François Marie Charles Fourier (; ; 7 April 1772 – 10 October 1837) was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker, and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of his views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become mainstream in modern society. For instance, Fourier is credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837.
Fourier's social views and proposals inspired a movement of intentional communities. Among them in the United States were the community of Utopia, Ohio; La Reunion near present-day Dallas, Texas; Lake Zurich, Illinois; the North American Phalanx in Red Bank, New Jersey; Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts; the Community Place and Sodus Bay Phalanx in New York State; Silkville, Kansas, and several others. In Guise, France, he influenced the . Fourier later inspired a diverse array of revolutionary thinkers and writers.
Life
François Marie Charles Fourier was born in Besançon, France, on 7 April 1772. The son of a small businessman, Fourier was more interested in architecture than in his father's trade. Fourier later said he was grateful that he did not pursue engineering because it would have taken too much time away from his efforts to help humanity.
When his father died in 1781, Fourier received two-fifths of his father's estate, valued at more than 200,000 francs. This enabled Fourier to travel throughout Europe at his leisure. In 1791 he moved from Besançon to Lyon, where he was employed by the merchant M. Bousquet. Fourier's travels also brought him to Paris, where he worked as the head of the Office of Statistics for a few months. As a traveling salesman and correspondence clerk, his research and thought was time-limited: he complained of "serving the knavery of merchants" and the stupefaction of "deceitful and degrading duties".
He began writing. His first book was published in 1808 but sold few copies. After six years, it fell into the hands of Monsieur Just Muiron, who eventually became Fourier's patron. Fourier produced most of his writings between 1816 and 1821. In 1822, he tried to sell his books again but with no success.
Fourier died in Paris in 1837.
Ideas
Fourier declared that concern and cooperation are the keys to social success. He believed that a society that cooperated would see an immense improvement in its productivity. Workers would be recompensed for their labor according to their contribution. Fourier saw such cooperation occurring in communities he called "phalanxes", based upon structures called Phalanstères or "grand hotels". These buildings were four-level apartment complexes where the richest had the uppermost apartments and the poorest had ground-floor residences. Wealth was determined by one's job; jobs were assigned based on interest and desire. There were incentives: jobs people might not enjoy doing would receive higher pay.
Fourier emphasized harmony and passion when it came to these communities. He wanted phalansteries to be places where people could not only do the work they liked, but discover and follow their passions. Fourier saw human nature as God-given and something that needed to be discovered. He believed people are born with certain dispositions and that society did not allow them to follow these dispositions. Instead it restrained and misdirected human nature. He believed a social arrangement was needed that allowed for the development of individual human nature. The development of individual nature would reveal passions. Despite Fourier's considerable work into his phalansteries, they remained only concepts, as he needed money to set them up, but never acquired it.
Fourier considered trade, which he associated with Jews, the "source of all evil", and advocated that Jews be forced to do farm work in the phalansteries. By the end of his life, he advocated the return of Jews to Palestine with the assistance of the Rothschilds. John K. Roth and Richard L. Rubenstein see Fourier as motivated by economic and religious antisemitism rather than the racial antisemitism that emerged later in the century. He used the word "civilization" in a pejorative sense; as such, "Fourier's contempt for the respectable thinkers and ideologies of his age was so intense that he always used the terms philosopher and civilization in a pejorative sense. In his lexicon civilization was a depraved order, a synonym for perfidy and constraint ... Fourier's attack on civilization had qualities not to be found in the writing of any other social critic of his time."
Work and liberated passions
For Herbert Marcuse "The idea of libidinal work relations in a developed industrial society finds little support in the tradition of thought, and where such support is forthcoming it seems of a dangerous nature. The transformation of labor into pleasure is the central idea in Fourier's giant socialist utopia."