The Rise And Fall Of Charles Fourier

Essay, Research Paper

A new craze

swept France, as well as most of Europe, in the early nineteenth

century.

The oppressed society was exhausted from its continual battle

against itself.

The

people sought change; they sought relief from the socio-economic labyrinth

they

had been

spinning themselves dizzy in for their entire lives, and the lives

of their

fathers, and their

fathers before them. Their minds wandered from

the monotony of changing

spools of

thread in a textile mill or hauling buckets

of water in that same mill to a

land of liberty and

equality– their land

of perfection.

Then suddenly a door opened. And above that door, in block

letters, read

the

word "SOCIALISM". And standing beside, beckoning to all

to enter, stood

François

Marie Charles Fourier.

Charles Fourier was

born on April 7, 1772, in Besançon, France. The son of

a

prosperous cloth

merchant, he was encouraged from an early age to pursue

commerce.

His father

died when Charles was nine, leaving him an estate valuing in

excess of 80,000

francs.

Upon the advice of his family, Fourier entered the business world, despite

his

personal

interests in the arts and sciences. He pursued an apprenticeship in

Lyons’s

commercial

system for four years, returning to Besançon in early 1793. He

had spent

his

years wisely, traveling through much of France and exploring the "cultural

and

social

diversity" of the places he visited. However, due to the turmoil and

unstable

state of

France at the time, the Fourier family lost all their property.

These

unfortunate

circumstances brought Fourier’s return to Paris. (Taylor

100)

It was here where he founded the basic principles of his socio-economic

beliefs.

He was given a first-hand view into the functioning of the economy, and he

was

disgusted

by the corruption and deceit he discovered. Throughout his childhood,

and

adolescence,

then carried into adulthood, he witnessed the severity of

the distinctions

between classes.

He matured in the aftermath of the French

Revolution, perhaps the most

"socially

incorrect" period in history. He

witnessed the havoc the guillotine wreaked

on the

aristocracy while watching

the chaos created by the poverty that resulted

from over-

taxation of the

peasant class. He saw these two diametrically opposed groups

as the root

of

all evil and sought to weaken the force that drove them apart. An

enormous

chasm

existed between the upper and lower classes, and Fourier believed that

if he

could find a

way to eliminate that, he would find true Utopia. He

gradually began to

develop an

alternative social order.

In 1808 a book

was published. It was appropriately titled Théorie des

Quatre

Mouvements

et des Destinées Générales, or Theory of the Four Movements and

the

General

Destinies. Fourier was announcing to the world his discovery: not

only were

there

natural laws, and laws of physics or science, there were social laws.

He

described

the four "spheres", his name for divisions of activity– the social,

animal,

organic and

material, each governed by strict mathematical laws.

(Taylor 101) However,

the only

sphere that any discoveries had been made

in so far was the material sphere,

and this is

where the fault in civilized

society lay. If we could uncover the remaining

three, some of

this chaos

may be remedied.

His second book was a deeper version of his first, in which

he precisely

described

the stages of evolution, ranging from the formation

of man to the day of

reckoning.

Another followed, Traité de l’Association

Domestique-Agricole. In this work

he

introduced the Phalanx, from the Greek

word meaning an orderly body of

persons, and his

theory that "mankind could

begin to establish conditions of social harmony in

small scale

communities

organized according to the scientific principles of human

association which

Fourier

claimed to have discovered." (Taylor 103) He included detailed and

specific

instructions

for the institution of such a community. This publication was,

in essence,

a

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