FOURIER, FRANÇOIS-CHARLES. - French economist, of socialist tendency, of that socialism which Marx characterized as "utopian." Born at Besançon on 7 April 1772 and died in Paris on 10 October 1857. In his youth he traveled a great deal, taking an interest in the problems that agitated his time. Like the Saint-Simonians, he considered the principle of equality by nature barren for the solution of conflicts between masters and workers, and with an optimism that lies at the basis of the systems of Owen and Cabet and goes back, through Smith, Malthus and Bentham, as far as Rousseau, he found himself in agreement with Saint-Simon in recognizing in universal harmony the new science. Later he broke away from Saint-Simon and from Owen, whom he attacked energetically in '31. He was convinced that all the evils of society come from individualism, which nullifies the spontaneous tendency toward living together: although opposed to libertarian formalism and favorable to the concentration of action and to proletarianization, he shows himself an opponent of egalitarian leveling and well-disposed toward agreement between capital and labor. On a religious plane he is still bound to the pantheism and theism of the eighteenth century, although he is not, given his love of organic societies, decidedly opposed to Catholicism.
As early as 1808, in his Théorie des quatre mouvements, he upheld the usefulness of cooperation and of industrial unions; the doctrine, however, appeared complete only in 1829, when he began the publication of the work Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire. His program presented the necessity of replacing the State with as many producing communities, called "phalanxes," of about 1600 persons each. To each phalanx was assigned a "phalanstery," that is, a common house with a suitable plot of land under cultivation. The principal work was agricultural, but it was envisaged that groups of workers would attend to other trades. Each family, with bizarre particulars of polygamy and polyandry, had its own private dwelling in the phalanstery, and, still within the ambit of the phalanstery, personal property was recognized. Also admitted was the remuneration of social capital through the contribution of real estate and financial assets by individual members and represented by shares guaranteed by a mortgage on the general property of the society. These ideas, however, were founded on a naturalistic pantheism, sweeping away the notions of God, of creation, of the soul, of the moral law and of the duty to observe it. The work was placed on the Index (decree of 29 January 1835). It was not necessary, however, to be a shareholder in order to be part of the phalanstery. In the newspaper Le Phalanstère en la réforme industrielle, founded in 1832 and reappearing in 1836 under the name Phalange, which was transformed in 1843 into the daily La démocratie pacifique, F. disseminated and clarified his thought. Practical success did not come to confirm these ideas. The only phalanstery set up in France was the one created in 1832 by Bauder Dulay, near the forest of Rambuillet. A community established itself there which soon dispersed: the capital was inadequate, but above all there was lacking from the beginning that harmony which F. had placed at the basis of his system and which was for him an instinct of nature. Albert Brisbane (1809-90) carried Fourierism (or phalansterianism) to America, and experiments analogous to the Parisian one were undertaken between 1840 and 1850; about forty phalansteries arose, and the most important was that of a number of intellectuals at Brook Farm: but these too rapidly disappeared.
Bibliography8 works
Celestino Melci