Charles Fourier 1772 – 1837

Francois Marie Charles Fourier was a French utopian socialist and an extraordinarily original critic of early industrial civilization. Working as a clerk and salesman, he composed a vast body of writing in which the existing social order, which he called Civilization, is denounced as the systematic repression of the human passions, and is replaced by the Phalanx, a community of about sixteen hundred people organized so that the natural variety of human characters can find harmonious expression. He was the first to use the word feminism in something like its modern sense, arguing that the degree of emancipation of women is the measure of social progress.

Francois Marie Charles Fourier was born in 1772 at Besancon, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant. After a commercial education and the loss of much of his inheritance during the Revolution he supported himself as a salesman and accountant in Lyon, Marseille, and Paris, devoting his evenings to elaborate calculations of an alternative social order which he expounded in a long stream of books and pamphlets without ever achieving the practical foundation he sought.

His principal works are the Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies (1808), the Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Association (1822, expanded as the Theory of Universal Unity, 1834), the New Industrial and Societal World (1829), and the late False Industry (1835-1836). The posthumous editing of his manuscripts by his disciples Victor Considerant, Just Muiron, and others extended his published output for decades.

Fourier worked out a vast cosmological-social system centered on the phalanstery, a community of around 1,620 men, women, and children whose passions, carefully classified into twelve types, would, under the principle of attraction passionnelle, find spontaneous expression in pleasurable productive labor. His critique of monogamous family, of commercial competition, and of repressive education made him a founding figure of utopian socialism, remembered by Marx as a satirist of bourgeois society and rediscovered by the Surrealists and the New Left. He died at Paris in October 1837.