Fourierism

Fourierism is the systematic set of economic, political, and social beliefs first espoused by French intellectual Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Based upon a belief in the inevitability of communal associations of people who worked and lived together as part of the human future, Fourier's committed supporters referred to his doctrines as Associationism. Political contemporaries and subsequent scholarship has identified Fourier's set of ideas as a form of utopian socialism – a phrase which retains mild pejorative overtones.

Never tested in practice on any scale in Fourier's lifetime, the Fourierist movement enjoyed a brief boom in the United States of America during the middle of the 1840s owing largely to the efforts of his American popularizer, Albert Brisbane (1809–1890) and the American Union of Associationists, but ultimately failed as a social and economic model. The system was briefly revived in the middle 1850s by Victor Considerant (1808–1893), a French disciple of Fourier's who unsuccessfully attempted to relaunch the model in the American state of Texas in the 1850s.

In contrast to the thoroughly secular communitarianism of his contemporary Robert Owen (1771–1858), Charles Fourier's thinking starts from a presumption of the existence of God and a divine social order on earth in accordance with the will of God. Fourier saw himself as a figure of world-historical importance akin to Isaac Newton (1643–1727) for having identified the fundamental force driving social development, which he called "passional attraction" (attraction passionelle).

Fourier believed that the structure of the world – that is the economic, political, and social system – inhibited humanity from the pursuit of their God-given individual passions, thereby preventing mankind from achieving a state of universal harmony. Rather than seeking to mold individuals to fit the existing form of economic, political, and social life, as had been the traditional goal of the educational and what we today call the socialization process, Fourier believed that instead the form of economic, political, and social life should itself be altered to fit the inherent passions of the individual, since these economic and social structures were man-made and not God-given.

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