By 1825, European society had
undergone several shock waves of change. The transformation was set in motion by two
immense revolutions: one set the pace for political change in the 19th century, while the
other radically transformed the nature of economic man. As we have seen, the French
Revolution made change the order of the day and helped to instill in man — at least some
men — the notion that change was somehow both good and desirable. Occurring at the same
time, although with a varied pace depending upon what European nation we are observing, an
Industrial Revolution worked its wonders on nations, social classes and
individuals (see Lecture 17).
Although there were those thinkers who were critical of the Industrial Revolution and
wanted to return to some pre-modern state of existence, there were other critics who saw
that industry and industrial capitalism were here to stay. For these individuals, it was a
forward-looking socialism which would help make sense of all these changes for the benefit
of mankind. However, it is curious to note that following the Napoleonic period, a strong
wave of conservative reaction set in across most of Europe. This is not that surprising
since most monarchs feared what another French Revolution and another Napoleon could do in
their country.
The first quarter of the 19th century was also marked by an artistic and
cultural phenomenon known as Romanticism (see Lecture 16).
The Romantic artist idealized medieval society and in general, exhibited a strong distaste
for rationalism of any flavor. The Romantic also had no sympathy for the atomized
individualism that was so prominent among the philosophes. Therefore, Romanticism
also lent itself to conservative and reactionary purposes. But since Romanticism also
meant the attempt to break away from established norms and standards in art, conduct and
philosophy, it could also seem to have served the purposes of liberation that was embraced
by the radical and revolutionary socialist.
 Romanticism was so complex a movement that
historians have never reached a consensus regarding definitions or meanings. Romantics
were liberals, conservatives, rationalists, idealists, Catholics, atheists,
revolutionaries and reactionaries. Their essential message, however, was that the
imagination of the individual should determine the form and content of all art. Such an
attitude ran counter to the judgments of the Enlightenment. The philosophes
attacked the Church because it blocked human Reason. The Romantics attacked the philosophes
because they had turned man into a soulless thinking machine, a robot. Christianity had
formed a matrix into which medieval man found understanding. The Enlightenment replaced
the medieval matrix with the matrix of Newtonian physics. For the Romantics, the result of
all this was the demotion of the individual. Imagination, sensitivity, feeling,
spontaneity and freedom were stifled, choked to death. Man must liberate himself. Like Rousseau, one of their spiritual
fathers, the individual must rediscover true freedom. Habits, rules, traditions and
standards imposed by rational society must be lifted. Man must be liberated.
The philosophes tried to demonstrate that all men are the same because they are
endowed with Reason. But where the philosophes saw commonality, the Romantics saw
diversity and uniqueness. Discover yourself, they said, express yourself. Play your own
music, write your own poetry, paint your own personal vision: live, love or suffer in your
own way. Whereas as the 18th century philosophe would have agreed with Kant when he said, “Sapere Aude!
Dare to Know!,” the Romantics took up the battle cry, “Dare to be! Dare to be
yourself” The Romantics were rebels and they knew it. They dared to be themselves.
And they were most passionate about their subjectivism, their emphasis on the
introspective self. After all, had not Rousseau’s
Confessions begun with the
following words:
I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent and which will never find
an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of
nature, and that man myself. Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know
men. I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made
like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
For the Romantic, it was poetry which revealed the highest truth. Poetry could
do what rational analysis and geometric calculation could not. Poetry could speak to the
heart, clarify life’s mysteries, and bring the imagination out of the soul. “O
for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts,” said John Keats (1795-1821).
“Bathe in the waters of life,” said William Blake (1757-1827). The
Romantics gave European culture an antidote to the excessive rationalism of the 18th
century. Intensely subjective and introspective, the Romantics discovered the soul behind
the mind.
It was in the context of the Romantic movement, the French
Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, that the Utopian Socialists made their
appearance upon the historical stage. The three main Utopian Socialists — Charles
Fourier, Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon — differed from one another in a number of
fundamental ways but they had enough in common to justify talking about them collectively.
They all lived at approximately the same time: only twelve years separated the oldest
(Saint-Simon) from the youngest (Fourier). All were alive between 1770 and 1825 and they
all did their most influential work during the first quarter of the 19th century. Although
it was Marx and Engels who eventually labeled these socialists as utopian (as outlined in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO), they were not utopian in the
sense that Sir Thomas More
certainly was. The Utopian Socialists believed that their ideal societies could be
established in the immediate future. More, on the other hand, could only admit that the
island called Utopia was an ideal society, but also that the only way England or Europe
could find its utopia was to go back in time rather than forward. This much said, the
label utopian has been accepted but not necessarily because historians have agreed with
the judgment of Marx and Engels. The real reason why Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen are
Utopian Socialists is because their thought closely resembles that of the religious
sectarian, the recent convert, the visionary and the Romantic. It might also be added that
for the modern, the ideas of the Utopian Socialist also appear to have been formulated by
fanatics. This is perhaps a result of the fact that they announced their plans for an
ideal society with the zeal of the religious prophet.
 Appearing
as they did in the first quarter of the 19th century, it is necessary to identify the
Utopian Socialists according to how perceptively they understood and dealt with the
massive challenge of industrial society. In this regard, it was CHARLES
FOURIER (1772-1837) who seems to have been the most utopian of the Utopian Socialists.
What I mean by this is that although Fourier was aware of what was happening in England as
a result of the Industrial Revolution, he rejected industrialism wholesale. He despised
laissez-faire liberalism and the factory system not because of what effects they
might have on human society, but because he believed that industrial society was a passing
phase. He saw no need to rectify the dangers inherent in industrialism — he simply went
beyond industrialism by ignoring it. Visionaries can do such things, you know.
As a visionary, Fourier’s ideas seem quite fantastical and without ground in
reality. Indeed, there is much in Fourier’s writing that is pure nonsense. Yes, like
some of the representatives of the early French communist movement, Fourier exhibits that
almost characteristic pretension of the visionary: contradictory, confused, repetitive,
chaotic and, of course, long-winded. Reading Fourier after having read Marx and Engels,
Fourier comes off as a confused thinker. For instance, Fourier’s passion for numbers led
him to predict that the ideal world he was helping to create would last 80,000 years,
8,000 of them in an era of Perfect Harmony in which:
- androgynous plants would copulate
- six moons would orbit the earth
- the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean
- the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade
- the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal
to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although “these are
approximate estimates”
- every woman would have four lovers or husbands simultaneously
It may be difficult to surmount these “difficulties” in Fourier’s thought but
I think it would be wrong to pass Fourier off as nothing more than an absurd eccentric.
After all, even Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790) was a bit odd: he believed that men could extend their life spans indefinitely
simply by the power of mind over matter. If one is able to wade through the near endless
nonsense which runs rampant through Fourier’s writings, one will find that he does
offer even the modern reader some fresh and somewhat audacious views of the human
condition. If his proposals seem rather extraordinary if not bizarre by modern standards,
his insights into human society and individual psychology remain quite perceptive.
Fourier was a relatively isolated thinker. We cannot trace the origin of his ideas with
any accuracy. He had no formal academic training and claimed to be bored with the
discourses of the philosophers. Working as a traveling salesman during the day and
scribbling away in the evenings, he was mocked and ridiculed by his critics. He had no
meaningful contacts with any political organizations nor did his ideas correspond in any
clear way to either the early French communists or the British democratic radicals.
This is not to say that we must accept Fourier’s claim of originality or
epoch-making genius either. Fourier tells us that his ideas had tremendous implications
for the future. In his parable, “The Four Apples,” Fourier sees history guided
by four apples. The first two — Adam and Helen of Troy — were the bad apples. The good
apples, on the other hand, were Newton and yeah, you may have guessed it, Fourier himself.
Newton had discovered the physical laws of universal attraction: it was up to Fourier, so
Fourier the illiterate shopkeeper tells us, to discover the laws of passional
attraction. These ideas aside, some of what Fourier says does reflect certain
rather typical Enlightenment themes. For instance, Reason and Nature were key terms in his
writings. He called himself the “Messiah of Reason,” and, like Rousseau, he
criticized bourgeois society for having created an unnatural civilization. Fourier
proposed a completely non-repressive society in which basic human drives would not be
repressed but expressed and cultivated.
Fourier detested the English for their rapidly emerging industrial society and for men
like Adam Smith (1723-1790),
David
Ricardo (1772-1832), Thomas
Malthus (1766-1834) and other political economists who had done so much to rationalize
that system. He held in special contempt the rationally calculating individualism of the utilitarians. They were too intellectual, too
rational. In their place, Fourier foresaw a community tied together by the bonds of
emotion. Thus Bentham’s
system, designed as it was to repress human drive and will, was both wrong and impossible.
Human nature, Fourier believed, was created by God and organized society should respect
that and not try to fight it. Neither could Fourier accept Rousseau’s concept of the
General Will, nor Robespierre, nor the Reign of Terror, nor even the Jacobins.
Charles Fourier was born into a well-established family of cloth merchants and spent
the bulk of his life engaged in commerce. But from an early age, so he tells us, he
rebelled against his work, lamenting that it was his fate to be “participating in the
deceitful activities of merchants and brutalizing myself in the performance of degrading
tasks.” He spent his early years in Lyons where he observed the efforts of the silk
workers to organize themselves. Here too he observed the rampant commercial speculation,
the cycles of inflation and industrial stagnation that prevailed when the free market
economy was re-established under the Directory.
Fourier wanted to elevate the status of manual labor, to rescue it from a long-standing
tradition of degradation and denigration. But while Fourier was interested in the rational
reorganization and efficiency of labor, he by no means accepted the bourgeois work ethic
or the older Judeo-Christian notion that work is unavoidably toilsome. For Fourier, all
manual labor was arduous and irksome — whether in the factory, workshop or field, the
plight of the laboring population was intolerably dehumanizing. He believed, on the other
hand, that it was possible to make all work into play, to make it pleasurable and
desirable and deeply satisfying, both physically and mentally. This was perhaps the one
vision of Fourier’s thought that most captivated other socialist thinkers of the 19th
century, including Marx and Engels.
The device which Fourier believed would make possible this non-repressive social
cohesion, this Eden of joyous labor, he termed the phalanstere. A typically
untranslatable concept, the term was coined by Fourier to suggest the ancient Greek
phalanx, where men were tightly linked together, forming a highly interdependent and
impenetrable fighting unit. Fourier’s phalanx was to become a self-contained
community housing 1,620 members with a myriad of subdivisions designed to encourage a
dynamic interplay of various human passions. Why 1,620? Well, Fourier had determined that
there are 810 different psychological types — if you multiply this by two (male and
female), you arrive at a figure of 1,620. Here the Law of Passional Attractions
would be allowed to operate unfettered for the first time in history. What Newton had done
for physics, Fourier had done for human society. And of course, Fourier believed his
discovery to be much more important than Newton’s.
There are twelve fundamental passions: five of the senses (touch, taste, hearing, sight
and smell); four of the soul (friendship, love, ambition and parenthood); and three that
he called distributive. The first eight passions are self-explanatory. It is the
distributive passions that deserve our closer attention.
First, la Papillone refers to the love of variety. A worker quickly tires of one
kind of task, just as lovers, in spite of their initial attraction, soon find themselves
looking elsewhere. Fourier held Christianity in deep contempt because it made people feel
guilty when they pursued their natural desire for variety in work or in sex. For the same
reasons, he also hated Adam Smith’s vision of a society of specialists, doing the
same thing over and over all in the name of the division of labor. Whatever the productive
advantages of the Smith’s liberal political economy, the fact remained, according to
Fourier, that it created only stunted and repressed human beings. Society should strive to
eliminate all tedious or unpleasant jobs, learning, if possible, to do without the
products derived from such labor.
The second of the distributive passions, la Cabaliste, had to do with
rivalry and conspiracy. While in previous societies this passion caused many problems, in
the phalanx it would be put to good use. Productive teams would compete with one another
to produce the most delicious peaches or the best pair of shoes. The need to compete would
satisfy a natural passion for all men, by nature, are competitive. And the harmful aspects
of competitive commerce in civilization would not be reproduced because production would
keep the overall good of society in mind, rather than encouraging individual profit in the
market.
Finally, la Composite, the distributive passion which Fourier considered the
most beautiful of all. Nearly impossible to translate into reality, by la Composite,
Fourier seems to have meant a combination of two or more different varieties of
passions — the sharing of a good meal (senses) in good company (soul) while conspiring (la
Cabaliste) to arrange a sexual orgy with the couple at the next table. This suggests
some of the special interest scholars took in Fourier in the 1960s. He was an ardent
advocate of sexual liberation and a staunch defender of sexual preferences that were
clearly not accepted by religion or society. He believed that the only sexual activity
that could be forbidden involved pain or force. He was willing to accept sadism and
masochism among consenting partners as well as sodomy, lesbianism, homosexuality,
pederasty, bestiality, fetishism, sex between close relatives — any sexual activity, in
others words, that satisfied man’s natural needs. Fourier was also a radical
feminist. He considered the position of women in his society as a form of slavery. In one
famous passage, he set it down that the level of any civilization could be determined by
the extent to which its women had been liberated. On the other hand, Fourier did not
advocate the equality of the sexes for the simple reason that there were real differences
between the sexes. He rejected patriarchy and familial conditions in the phalanx were
based on a structure entirely unknown in western civilization. He believed that the
existing family structure was partly responsible for the subjugation of women. The family
turned people exclusively inward to spouse and children, rather than outward to society.
Fourier’s vision, together with his criticism of the existing system, places him
as one of the most inspired prophets of 19th century socialism. His remarkable
psychological insights, such as his championing of brief spells and variety in work, his
quickness to see oppression no matter how veiled, and his penetrating concern with
character formations and problems, links him to modern educational theory, the
emancipation of women and even personnel management.
Fourier can also be described as a brilliant exponent of the idea of alienation, a
concern which we will find fully developed in Marx, or as an early theoretician of the
affluent society, a theme later developed by the American economist, John Kenneth
Galbraith. His sometimes nonsensical statements aside, Fourier’s ideas do make some
sense when placed alongside the more advanced ideas of a Karl Marx,
Sigmund
Freud or Herbert Marcuse,
the critic of the one-dimensional society of the 1960s. His vision that mankind’s
existence is somehow false or repressive, was certainly taken up again by later thinkers,
of course, with quite different conclusions.
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