Charles Fourier (1772–1837)

Famous French utopian socialist thinker in the 19th century.

Fourier was born on April 7, 1772, in Besançon, France, into a wealthy merchant’s family. After graduating from high school, he followed his father’s will to study business and worked as a store employee, salesman and exchange broker in Lyon and Paris. In 1792, at the age of 20, Fourier independently ran a store in Lyon. It was during the French Revolution that the Girondists revolted in Lyon in 1793, during which he lost all his merchandise and was forcibly conscripted into the army by the rebels. After the Jacobins put down the revolt, he was arrested and had his house raided. These encounters made him hate class struggle and violent revolution, and he advocated social reform in politics. As Fourier had been in business for a long time, he witnessed the commercial scams of capitalism and the miserable life of the toiling masses, and also directly felt the intense contradictions of the capitalist society, which gave rise to the desire to demand a change of the reality and to search for an ideal social system, thus giving rise to his utopian socialist thought. In 1803, Fourier published the article Universal Harmony in the Bulletin de Lyon, which was the first time to elaborate his new social ideal. In 1808, Fourier published his first important book, Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies, which did not have a strict logical structure and talked about rather complicated questions. In 1822, he published Treatise on Domestic Agricultural Association, which gave a fuller account of his theories. In 1827, he published The New Industrial World, and further expounded his Phalanstéres and the organization of a harmonious society. In 1835, Fourier published his last book, False Industry, Fragmentary, Repulsive, and Lying, and the Antidote, a Natural, Combined, Attractive, and Truthful Industry. On October 10, 1837, Fourier died in Paris.

Fourier provided a profound critique of the capitalist system in several respects. He held that the system of civilization, which the bourgeoisie regarded as eternal, was nothing but a stage in the development of society, that capitalism was a system of war of each against the whole and of the whole against each, and that the civilization of capitalism was in fact the resurrection of slavery. He exposed and criticized the essence of wage-labor in capitalist society and the relations of exploitation in the capitalist system, pointing out that the labor of the workers in capitalist society is not based on volition, but on the threat of poverty and death. Therefore, in capitalist society, labor is the hell of all evils for workers. He also deduced from the anarchy of production that economic crises are inevitable under the capitalist system and are crises of overproduction, pointing out that the crises caused by the pressure of material excess are depressions caused by abundance and poverty caused by excess. He pointed out that the so-called civilized society of capitalism was in fact a place of lies and deception, and that civilization was a kingdom of deception, while morality was its instrument.

On the basis of criticizing the capitalist system, Fourier made designs and predictions for the ideal society of the future. Like Saint-Simon, Fourier believed in the existence of laws in the development of social history. He held that there were laws of society (the law of passionate attraction) that corresponded to Newton’s laws of the material world (the law of universal gravitation). He divided the development of human society into eight periods and phases: edenism, savageism, patriarchalism, barbarism, civilization, guaranteeism, socialism, and harmonism. The phase of harmony is the highest stage, which can be reached through Phalanstéres. Phalanstéres were grass-roots social organizations combining workers and peasants, usually consisting of about 1,600 people. In a Phalanstére, there is equality between men and women, work for all, free education, combination of industry and agriculture, and no distinction between town and country, and between mental and physical labor. In the Phalanstéres, everyone can become a capitalist by investing in shares, thus eliminating capitalists, and the products are distributed according to labor, capital and talent. Everyone can work according to his individual interests and penchants, and can change job at any time. He also drew up a set of architectural plans for the Phalanstéres, with a central area for canteens, shopping malls, clubs, libraries, etc., a factory area on one side of the center, and living quarters on the other. As for Fourier’s thought on the phases of socio-historical development, Engels highly praised it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Engels pointed out that Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society. He divided its whole course, thus far, into four stages of evolution—savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of today—i.e., with the social order that came in with the 16th century. In addition, Engels also highly praised Fourier’s thoughts on equality between men and women and women’s emancipation, pointing out that still more masterly is his critique of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes, and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.

Fourier’s comprehensive attack on capitalism provided valuable intellectual means for enlightening workers’ consciousness and scientific research on capitalism, and provided ideological-theoretical conditions for the emergence of scientific socialism. However, due to the limitation of historical conditions and the lack of scientific theoretical basis, Fourier did not find a correct way to realize socialism. He did not advocate the abolition of private property and fantasized about establishing a socialist society through propaganda and education, which has an obvious utopian nature.