet we'd all live a life full of 140 years if medicine worked for the collective health of the population. David Zeldin's The Educational Ideas of Charles Fourier: 1772-1837 (1969) is 180 pages and costs $97.71.
Further peace-promoting activities would be world conclaves of those who shared each sexual or food fetish. To end the scourge of war yet allow expression of competitive passions, Fourier proposed a "world war of small pastries" (petits pâtés), in which massive armies (men and women) would compete to produce the best array of these pastries (Fourier 1967: 339-379). (Roelofs 2015: 408)
Can you imagine? Instead of "Force Postures" there'd be a competition for who can bake the best god damn cup cake.
Women's personalities were warped because for years they were trained in duplicity for snaring a husband. This energy was in any case wasted, for once snared, the merry-go-round began. Fourier did not devalue "traditional women's work." On the contrary, the marital arts, especially cooking, gardening, child-rearing, and lovemaking, were to become the most important activities in the future. (Roelofs 2015: 409)
Sounds about right. In many parts of the world this is still the case.
Was all the sacrifice worth it because the family was a wonderful nest for child-rearing? Fourier (1971: 99) thought not: "In the family system children spend all their time crying, quarreling, breaking things and refusing to work." Children were oppressed by child-rearing which concentrated on breaking their wills and fitting them to society. He believed that a better method encouraged children's instincts for imitation and play. Society must respect nature and provide [|] for the harmless release of all desires and passions; otherwise, the repressed would result in a "countermarch" of evil and violence. (Roelofs 2015: 409-410)
"Granted the truth of the theory now believed to be true, that the very essence of all civilisation is to train out of man, the beast of prey, a tame and civilised animal, a domesticated animal" (Nietzsche 1921: 24).
Fourier's indictment of capitalism was appreciated (some would say appropriated) by Marx and Engels, but there were significant differences between the two socialist doctrines. Fourier disapproved of all violence and revolution, did not see class truggle as the pivot of socialist transformation, and desired the happy collaboration of all classes, ages, talents, and personality types. Fourier's Harmony permitted private property, profit making and unequal consumption - as long as everyone enjoyed a high material and cultural standard. The proletariat was not the instrument of socialist transformation; that was the mission of the enlightened of any class. (Roelofs 2015: 410)
That is to say, the rich can be rich, as long as everyone else is guaranteed a minimum. Our current state of affairs does not live up to this. There are immensely, unimaginably rich people while homelessness and starvation are common. As to the insistence on proletariat being the key to salvation, this was Winston's mantra, yet he himself was an "enlightened" member of a higher class.
For several years, Arthur Brisbane had a thrice-weekly column on Fourierism in the New York Tribune, which omitted some of the wilder aspects, but explicated the basic ideas. The advocates of associationism, as it was often called, regarded it as a preferred model for the settlement of the West (Bestor 1970). Forty-five Fourierist "phalanxes" were created in the United States; the best known was Brook Farm in Roxbury, Massachusetts (Guarneri 1991). There were also many religious communities, of which teh Shaker settlements in New England, Kentucky, Ohio, and elsewhere were most numerous. Whatever their inspiration, they saw themselves as providing a practical alternative to isolated monoculture farming, slave plantations, and industrial capitalism. (Roelofs 2015: 417)
May explain why I'm meeting details of Fourier's theory of passions in these papers rather than the "Abstract Theory" portion in Brisbane's compendium where they should have been divulged.
Some may argue that cooperatives are not in accordance with "human nature" and that people will not be able to "get along." This ignores the eons of human tribal history, surely as genetically significant as the aggressive drives. Furthermore, people do not "get along" very well in individual families; pioneer farmers' domains were rife with domestic violence. Communal living skills can be learned - after all, there have been successful experiments. Those older sustainable communities that had a probationary period did not admit troublemakers and those unsuited to the lifestyle. (Roelofs 2015: 420)
"We do not know what our nature permits us to be" - Rousseau.
Bowles, Robert C. 1960. The Reaction of Charles Fourier to the French Revolution. French Historical Studies 1(3): 348-356. [JSTOR / DOI: 10.2307/285974]
The criterion of judgment by which Fourier evaluated the French Revolution was a vast scheme of universal perfection supported by an ingenious system of psychology designed to govern every phase of social and industrial life. He spoke of this scheme as God's social code,f or he felt that the Creator had placed it in juxtaposition with the natural laws of the physical universe as revealed by Sir Isaac Newton. (Bowles 1960: 349)
Universal analogy and psycho-physics.
The futile pursuit of liberty has been one of the most tragic blunders made by our century, asserted Fourier, for it cost Europe four million lives during the Revolution and wars of the Empire. Those who sang its praises could not define it, nor did they know what it was, for they were "simplists" who saw only the obvious facet of a many-sided concept. Liberty meant to them little more than a simple corporeal freedom. The workers and salaried people possess only this degree of liberty, for they are bound by social chains just as slaves are bound by physical ones. True liberty, ccording to Fourier's analysis, must guarantee to everyone a minimum of subsistence, the privileges of leagues to protect this minimum, a freedom from anxiety, and in case of necessity, the right of theft to appease hunger. It must also include the complete release of all the psychological forces underlying human behavoor, and for this reason, it is indivisible. He was most dogmatic in his insistence that God denied approval of that freedom which does not extend alike to all persons. The revolutionists, he complained, exclude a half of humanity from the outset, for they did not lighten the burden to women one iota. These levellers who upset all other social relationships failed to abolish prevalent prejudices concerning love and marriage, and that one mistake, alone, would have caused the Revolution to flounder and wreck. (Bowles 1960: 350)
Total liberty includes freedom from want. I suspect that nothing of the kind can be found among other political philosophers.
The work teams of Fourier's utopian association were to be composed of men and women possessing very unequal fortunes, for it is only in such a way that proper balances can be attained. Rich and poor easily become the best of friends when tehy are united by bonds of industrial interest. NOthing stimulates the poor, obscure worker like being teamed with a very wealthy one in an industrial intrigue whose purpose is to outproduce another team. Fourier cited the example of Louis XVI and his good-natured boasting about his skill at the humble trade of locksmithing. This was merely a friendly gesture toward those who plied the trade seriously, and in a more advanced society, the king might have belonged to a locksmithing team, much to the delight and benefit of everybody concerned. Such are the natural functions of inequalities. (Bowles 1960: 351)
A bold vision, but one that would require rich people to be human still, and not scaly dragons who imagine themselves superhuman because they've won the game of exploiting humankind.
Fourier's conclusion was that the only remedial measure which could have averted the bloodshed and chaos of the Revolution and the innumerable scourges which grew out of it was the adoption of universal agricultural and industrial associations based upon the social code of God. This code will be revealed to man only when man ceases to follow the dictates of the sophists and obeys without exception all of his own psychological impulses. It is through these natural impulses that the Creator makes his will known to man. (Bowles 1960: 256)
While Roelofs's "full expression of all human passions" is preferable to Bell's "complete release of the passions", this here is probably closest to the original. By "expression" Roelofs is taking passion as emotion (tinted by Darwinian expression of emotions), with "release" Bell is, on the other extreme, taking passion as hydraulic valve of sorts (tinted by Freudian psycho-hydraulics). Bowles hits the mark, I think, because "psychological impulses" embodies the motive force Fourier attributed to passions; "obeyance" is in line with Fourier's contemporaries' view of passions.
Silberner, Edmund 1946. Charles Fourier and the Jewish Question. Jewish Social Studies 8(4): 245-266. [JSTOR]
François-Charles-Marie Fourier (1772-1837) was a noted advocate of reform in his day, and his ideas have continued to command a considerable degree of interest. Fourier envisaged the transformation of the individualistic capitalist order into a harmonious society based on cooperative communities, which he termed "phalansteries." Each of these units, consisting of about 1,500 persons, was to constitute an independent economic group, and its income was to be divided thus: four-twelfths to capital, five-twelfths to labor and three-twelfths to "talent." To judge by the number of publicatons devoted to the man and his ideas, Fourier still continues to attract the attention of scholars and writers on social problems. (Silberner 1946: 245)
Still does. But "the number of publications devoted to the man and his ideas" seem meager; I managed to scrape together only some 30 papers.
It is no exaggeration to say that Fourier's knowledge of the Jews was quite rudimentary. Even if he had been interested in their culture, which does not seem to have been the case, he would certainly not have had the time for such studies. For it should not be forgotten that from the day he left secondary school, equipped with a rather mediocre education, he was preoccupied with the tasks which provided him with his modest livelihood. All he knew about the Jewish problem, or rather all he thought he knew, he learned from newspapers or from personal experience, which was inevitably very restricted in scope. (Silberner 1946: 246)
In 1946, evidently, "the Jewish problem" was not yet a problematic expression. Imagine some Soviets writing of "the Estonian problem".
And that is not all: they do not shrink even from high treason. "The Jews, by virtue of their dedication to trade, are the spies of all nations and, if need be, informers and hangmen, as one may see in Turkey today, where [|] they denounce, at so much per head, outcasts in hiding, and commit a thousand other infamous deeds." (Silberner 1946: 247-248)
I could see that. I'm still trying to shake off the stereotype-confirming impression I received from watching Eric Weinstein guesstimating Jeffrey Epstein's monetary worth.
Few social reformers have laid greater emphasis on the necessity of applying a rigorous method to the social sciences. It is therefore of some interest to inquire whether, in examining the Jewish problem, he follows his own methodological precepts. In embarking on the study of society, we must, according to Fourier, "forget all we have learned"; subject all our ideas to the test of "absolute doubt"; "explore the entire field of (social) science"; establish our judgments on the facts and "accept only the truth confirmed by experience"; avoid "taking errors that have become prejudices for principles." A cursory glance at Fourier's works suffices to show that neither in dealing with the Jews nor in examining other subjects, does he practice what he preaches. (Silberner 1946: 254)
This contradiction I've already noted with regard to Fourier's beliefs about life on other planets, upon which he has much to say without any observation or experiment.
He led the monotonous and restricted life of a man whose ideas and tastes were above his material position and who, according to his own testimony, was reduced to "trivial jobs incompatible with study," for which he yearned. (Silberner 1946: 256)
Don't I know it.
Bourgin, who has meticulously studied Fourier's sources, observes with reason that nowhere in his work can the derivation of his theories or the origin of a doctrine be determined wit hany certainty. The reason is that Fourier read incredible little. "This ignoramus," as Bourgin, the leading expert on Fourier, calls him, cared little about specific, formal theories, and he was acquainted with them only to the extent that tradition, popular teaching or the press made them in some way familiar and common. His own doctrine was developed by an internal process on which no particular writer seems to have exercised a perceptible influence. (Silberner 1946: 258)
Quite unlike my favorite authors who read widely and make it an intellectual pleasure to find where they derived some part of their own writings.
It is in this complex of "appeals of self-interest" (stimulants d'amour-propre) that the origin of Fourier's Zionism must be sought. (Silberner 1946: 265)
Noted for the French expression, which Dictionary.com gives as self-esteem or self-respect, but elsewhere I've found to be synonymous with "selfishness" pure and simple. It is literally "self-love", which is what it evokes in Estonian (enesearmastus).
Leopold, David 2011. Education and Utopia: Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Oxford Review of Education 37(5): 619-635. [JSTOR]
Owen's central claim about human nature (repeated endlessly in his writings) has two (equally contestable) component parts. First, he insists that individuals do not form their own character, rather their character is wholly formed for them by circumstances. Second, he insists that individuals are consequently not accountable for their own sentiments and habits; to imagine that they merit rewards for some actions and punishments for others is a fundamental mistake. Owen maintains that with the application of the right means any 'general character' from the 'best' to the 'worst' can be created in a community. (Leopold 2011: 621)
Sounds like an anticipation of Watsonian behaviorism.
Class struggle is 'irrational' because it presupposes what is - on the Owenite account - false, namely that the 'higher classes' are responsible for the misery of the 'lower classes'. And it is 'useless' because it encourages (misplaced but nonetheless real) resistance to change on the part of the 'higher classes'. Rich and poor, Owen avers, have but one interest, and the latter ought to view the former not as class enemies but as potential friends and active collaborators. (Leopold 2011: 622)
Potential friends and active collaborators don't lobby to remove regulations that help preserve your life and limb, wouldn't protest to minimum wage catching up to inflation, etc.
Girls were taught to sew and make useful garments, to prepare appetising food economically, and to keep a neat and ordered house. Boys were instructed in the art of war - there were drill exercises in the playground, training in the use of firearms, and some introduction to military tactics. Owen enthuses about the individual and collective advantages of such training: it encourages 'attention, celerity, and order', and provides for teh self-defence that would be necessary as long as irrational beings still remained in the world (Owen 1993a: 72). (Leopold 2011: 625)
Gender stereotypes. Only about the fifth or sixth time I meet "celerity" (swiftness of movement) in the wild. While irrational beings still remain in the world - if the world is to accommodate any living organisms besides our vain species - then military training will be necessary for ever? Or is it only until all of humanity has been incorporated into Owenite communities?
The means of instruction were designed to make learning a pleasure and delight to children. Reflecting Owen's controversial views on responsibility, therew as to be no scolding or punishment (or rewards) of children; teachers were required rather to show affection and 'unceasing kindness' to all their charges (Owen 1993d: 287).Children were not to be irritated or bored by books, and [|] every effort was made to use 'sensible signs' in lessons and lectures (that is, models, diagrams and specimens of the things themselves). Conversation with teachers was to be the norm, and children were encouraged to ask questions and seek clarification. Lessons might be held indoors or outdoors, and there were occasional trips (to learn about agriculture and natural history). (Leopold 2011: 625-626)
Somewhat more agreeable, though I'd question the means of making children not irritated or bored by books.
As well as being formed with the best of characters, children would be taught to reason for themselves. For example, when learning to read, the content of books was to be discussed (not lerant by rote). If children could be taught to think and reason correctly, Owen insists, they would discover how to distinguish truth from falsehood for themselves. (Leopold 2011: 626)
Yeah, that's sensible. This blog, after all, is a discussion about books that I'm having with myself, or my past selves. Group seminars and reading discussions I haven't found half as productive as reflecting and replying to the text.
In adulthood, Fourier earned a modest living from a variety of commercial jobs (mainly in the silk and textile industry of Lyon), but increasingly devoted his energies to producing a torrent of idiosyncratic brochures, multi-volume treatises, letters and polemics. Educational themes took up a large part of his Traité de l'association domestique-agricole (1822), and early references to Fourier often describe him as a theorist of education. His lesser publications also include a strange pamphlet (the Mnémonique géographique), which sought to function as both a coded introduction to his own system and a critique of contemporary geography teaching (Beecher 1986: 378-380). Despite a deserved reputation for being a difficult and suspicious person, Fourier gradually accumulated a small school of followers, complete with its own journals (Le Phalanstère and La Phalange). He lived in Paris for the last 15 years of his life, obsessed with the threat of plagiarism and the need to find a patron (to fund a trial community). (Leopold 2011: 627)
Starting to look like fuller picture of a person.
Fourier shared Owen's concern with human nature, but with a crucial difference: he saw character as God-given and liable to discovery, rather than plastic and open to creation. Given His own nature, it was impossible that God had not provided for the terrestial happiness of humankind. The role of the social theorist was consequently to discover the key which would make that earthly paradise achievable. Fourier acknowledges that he appears an unlikely prophet, but maintains that God had once before chosen the most obscure man to deliver the most important message to thew orld. The key in question involves a divinely underwritten model of human nature, according to which individuals are born with different innate dispositions and propensities. The problem with all hithero existing societies was that they had (unintentionally) costrained and misdirected that nature. What was needed instead were social arrangements that would facilitate the free development and deployment of these basic human characteristics. (Leopold 2011: 627)
This God-givenness really stands out in his text. The universal analogy with physical laws is really weak. Interesting, but extremely dubious.
There are few details of communal life that Fourier can resist describing, but its architecture is a particular obsession. He was especially enthusiastic about the covered walkways (cooled in the summer and heated in winter) encircling the Phalanstery - the grand central building of the community, combining public and private spaces - and connecting it to surrounding buildings. (Leopold 2011: 628)
Why not. It'd be great if there was somewhere to walk around in any weather whatever.
The most striking social feature of the community is that it has class divisions but no class antagonisms. There would be classes in that disparities of income would coalesce to form three groups with slightly distinct lifestyles (the rich would include wealthy shareholders helping to finance the community, and drawing an income from their investment). There would be no class antagonisms, however, because their primary cause - poverty - would be absent. Fourier insists that it is not inequality per se that causes class antagonisms; disparities in wealth only [|] provoke conflict in the absence of provision for our essential needs. And Harmony would eradicate poverty by instituting what would now be called a universal basic income; that is, an income paid to individuals, irrespective of their income from other sources, and without requiring the performance of any work. In Harmony, this income would be set at a subsistence level (covering basic needs). (Leopold 2011: 628-629)
Called it. Anticipating UBI is probably one of the reasons why Fourier is currently having a resurgence. A solution like UBI is increasingly becoming unavoidable. Eradicating poverty would not simply do away class antagonisms tho, it would effectively do away with most criminality.
The most striking institutional feature of Harmonian education is that it takes place without schools and without teachers. First, education occurs not in schools, nor in the family, but in the wider community. It is the Phalanx that collectively raises and educates Harmonian children. Fourier is usually said to 'abolish' the family, but that description is surely misleading. The modern family certainly disappears, and there are communal arrangements for child rearing. However, mothers breastfeed their children, biological parents often have close relationships with their offspring, and the familial passion is identified as one requiring expression. Second, there is no longer a class of professional educators. Harmony would, of course, contain people who teach others, but they would do so as one of many different activities as they go about their daily lives. (Leopold 2011: 630)
Learn by doing from people who already do. "Family" would probably amount to the relationship fathers had with their children on Trobriand according to Malinowski: they'd simply be their favorite children, upon they'd lavish gifts and best pieces of food.
A new volunteer for the series - a candidatemember of the green pea shellers - would perform the latter role. Their task was the simplest, but they would, if successful, feel that they had contributed as much as anyone, and be rewarded with a decoration for their hat or collar. (A succession of such decorations would, in due course, mark their ascent through the work group.) In this way, social arrangements which encourage natural proclivities are used to initiate children into the world of work. Fourier identifies the five dominant tastes of children as: a desire to 'ape' or imitate; an eagerness to follow (slightly) older children; a fondness for small things; the enjoyment of rummaging about; and the love of making noise. The tableau of the little peas shows the first two of these instincts, in particular, being used to constructive ends within the Phalanx (Fourier 1972: 307-310). (Leopold 2011: 631)
As I suspected - gamification of work!
These moral motivations are accompanied, and reinforced, by a bewildering range of ceremonial ranks and titles, which are highly sought after by members who yield to no one in loyalty to their own intermediate association (Fourier 1972: 317-318). (Leopold 2011: 632)
Such gamification tactics are already in use on social media platforms (reddit and facebook). That children and many adults alike love "getting XP" and rising in "levels" requires no further comment.
Fourier sees education, first, as properly aimed at liberating character, developing and deploying (not repressing and misdirecting) our God-given essential passions. (Leopold 2011: 632)
Even more to the point than the previous verbs associated with the passion (see above).
Fifth, freedom is at the heart of Harmonian education; children seemingly profit from instruction only when, and insofar as, they have themselves solicited it. (Leopold 2011: 633)
I'd argue that this applies equally to adults. One can be "taught" by unpleasant means, sure, but one "learns" best out of curiosity.
Detailed descriptions of an ideal society, of the kind that Owen and Fourier provide, can have a number of additional functions. These utopian designs can, for instance, play a critical role, providing a vantage point from which to evaluate less than ideal societies. They can also reflect their historical context, telling us something about the world in which they were written. They can also help to clarify particular (conceptual and normative) issues, acting as though experiments which help us understand something better. They can also console, acting as a diversion from the harsh realities of the existing world. And they can also, of course, cheer, entertain and otherwise amuse their readers. I do not mean to suggest that all of these potential functions - the list is not intended to be exhaustive - will necessarily be of interest to educationalists (qua educationalists). However, the existence of these other functions does show that the constructive weakness (real or imagined) of these ideal commonwealths is not enough to make them worthless to that audience. The interest of utopian writings can sometimes lie elsewhere. (Leopold 2011: 634)
Damn educationalists and their broad understanding of what a text can do. Let's compare these points with Lotman's:
- Critical: nearly Lotman's 3 (L3), that is, "Communication of the reader with himself", or rather, with one's own cultural tradition.
- Historical: (L2), "Communication between the audience and the cultural tradition." More-or-less exact correspondence.
- Clarificatory: either not included or metaphorically L4, i.e. "Communication of the reader with the text", in which case the figurative "conversation" with the text is primarily conceptual or semantic.
- Escapist: not included in Lotman's scheme but essentially not communicative; more like the textual analogue of phatic communion - reading a text for the mere pleasure of reading it (cheer, entertain) or act as a diversion (Bart reading the solar system poster to shut out the amorous noises of Skinner and Krabappel).
Levi, Jane 2015. Charles Fourier Versus the Gastronomes: The Contested Ground of Early Nineteenth-Century Consumption and Tastes. Utopian Studies 26(1): 41-57. [JSTOR / DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.26.1.0041]
The extraordinary utopian thinker Charles Fourier (1772-1837), if known at all, is more often derided than celebrated, even though in the mid-nineteenth century there were up to two hundred thousand Fourierists in the United States and numerous publications and associations inspired by his ideas in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. (Levi 2015: 42)
Huh. Wouldn't have imagined so large a following.
Fourier's vision is at once systematic and extraordinary, so that the boundaries between possible fact and fantastical fuction are blurred in a way that does not often apply to ostensibly political writing. Perhaps as a result of this, far more scholars have paid attention to Marx's dismissive comments about Fourier's lack of realism and dislike of industrialization than to Engels's approval. But not only did Engels approve of Fourier's fundamental ideas on social structure (including the emancipation of women), he also appreciated his skills as both a thinker and a writer, acknowledging his debt to Hegelian dialectics and appreciating his accomplished satirical style. (Levi 2015: 42)
So it is, a whole page in Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is dedicated to Fourier, his style, his view of the emancipation of women and the four phases of society, concluding rather starkly: "As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the Earth, Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race."
Fourier defined his vision of the future utopian world, called Harmony, in terms of some of the basic activities of everyday life - reforming the world by reforming social interaction and expressions of human urges. Food is prominent among the images and examples he uses to put forward his theories; indeed, good food lies at the heart of his new world, rising far beyond mealtimes (though even these are spectacularly transformed) to become a key component in work, education, diplomacy (including warfare), and religion. (Levi 2015: 44)
Here I think "passion" became "urge". On the whole it looks correct, keeping in mind that "taste" was one of the "luxurious" passions.
The fundamental conception is that gastrosophy encompasses a combination of production, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food, so that the truly developed sense of taste consists of five main elements. The four "wheels of the cart" are (agri)culture, preservation, cooking, and gastronomy, and these four "pivot" around hygiene in equilibrium, otherwise known as health, involving a proper balancing of the temperaments, tastes, and digestion. In other worlds, not only must the gastrosophic individual be equally expert and involved in agriculture, preservation, cookery, and gastronomy, but knowledge of all these should also operate in concert to achieve the proper balance and ideal health for each person. Fourier insists than any one branch of this knowledge is meaningless without the others. (Levi 2015: 45)
Fullness typical of Fourier. Reminds me of that time I went online to search for a recipe for omlette and somehow ended up reading about how chicken should be raised and fed to produce the best eggs.
Rousseau's rigorous and ascetic approach to food, such as Emile's simple and antisensuous vegetarian diet, his palate explicitly to remain uncorrupted by the fussing of French chefs and their sauces, would find few friends in Harmony. In Harmony, an individual's taste and character starts at birth regardless of gender and is specifically cultivated and expressed through food. Babies are cared for in communal nurseries, where they are breast-fed by wet nurses of the appropriate temperament when their own mothers are busy elsewhere. The description of this practice gives an opportunity to directly criticize J. J. Rousseau, whose "luxurious" and "punishing" ideas on breast-feeding (and by extension the place of women) are described as being as ridiculous as his social contract. (Levi 2015: 46)
Looks like Rousseau was an "influence" to Fourier much like Durkheim was for Malinowski.
This ability to eat what seems like an excessive amount is balanced by the development of accelerated digestion, and Fourier is at pains to point out that the perfect matching of food to temperament and the guarantee of scintillating conversation with ideas companions at every meal, coupled with the attraction of the pleasures to follow it, will guard against any Cockaigne-like scenes of gluttony and excess. (Levi 2015: 50)
The communion of food!
Beecher, Jonathan 1985. Parody and Liberation in The New Amorous World of Charles Fourier. History Workshop 20: 125-133. [JSTOR]
Charles Fourier was the boldest and most original thinker among the strange group of early nineteenth-century radical social theorists whom Frederick Engels first identified as 'utopian socialists.' He was in fact so bold and so original that even some of his most ardent admirers have found it difficult to write about him without questioning his sanity. Others have simply discounted his wilder speculations, preferring to consider his thought from the standpoint of its contribution to the development of a socialist ideology understood to have reached maturity in the writings of Marx and Engels. Thus for several generations scholarly debate over Fourier's ideas focussed largely on a single set of questions: Was he or wasn't he a socialist? And what was the relationship of his thought to the 'scientific socialism' of Marx and Engels? In recent years the boundaries of the discussion have widened. Fourier is now seen as an ancestor of surrealism, of psychoanalysis, and of feminism. What has not changed is the tendency to view him as a precursor - a thinker important mainly for his contribution to movements and ideologies which only became fully self-consious long after his death. (Beecher 1985: 125)
The true secret of his staying power might be that he's not boring.
One of the fundamental conditions for the realization of Fourier's amorous utopia was what he called the 'sexual minimum'. In the ideal world which he called Harmony every mature man and woman would be guaranteed a satisfying minimum of sexual pleasure. Whatever his or her age and no matter how bizarre his or her desires, no Harmonian could go unsatisfied. Fourier maintained that this sexual minimum would play a role in the amarous world similar to that played by what he called the 'social minimum' in the world of work. Labor could become an instrument of human freedom and human self-expression only when all men and women were freed by a guaranteed income from the obligation to work. Similarly love could become a force for both individual liberation and social solidarity only when its expression had been purged of every trace of coercion and constraint. For Fourier the important thing about this sexual minimum was that it removed the fear of sexual deprivation which falsefied amorous relations in contemporary society. (Beecher 1985: 126)
No more incels.
Fourier completed Le Neuveau monde amoureux in 1818, but he never dared to publish it. His disciples, who sought to transform Fourierism into a reformist movement for 'peaceful democracy', pretending it didn't exist. It was only in 1967, a century and a half after Fourier wrote it, that it finally appeared in an edition prepared by Simone Debout. At that time almost everyone interested in Fourier agreed that its publication was a major event. Apparently confirming the view of those who held that Fourier's [|] real importance was not as an economic thinker but as a prophet of instinctual liberation, Le Nouveau monde amoureux seemed to call for a major reassessment of Fourier. (Beecher 1985: 127-128)
Could it have influence Huxley's Brave New World? The titles are similar, and all the orgies in that novel appear to be catalogued in Fourier's work. Did Huxley somehow have access to the manuscripts?
His statement in his first major work that "the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress" became one of the battlecries of radical feminism in the 1840s and served Flora Tristan, who knew Fourier during his old age, as the epigraph for her L'Emancipation de la femme (1845). Fourier's contributions to early feminist ideology were significant enough that he has even (erroneously) been credited with inventing the [|] word 'féminisme.' But still, as a few writers have suggested, there are problems with Fourier's feminism. No more than Prosper Enfantin was he concerned to change the conventional ideas of woman's nature. In fact, one repeatedly finds Fourier falling back on clichés in his characterization of women - their inclinations, their aptitudes, and even their ability to respond to his own writings. In Le Nouveau monde amoureux he often describes women as 'sensualists' moved by 'gross physical desires' which men must satisfy if they don't want to be ridiculed by women. And while developing an argument, he can suddenly interrupt himself to observe that he has doubtless failed to make the issues intelligible to his female readers because he lacks the ability to satisfy what Diderot calls the taste of women for 'flowers of rhetoric' and 'the dust of butterfly's wings.' (Beecher 1985: 128-129)
The corresponding endnote reads: "This claim, which appears in much of the recent literature on the history of French feminism, appears to derive from Benoîte Groult, Le Féminisme au masculin Paris 1977." Even I detected a passage in The Theory of Social Organization that was less than generous to women, something to the effect that if they don't develop hobbies in their youth they'll become bored and boring people in their old age. This no doubt applies on both genders but the implication is that women are less willing to develop life-long and satisfying hobbies and prefer to be entertained by suitors in youth, to be abandoned and alone when their looks fade.
What Fourier may have been offering in Le Nouveau monde amoureux is not so much the blueprint of an amorous utopia as a remarkable parody of the customs and institutions of civilized society, a parody in which the familiar world is turned upside down and stood on its head. (Beecher 1985: 130)
This was the takeaway from this paper in the previous one I read, offering a pretty substantial case for Fourier's social construction of gastrosophy being likewise a parody of contemporary French food culture.
What I have tried to offer here by way of conclusion is little more than a sketch of one possible reading of Le Nouveau monde amoureaux - a reading which interprets the text not as the map of a future utopia and not as a fixed body of idas to be judged on the basis of its consistency with other, more modern ideas, but as something closer to a mental exercise designed to reveal the new world of possibilities that might be opened up by adapting Christian and courtly institutions to an ethic of self-indulgence. One might also argue that Fourier's parody of organized Christianity is the vehicle for a demonstration of what might really be entailed in a religion which took seriously the Christian injunction to 'love thy neighbor'. (Beecher 1985: 132)
Naturally, Fourier was as scathing towards (at least one form of) Christianity as he was towards commerce.
Butler, Brian E. 2003. Morality, Economy, and the Nature of the World: Fourier and Thoreau. Studies in Popular Culture 26(2): 89-108. [JSTOR]
Thoreau's writings upon economy were composed within an era of American utopian experimentalism. Hope for a more perfect society was in the air. This paper investigates Thoreau's thoughts on economy in conjuction with one powerful influence in social or utopian thought during his era - Charles Fourier's design for an ideal society or "Harmonic Association." This utopian vision was widely propagated in America through the works and efforts of Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley among many others. Thoreau was well acquainted with both of these "propounders" of Fourier's ideas. Horace Greeley was especially important to Thoreau's own literary career. Fourier's ideas were specifically popularized in America within Brisbane's book, The Social Destiny of Man. (Butler 2003: 89)
Brisbane's Social Destiny of Man: Or, Association and Reorganization of Industry (1840) is available but the pages must have been really thin because the text from the other side of the page shows through and makes it difficult to read. I'd much rather take on a newer translation of Fourier.
To do this I will first give an outline of Fourier's "moral-less" societal plan. More specifically I will highlight two central metaphors of his system, that of societal harmony as musical harmony, and that of humanity as nature's caretaker. I then push for an interpretation of Thoreau as propounding an alternative mythos that places humanity within Nature, not as caretaker, but as a sojourner. (Butler 2003: 90)
Not sure if Fourier's social construction is amoral or hypermoral. Personally I found Fourier's extreme caretakerism (let's eradicate deserts and marshes, in fact every ecological extreme not suitable to humans) off-putting. Thoreau on the other hand, going by quotes presented here, is flowery to the point of incomprehension.
Fourier starts with the conviction that there is a plan of God, which provides a social order that will, if implemented, bring about mankind's complete happiness. In opposition to the moralist, who is attempting to change human nature, Fourier believes we must adapt the environment to man's essential needs. For Fourier and Brisbane, the root of evil lies in following a wrong form of social organization - "we cannot change human nature, we can only change its developments, give it a harmonic, instead of an incoherent development." (Butler 2003: 91)
What I like about it is that it's conditional, if there's a God who created the universe then it would be absurd to assume that he/she/it didn't also install a social code into human beings in the form of passional attractions. If you disagree with the absurd premise of divine predestination then what it boilrs down is just an amusing thought experiment as to how to achieve for mankind, which is still developing, a greater happiness than it currently enjoys.
Three of Fourier's twelve essential passions are specially important to the understanding of the "passional" system. These three passions he labels the Cabalist, the Composite, and the Papillonne. The cabalist is the plotting or intrigue passion. When used properly (as opposed to being thwarted through social sanctions) it beneficially draws people together through group intrigue. The "cabalist" passion creates a binding atmosphere of co-conspiracy. The "composite" passion "requires in every action a composite allurement or pleasure of the senses and of the soul." This passion therefore looks to activities that are both diverse and multifaceted. The "papillonne" or butterfly passion links the other two. Because humans like and need alternating tasks in order to [|] avoid monotony, labor should be done in short intervals alternating between a great multitude of tasks. This ensures that the physical or mental aspect in any given task will not exhaust us. (Butler 2003: 93-94)
There might be some potential in conjoining Fourier's social passions with Malinowski's phatic communion. The latter views antipathies as something that can only draw people away from each other, whereas intrigue and rumour can also be used for creating social bonds. Also, in "butterfly passion links the other two" it looks like there might be a Kantian (categorical) logic behind these but it might be this author's unique interpretation.
In Thoreau's sense of the term, Fourier is a champion of the worst aspects of civilization. Thoreau is not as enamored of man's achievemnets or of his position in nature as Fourier. As he writes, "in Wildness is the preservation of the world." Instead of man as the cultivator perfectingthe world, for Thoreau, "almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap." (Butler 2003: 101)
With this I cannot but agree. Fourier as if views humanity and nature with two distinct and contradictory lenses: diversity of human passions is good and godly, but biodiversity he couldn't care less about.
Zonderman, David A. 1982. George Ripley's Unpublished Lecture on Charles Fourier. Studies in the American Renaissance 1982: 185-208. [JSTOR]
Once settled at Brook Farm, Ripley turned to Fourier's original writings and was even more captivated with these writings of the master himself. He saw many parallels between Fourier's theories and his own efforts at the Farm. Both men believed in cooperative labor, universal education, and the abolition of class distinctions. (Zonderman 1982: 185)
Is "class distinction" something other than "class differences"? I.e. there are differences in wealth - inequality - but they are not discerned?
This overview is perhaps the strongest part of the lecture; it is a remarkably clear presentation of the essential principles underlying Fourierism. It demonstrates Ripley's earnest effort to make this doctrine approachable, understandable, and acceptable. All the bizarre speculations concerning the future, which Fourier's critics often raised to question his sanity, were distilled out by Ripley. He, and Brisbane, had always been uncomfortable with some of the master's more outlandish schemes. So Ripley made no mention of oceans turning to lemonade or anti-animals populating a new world; instead, he focused on the enormous potential for social reform inherent in the Fourierist system. (Zonderman 1982: 187)
Of course they would censor the best bits that don't serve their own purposes.
Nothing that was remarkable escaped his observation in the course of his travels, nor was his memory less retentive than his other intellectual facilities were powerful and methodical. The climate, the soil, the rivers, hills, forests, etc., the peculiarities of every province in every kingdom which he had visited, were regularly classed in his memory, and critically compared one with another. The number of inhabitants of each city and their respective pursuits of industry, the principal buildings, both public and private, their respective dimensions, beauties, and defects, the width and direction of streets, the height of houses, the nature of building materials, promenades, fountains, vistas, every thing notable in fact was seen by his observing eye, [|] wherever he passed; and when once he had properly observed, he never forgot even the most trifling details. It often happened that those who visited him were astonished to hear him explain the defects of public buildings, the insalubrious distribution of streets, and the particular improvements which might be made in their native cities, through which he had passed only once or twice in his life, and then remained perhaps not more than a few hours. They had passed a great part of their whole lives in their native cities without ever noticing those details which he had pointed to them. "We remember," says Mr. Doherty, "an instance of this nature concerning Metz. One of his friends, a military engineer, who had long been stationed in that city, and who from his profession was well acquainted with it, on hearing him comment learnedly and familiarly on its beauties and defects, the deformities of certain buildings, and the improvements which might be easily made, was led to believe that Fourier had not only resided there many years, but that he had been employed as an Edile of the city; on inquiring how long it was since Fourier had resided there, the answer was that he had never resided there at all; that he had only been there once in his life, about thirty years before that time; and that he then remained only one day in that city, he was either gone to, or returning from Germany; arriving in Metz early in the morning, he was obliged to wait for an evening ceach, and there, not knowing what to do with his time, he passed it in his usual recreation, that of observing the buildings and the neighboring country." (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 191-192)
Not the first instance in which Fourier is made to sound autistic. The story is reminiscent of the play, The Legend of 1900, in which a man left on board a trans-Atlantic ship as a baby grows up learning all the European languages and is conversant of every port city, at least from the pier.
The study of languages [|] was the only one for which he appeared to have little attraction. He regarded the variety of languages as one of the signs of the social incoherence of the globe, - as one evidence among many others of the antagonism of man with nature, and the distance of the human race from the attainment of their destiny. (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 192-193)
Much like biodiversity, Fourier couldn't care less for linguistic (and possibly cultural) diversity. Only diversity of passions.
He found that Attraction and Repulsion were the two great principles by which the Creator governs the world, and in order to obtain a complete knowledge of these laws, he resolved the study simultaneously the highest and lowest order of creation in the Universe. He [|] considered the stars as the highest order of creation, mankind as the middle term, and the inferior animals and insects as the lowest step in the scale. He supposed that there must be certain general laws of unity common to these three orders of existence or it would be impossible for them to compose our harmonious whole; and he hoped that by studying all that was known in the positive sciences concerning them, he might discover the natural laws of relation which combine them in an integral unity. (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 197-198)
Mechanical.
Having observed perfect analogy in the different orders of creation in the Universe, he was led to infer that as the Creator was one and the same Being, Infinite and Eternal in his attributes, there must necessarily be a principle of unity and analogy in his creations; that the Creation must necessarily be a reflection of the attributes of the Creator; that the creator being all in all, it was impossible for him to paint or represent any thing but himself in the Creation. From these considerations, Fourier derived the second grand axiom which is at the foundation of his system, "The Creator being one Infinite Harmonious Being, every thing in nature must be an imitation of his own attributes." (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 198)
Observation and experiment, not deduction from imagination.
[...] the affinity which binds the atom, the attractive power which governs the planets, the affections which bind human beings to each other in society, are only so many different modes of the one universal law of attraction and repulsion; and from this induction Fourier derived his third general axiom, namely "The permanent attractions and repulsions of every order of beings in the creation, are exactly in proportion to their respective functions and real destinies in the Universe." (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 198)
The implication being that human affections are as mechanical and causal as the movements of the planets.
Accordingly, he never aims to construct an ideal form of society; he deals in no hypothesis; he never indulges a philosophical fancy, like Plato, in framing imaginary republics, or invokes the genius of poetry, like Sir Thomas More, to people utopias with visionary beings; but concentrates teh whole force of his intellect on the single question, What is the social order designed [|] for man by the Creator of the Universe? Nothing diverted his attention from this inquiry. He pursued it with the devotion of a prophet who felt that the interests of humanity were staked on the issue. He took no counsel of man. (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 199-200)
So he didn't imagine "anti-animals" and didn't take most of his cues from newspapers?
His mind seems to have been absolutely free from prejudices. He brought a virgin soul to commune with the eternal source of truth. He entered the career of discovery like one new born. No splendor of reputation, no force of authority, no magic of sympathy, no charm of traditional opinion could seduce him from his allegiance to God. (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 200)
An easy thing to imagine if you're not the one he was prejudiced against. (Cf. Silberner, above.)
Its leading principle that the Universe is constructed on the model of the human soul coincides with the axiom which the celebrated German philosopher Schiller unsuccessfully attempted to expand into a system, and seems to have been dimly foreshadowed in the doctrine of spiritual and material correspondences which holds a conspicuous rank in the teachings of Swedenborg. (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 202)
Anthropocentrism at its finest.
The soul, in its original unity, may be regarded as a living force tending to Universal Harmony. The moment we observe its manifestations, we find them divided into three great branches, Sensation, Affection, and Intellect, which exhaust the sphere of its spontaneous action. The Sensitive Passions, corresponding to the Five external senses, connect is with the material world, impel us to the pursuit of material order and harmony, and find their legitimate centre in the true action and gratification of the external senses. The normal development of these five sensitive passions, although not forming the highest aim of the soul, is an essential condition of the true well being of man. It lies at the foundation of all human prosperity. Their claims cannot be overlooked or slighted without defrauding nature. It is a false and perverted spiritualism which seek to develop the higher nature of man by sacrificing the ties which bind him to the material world. We might as well hope to quicken and invigorate his intellectual faculties by cutting off his limbs or putting out his eyes. Next in order, be the four Affective Passions, which comprise the sphere of the moral feelings, or the sentiments which connect the individuals of our race with each other. These are the ties which unite men in the relations of equals, of inferiors and superiors, the relation of the sexes, and of parent and child, or the passions of friendship, of ambition or reverence, of love and familism. These two orders of attractions, or original passion, composed the [|] primary springs of action in man. His fundamental wants grow out of them. They furnish the motives for industry and suggest the method of its true organization. As the light and regulator of these Cardinal Passions, we find three others, belonging to the intellectual sphere, which Fourier terms the Cabalist, the Composite, and the Alternating Passions, but which, considered in reference to their mode of operation, may be called the tendency to Analysis, to Synthesis, and to Observation. (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 202)
Ah, now I see the "the occult Pythagoreanism" (Bell 1968: 46). ▲ or △? "Affective" should be first but "moral" is where it should be, and rightly "alter-oriented". I've found other translations of Fourier's works that explain his system of passions more fully.
After centuries of hopeless degradation, of remediless wrongs and sufferings, they have at length received the assurance that their destiny is not forveer to a debasing, monotonous, repugnant, ill paid, painful, and disease-producing toil; in filthy and pestilent shops; under cruel taskmasters; from night to morning, without relief or change; at cutthroat competition, each man with his fellow; and all for a niggardly stipend, never enough to secure a man, much less his family, against sickness and old age, but always keeping him in anxiety on the brink of starvation and death. (Ripley; in Zonderman 1982: 205)
Yeah, thank god all of that is behind us and things are, uh, different? This is a quote from an unknown source, it's "eloquent expounder" remaining "[undeciphered]" in Ripley's manuscript.
Katsaros, Laure 2012. A New World of Love. The Massachusetts Review 53(3): 405-411. [JSTOR]
The world we live in today enjoins us not only to be happy, but also to display our happiness to others. We have less and less of a right to withhold our inner life from view. Instead, we have an apparent obligation to make our most private moments visible. The compulsory display of happiness seems an aftereffect of the later developments in technology; but the dream of it already existed in the imagination of a nineteenth-century utopian named Charles Fourier. (Katsaros 2012: 405)
Odd use of "right" and "compulsory". There's no law forcing you to use social media.
We are accustomed to thinking that our identity is grounded in a place, a home, a lineage. The family is universally considered as the most basic unit of social life. Widows and orphans inspire pity because they have no one but themselves to rely on. But Fourier envied their fate. He considered the family as unnatural, counterproductive, and perverse. In his eyes, men and women who married and had children, as "civilized" society enjoined them to do, inevitably became concerned with their own offspring only instead of keeping the common good in mind. (Katsaros 2012: 405)
Continuous hyperbole is tedious. Did Fourier envied the fate of widows and orphans? Citation needed. He died alone but was that his greatest desire?
Yet this tantalizing glimpse of a happier alternative to marriage and child rearing was shocking enough that The devoted disciples who later edited Fourer's works took pains to minimize the master's radical inversion of moral and sexual norms. When the treatise was republished in 1841, four years after Fourier's death, the editors warned in a preface that Fourier did not recommend that contemporary society should alter its matrimonial customs. They dismissed the ideas on love and family contained in the book as "reforms of a minor order." But nothing could have been further from the truth. For Fourier, only a revolution in gender norms and sexual mores could achieve the state of economic and existential bliss he promised the future citizens of his utopian phalansteries. (Katsaros 2012: 406)
This is beginning to look like a common theme in reflections upon Fourier's followers - hide and minimize the wacky stuff, or what was considered whacky at the time.
Fourier's "new world of love" revolves around a busy schedule of highly ritualized orgies and amorous competitions. Every day, a high priestess, chosen among the older women in the community, presides over the elaborate ceremony that will match the men and women of Harmony according to their "affinities." After a "salvo to Nature" and an initial period of tentative groping, called by Fourier "the semi-bacchanal," partners link up semipermanently. As the ceremony concludes, they engage in "transitional unions," to everyone's satisfaction. Whereas "civilized" society keeps women in a state of sexual subjugation, in Harmony they choose their partners as freely as men do. If the institution of marriage is outlawed, as it inevitably would be in a just world, then frustration, boredom, and infidelity no longer have any reason to exist. New partners are always available. "Civilized" society frowns on the public expression of sexual desire and confines sexuality to the privacy of the marriage bed. But in Fourier's revolutionary new world, sex is part of a public ritual, [|] from which both shame and secrecy are outlawed. Utopia becomes a daily Olympiad - a sexual competition without any losers. (Katsaros 2012: 407-408)
Too bad there doesn't appear to be an English translation. The French paperback is $5.46 but I can't even read a lick of froggish.
Sex in all its forms is innocent; it is the repression of our inborn sexual instincts that creates evil. Fourier views the progress from "civilized" society to Harmony as a return to an Edenic state of childhood. (Katsaros 2012: 408)
Profound.
When children are allowed to enter Harmony, by being born, they are not raised by their biological parents. Instead, they live in a collective nursery, where nannies care for them. As they get older, they are schooled by educators of both sexes who teach them the arts of music, gastronomy, and horticulture. Fourier invents new words for these quasi-parents, calling them "mentorins" and "mentorines" instead of teachers (the verbal inventiveness that characterizes his writings testifies to his belief that a new language will create a new reality). (Katsaros 2012: 409)
The more I learn about this book the more it dawns on me how deeply Aldous Huxley fucked up. He shows us distant glimpses of the systematic orgies through the gaze of a pseudo-Shakespearean prude and even taints collective nurseries with inhumanity by introducing us to the work of the mentorin(e)s through a lesson about disposing of dead bodies. Most egregiously, even in The Theory of Social Organization Fourier says that children don't understand sex, while Huxley makes children do "love play"!?
Fourier imagines that technology will soon be advanced enough [|] that a "celestial mirror" will orbit the earth and spy out monogamous lovers, exposing their infraction to the whole community. (Katsaros 2012: 410-411)
Satellites. This paper felt needlessly contentious. I'll reserve my judgement as to compulsive happiness in Harmony until I've read more of Fourier.
