FOURIER, FRANÇOIS-CHARLES. – French economist of socialist inclination, belonging to the socialism that Marx characterized as “utopian.” Born in Besançon on 7 April 1772 and died in Paris on 10 October 1857. As a young man he travelled extensively, taking an interest in the problems that agitated his age. Like the Saint-Simonians, he considered the principle of natural equality unproductive as a solution to conflicts between masters and workers; and, with an optimism that lies at the foundation of the systems of Owen and Cabet and goes back, through Smith, Malthus, and Bentham, to Rousseau, he agreed with Saint-Simon in recognizing universal harmony as the new science. Later he distanced himself from Saint-Simon and Owen, whom he vigorously attacked in ’31. He was convinced that all the ills of society stem from individualism, which nullifies the spontaneous tendency toward communal life; while opposed to libertarian formalism and favourable to shareholding concentration and proletarianization, he showed himself opposed to egalitarian levelling and benevolent toward an agreement between capital and labour. On the religious plane he remained attached to eighteenth-century pantheism and theism, although, because of his love of organic societies, he was not decisively opposed to Catholicism.
As early as 1808, in his Théorie des quatre mouvements, he maintained the usefulness of cooperation and industrial unions; the doctrine, however, appeared complete only in 1829, when he began publishing the work Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire. His programme presented the necessity of replacing the State with numerous productive communities, called “phalanxes,” each consisting of approximately 1,600 persons. Each phalanx was assigned a “phalanstery,” that is, a common house with a suitable tract of land under cultivation. The principal work was agricultural, but provision was made for groups of workers to engage in other trades. Each family, with bizarre details involving polygamy and polyandry, had its own particular dwelling in the phalanstery, and personal property was recognized, still within the framework of the phalanstery. Remuneration of the social capital was also permitted through the individual partners’ contributions in real estate and finance, represented by shares guaranteed by a mortgage on the society’s general property. These ideas, however, were founded on a naturalistic pantheism that swept away the notions of God, creation, the soul, moral law, and the duty to observe II. The work was placed on the Index (decree of 29 January 1835). It was not, however, necessary to be a shareholder in order to belong to the phalanstery. In the journal Le Phalanstère en la réforme industrielle, founded in 1832 and reappearing in 1836 under the name of Phalange, which in 1843 was transformed into the daily newspaper La démocratie pacifique, F. disseminated and clarified his thought. Practical success did not confirm these ideas. The only phalanstery established in France was the one created in 1832 by Bauder Dulay, near the forest of Rambuillet. A community was established there that soon dispersed: the capital was inadequate, but above all that harmony which F. had placed at the foundation of his system, and which for him was an instinct of nature, was lacking from the outset. Albert Brisbane (1809–90) carried Fourierism (or phalansterism) to America, and experiments analogous to the Parisian one were undertaken between 1840 and 1850; approximately forty phalansteries arose, the most important being that of a group of intellectuals at Brook Farm; but these too quickly disappeared.