Observations on Charles Fourier
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a remarkable series of utopias envisaging the radical reformation of industrial society emerged, imaginatively embodying and articulating the aspirations of an age of dramatic change and disturbance. The Utopias of Fourier, Owen, Cabet, Buckingham, and Bellamy tell us a great deal of the condition of that age. Fourier tells us much more than this, though, his insights going beyond time and place to address the human condition in depth. Marx and Engels would later criticize as 'utopian' all those schemes in which the ideals were divorced from the means of their realisation, by which they meant the human agency with the structural capacity to engage in transformative action. It was a fair criticism, to the extent that any void in transformative agency from below will be filled by those with the power and resources to act from above – the rich and powerful with stakes in reproducing the essential structures of the very society to be transformed. This is a paradox of reform that reformers, divorced from agency, unable to see human subjects as knowledgeable, moral agents, has yet to resolve. Inevitably, they take their demands for 'system-change' to the principal agents of the very system to be changed. They will change nothing fundamentally.
The point made by Marx and Engels is well taken – ideals and the means of their realisation need to be commensurate, treating means as the end in the process of realisation. It is this that tends to go missing in idealistic attempts at transformation from above and from without. That principle lay at the core of the "scientific socialism" of Marx and Engels, much derided and much misunderstood, but sound and sage. That said, it is noticeable that whenever Marx and Engels did go so far as to suggest the contours of the future society, their views were remarkably similar to those of the Utopians. It wasn't so much on the ends that Marx and Engels disagreed, as the means, insisting on means with respect to associational agency that were consistent with and actively contributed to socialistic ends. Marx and Engels were adamant that dependency upon the initiative and resources of 'philanthropic big bourgois and petty bourgeois' would divert socialist energies and pervert socialist ends into their opposites. They stated the point clearly. In the Circular Letter to Bebel et al, Marx wrote:
“As far as we are concerned, after our whole past only one way is open to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the most immediate driving power in history and, in particular, the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social upheaval; therefore it is impossible for us to ally ourselves with people who want to eliminate this class struggle from the movement. When the International was formed, we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. We cannot ally ourselves, therefore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois. If the new party organ assumes a position which corresponds to the opinions of those gentlemen, which is bourgeois and not proletarian, then nothing remains, much though we should regret it, but to declare publicly our opposition to it and to abandon the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German party abroad. We hope, however, that it will not come to this.
Marx, Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke, et al.
Those words apply in this day to the 'classless' class of would-be techno-bureaucratic managerialists who think themselves above class interest and struggle, who work through 'philanthropic' not-for-profit organisations and ngos, all connected with global bodies and the UN, and who translate social and economic issues into political neutral technical language. Such people will effect not thoroughgoing social transformation but a pacification which entrenches and extends existing diremptive social arrangements.
Fourier is often considered a pioneer of the technocratic mentality. The truth is that Fourier is classes above such people. Lewis Mumford's description of Fourier is pertinent, capturing aspects of the man's combination of insight and eccentricity:
“The man who first penetrated the weaknesses of capitalist production, who first devised, out of a fertile imagination, an alternative to the paleo-technic regime, was Charles Francois Marie Fourier: a genius whose social fantasies pushed common sense to the border of lunacy; or, if you will, a lunatic whose lucid imagination more than compensates for moments of unbridled fantasy. Fourier presents an unusual mixture of fanaticism and shrewdness, of wishful sleight-of-hand and penetrating observation, of daft hopes and rational proposals. He was the last nineteenth century economist, I believe, to begin his work with a series of propositions about the nature of God; he was likewise the first reformer to take full account of the existence of evil, and to propose, in a positive way, to make use of negative and hostile elements in order to generate a better society. One must think of this extraordinary man, a commercial traveler by occupation, as a sort of Balzac of sociology, capable of swift passages from absurd melodrama to robust observation and statesmanlike insight.
Mumford The Condition of Man 1944 ch 9 pp.325-6
Fourier is 'the Balzac of sociology!' That's quite the image. But Fourier had much the greater futurity and embraced potentiality and possibility for the human betterment. Fourier examined the conditions produced by paleotechnic industry in search of both diagnosis and cure. As Mumford writes, 'Industrialism, for Fourier, was one of the latest of scientific chimeras, which produced goods in confusion without any proportional compensation, without any guarantee to the producer or wage-earner that he would participate in the increase of wealth, without any attempt to rectify the social or the personal results of lopsided mechanical toil. Fourier opposed to the mechanical atomism of this society his theory of combinations and groups; and he divided these groups according to the needs or "passions" of men: one of the earliest essays in dynamic psychology.'
Mumford rightly praises Fourier's brilliant intuitive improvisations in psychology and sociology as 'sounder than much of what passed for science in these fields during the nineteenth century.' (Mumford 1944 ch 9). And long after.
Fourier offers a moral and philosophical anthropology that may be designated as a normative essentialism. It is a view that is much out of favour, but which is of ancient vintage and which has enduring significance. Fourier takes human passions as given rather than self-created, malleable, manipulable, disposable. Fourier holds that there is such a thing as the human essence and that this is manifested in practical social life; his Utopia is not designed to "effect any change in our passions . . . their direction will be changed without changing their nature." Fourier proposed to achieve this transformation by way of uniting sufficient numbers of people in an organized community, a phalanstery, whose manifold interests, occupations, and industries and ample civic equipment gives adequate scope to every variety of the human temperament.
The good community is one that brings the essential human passions into play and which, through their complex interactions and interplay, brings about the achievement of an ultimate harmony: for man has a threefold destiny, "an industrial destiny, to harmonize the material world; a social destiny, to harmonize the passional or moral world; and an intellectual destiny, to discover the laws of universal order and harmony."
A truly harmonious society would emerge in light of the proper balancing of the passions. It was to this end that Fourier proposed what he called associations. A new principle was born – associationalism. Each association would have a limited number of people which Fourier determined via a grid of typologies and which were to be organized in large mansion-houses called phalansteries (a combination of the French words for ‘phalanx’ and ‘monastery’). The phalanstery was to be self-operating, but only partially autonomous within a network of phalansteries, expanding outwards within a theme of ascending purposes. At the summit of this expansive and interconnected social order stood the World Congress of Phalanxes, capable of coordinating between the various communities. In a sense, this idea represented Aristotle’s polis on a global scale, the supreme community encompassing all other communities, the Cosmopolis.
Fourier identified the key fault of modern civilized societies as lying in their incomplete nature, thwarting the needs and potentials of their members and creating social dissonance. Thus the principal social agents of society congregate around society's and people's lack: the merchant thrives on scarcity instead of plenitude, the doctor on disease instead of health, the soldier on war instead of peace.
An example of a proposal that Marx and Engels took directly from Fourier was the idea of occupational flexibility as against the fixity of the division of labour. Fourier (like Marx) accepted the division of labour, but sought to nullify its damaging effects not only by suiting the occupation itself to the temperament of the worker but by insisting on a frequent change of occupation throughout the day. He further proposed to give workers a direct stake and interest in industry by making each worker a co-partner in their enterprise.
As Mumford observes, the economy of plenitude that stands before us as a real possibility suggests an entirely different approach to the fixity of the old division of labour. “That new possibility was outlined more than a century ago by that singular if mad genius Charles Fourier. This is what Fourier called the 'butterfly principle.' Instead of working a whole day at a single occupation, still less a whole lifetime, Fourier proposed that the working day should be enlivened by moving at intervals from one task to another. As so often happened with him he weakened a good idea by stretching it to absurdity: in this case by making the work periods too brief. But again I can testify from my own experience … that a four-hour work period, or a little less in the case of writing, produces the best results; and the alternation of intellectual activity with other forms of work, like gardening, wood-chopping, food-garnering, carpentry, or machine-tinkering, animates and raises to a higher pitch every other part of the day.” (Mumford 1971 The New Organum, The Myth of the Machine, The Pentagon of Power ch 14).
Fourier also sought to give workers a stake in society by way of social security, guaranteeing the provision of goods sufficient to remove all anxiety about the future from the worker and his family.
Fourier is an intriguing figure. You can see him as a pioneer technocrat, but only if you are of a technocratic mentality, which is to say that you move quickly to the easy stuff – the pushing of buttons and pulling of levers – and miss out the more complicated and messy human stuff. If I am leery of the invitations to very excited geoengineering dreams of the sea being turned into lemonade, as proof of an integral civilisation, Fourier's concern with harmony and amity is worthy. I think. I'm not keen on a unity that is uniformity and eliminates all tension as bad in itself. And I positively resist the kind of pacification that puts the life insurgent on ice. 'Harmony' and 'amity' of such a character is the kind of thing that excites technocrats and totalitarians, people who have little time for human beings. Fourier didn't make such crass errors. The neglect of the human factor comes at a heavy price, negating technological advance. The age has turned Fourier inside out and upside down. As Lewis Mumford wrote: “It was easier to conceive of a series of chemical changes that might convert salt water into sweetened citric acid than to conceive that human beings, with eyes, oars, hands, dimensions, machines, like our own might deliberately transform themselves into barbarians.”
There is no progress when quantitative expansion is accompanied by a qualitative diminution, only natural evils magnified by technological power and its reach. The expansion of means has been accompanied by a diminution and even dissolution of meaning.
Fourier's idea of a harmonic society was based on a practical idealism. It was also a vision scaled and tailored to human dimensions and proportions. Fourier's vision possessed a much deeper ethical basis and a much richer psychological basis than that of other utopians somewhat thin, arid, and one-sided rationalism, a rationalism that lent itself easily to 'thingification,' of objects, places, and persons equally. Though occasionally fantastic, Fourier's scheme for phalansteries supplied insightful and imaginative details to furnish the conception of a rational civic economy. It also inspired practical efforts to build that harmonious society. The steel manufacturer Godin built a phalanstery at Guise in France as a direct attempt to realise Fourier's ideas: it was one of the first efforts at rational industrial reorganisation and collective social housing andcommunity building. The lesson – so easily forgotten by practical minds in a rush to realise quantitative objectives – was learned – the human factor lies at the centre of progress, or it is no progress at all, only a continuation of regress. These new communities integrated work and life, making provision for the social life of the workers whilst ensuring the rational organisation of industry. In other words, they were integral components of the moral and civic economy. The weaknesses of such utopian ideals and practical endeavour, as Marx and Engels were later to point out, is that such worthy ambitions tended to be at the behest of "enlightened” employers, patrons, and politicians – the rich and powerful, which is to say, the very people who have benefited from and have stakes in the existing irrational, divided, and unjust order. Marx and Engels thus denounced as 'utopian' any scheme in which ideals were detached from their appropriate means of realisation. At the same time, if one cares to examine the proposals of the 'scientific socialists,' however sketchy, they tend to be drawn from the ideas of the utopians. The biggest difference lay at the level of agency – for Marx and Engels, the emancipation of the working classes was to be an act of the working classes themselves, a product of their own mutual aid, self-initiative and self-organisation, not of the philanthropic rich and powerful.
Fourier understood the centrality of the human factor. With that came a keen insight into the associational character of human life, following the fundamentally social nature of human beings. Fourier also understood that there is a natural limit to growth in the primary units of every association. This constraint in size, scale, quantity, and complexity is an essential attribute of all organic grouping, an awareness of which holds in check the tendencies to abstraction and inflation in overly rational ideas of planning and design. Fourier thus offers the proper alternative to large-scale, centralised organizations and the way that these come to be strangled and suffocated within by their self-imposed routine. The key to organisation is to limit the number of people and functions in the local group and to multiply and federate these groups in expanding outwards.
In fine, balance, blend, and harmony in organization and community requires an 'I-and-thou' proximity in social relations, facilitating an embedding of power and resources in human scale and personality. Such communities are based on a self-limiting principle that expands outwards through relations to similarly balanced others in community. They are therefore organic communities overcoming notions of a self-centred and/or self-contained existence. Such communities in the family, the neighbourhood, school, work, the city, and the polity furnish the milieu in which the balanced person may acquire, cultivate, and exercise his or her powers effectively. Such milieu is not simply the condition of such flourishing being but an active dimension of it. Once the self-limiting principle checking over-centralization and congestion is established, there is no upper limit to effective association promoting self-education and facilitating self-government and self-administration.
The interesting thing about the early uptake of Fourier's idea is how quickly they passed from the initiative of wealthy and influential industrial benefactors to the working class. The problem of a possible divorce of ideals and their means of realisation was resolved. What gave the schemes born of this development their great significance for future practice is that they derived their power not from any doctrinaire vanguard in possession of 'truth' and 'correct ideology' but from the inner compulsion on the part of the workers to unify those essential aspects of their lives that an era of specialisation had separated and turned against one another: re-integrating town and country, work, education, social life, and leisure. It's all of a piece, once everything is properly ordered and put in its true place. Here, Fourier's moral anthropology established the basis for a balanced and flourishing existence, giving a new pattern of development to the industrial system.
Fourier's ideas make it clear that work, citizenship, and life cannot be divorced but are co-ordinate phases of a singular life-process whose purpose is realised through emotionally mature, animated, and responsible men and women capable of ordering their existence from within. A century after Fourier, the great socialist William Morris described the modern age as 'the great sundering.' Fourier was already seeking to address the problem. The restoration and reintegration of the sundered aspects of life is the great task for the peace armies envisaged by Fourier. Fourier's conception of creating a work army for peace is an idea that William James was later to adapt his Moral Equivalent for War.
Fourier had a concerned eye for the countryside, highlighting the evils of deforestation and laying down a firm policy of conservation, proposing the creation of industrial peace armies who "instead of devastating thirty provinces in a campaign . . . will have spanned thirty rivers with bridges, re-wooded thirty barren mountains, dug thirty trenches for irrigation, and drained thirty marshes." It is want of such armies, Fourier contends, that civilization is unable to create anything great.
Fourier thus envisaged war armies being disbanded to be replaced, on a far larger scale, by peace armies. Every young man and woman, at the age of eighteen or thereabouts, should serve, perhaps, six months in a public work corps, undertaking training and performing active service in his or her own region, doing the things that needed to be done, from planting forests and roadside strips, auxiliary work in harvesting and fire-fighting to supervising children in nurseries, schools, and playgrounds to the active companionship with the aged, the blind, the infirm, from. These forms of public work were to be carried out with the educational requirements uppermost, introducing participants to a range of life's activities and modes of life. Those who demonstrate special interest and aptitude would be given the opportunity to perform similar service in an international corps, becoming active participants in the working life and culture of a planetary civilisation. Such participation in expanding community would generate such comradeship and mutual understanding as to create a world fellowship of the young, a fellowship forged in common experience in consensual devotion to common purposes, undertaken and achieved in cooperation, stimulating an ever widening area of interest in service, turning the age-old ideal of world co-operation into a working reality. Fostering such motives, character, and modes of conduct would, in time, see the emergence of a true world community, based on the activity and interest of seasoned men and women awakened to the variety and diversity of other cultures, conscious and united in an awareness of their common humanity.
People comment on Fourier's more extravagant flights of fancy, but Lewis Mumford is fundamentally correct in emphasising that “Fourier was the first of the revolutionists to project a series of radical institutional changes in terms of the whole man, and to relate the wholeness of the individual to that of the community: here he was not merely the first but remained the last.” Mumford puts his finger on Fourier's lack of influence in the practical age of industrial progress that followed: “He remained without influence precisely because of his desire for wholeness: even the Utopias that followed were born of an impoverished sense of the human personality.”(Mumford The Condition of Man 1944 ch 9). I would suggest that now we face the consequences of that unbalanced age of specialisation and separation, we return to Fourier's integral concern with wholeness, as against the still dominant technocratic mentality.
Fourier offers a useful contrast with Robert Owen in this respect. Owen spoke with the authority of experience, having been a mill owner and manager. Owen knew what he was talking about and was influential. Unfortunately, Owen's understanding of human nature was one-dimensional and simpleminded in its environmentalism, leaving a sad bequest that blights attempts at reform to this day. “His doctrine of improvement was founded on the conception of the human personality as completely plastic and passive: by artful conditioning and systematic education he proposed to wipe out false ideas, and to replace them with correct ideas about man and his powers.” (Mumford 1944 ch 9). Suffice to say, these "correct ideas" were Owen's own. Here we see the origins of a top-down vanguardism and engineering, the filling of empty heads with what Lenin called “correct ideology.” As Lewis Mumford comments, “if his [Owen's] doctrine were indeed true, it would be a better tool for despotism than for democracy: indeed, to the extent that it is true, despotism employs it.” (Mumford 1944 ch 9). We live in an age in which the people Marx derided as “would-be universal reformers” are plenty in the form of a techno-bureaucratic managerialism seeking to organise and order people and society from above and without. Such people are rootless and hence fruitless, their proposals entirely lacking in social and democratic content. They naturally appeal to and ally with the rich, the powerful, the influential, those with the resources and capacity to engineer change; they have no faith in democratic capacity. In keeping with his Enlightenment environmentalism, Owen himself was exceedingly optimistic about the natural reasonableness of man. His illusions about the reasonableness of the rich and powerful were accordingly fantastic. He wasn't alone in this, with various philosophes going over the heads of the ignorant and corrupted people to make appeals to 'enlightened despots' to rationally reorder the world. Owen's delusions were of the more modest, reformist, type, imagining that employers wouldn't oppose the workers' demands for amelioration once they had been persuaded that their own "comfortable and respectable enjoyment of life would not be affected." That same hope continued to be expressed throughout the twentieth century as a moralism and a rationalism stated in opposition to the perils of revolutionary transformation. That reformist idea is based on the view that the workers' condition could be radically improved without a substantial change in the fundamental structures of the capital system, and without reducing either the wealth or the prerogatives of the ruling class.
Fourier and Owen exerted an influence over the long run, their ideas percolating outwards and being taken up in ways that they had not envisaged. Their thoughts had far-reaching practical effects, being embodied not systematically as they had intended but incorporated and embodied by degrees.
For all of Engels' scorn, Mumford is right: “When socialists had any concrete problems to face, they could get little guidance from Marx or Engels once the initial phase of seizing power was over: they were forced to return secretly to the very thinkers they had despised.” “In terms of actual results, it is the Utopians, not the scientific socialists, who have helped define the ends of socialized production: many of the most important social inventions of the last century and a half can be traced back to them.”
Mumford reminds us that the utopian tradition, which takes in Plato and Thomas More, contains a warning to humankind with respect to the price that must be paid for mechanical perfection: “almost without exception they agree that the price of this perfection is loss of freedom, initiative, self-government.” Mumford notes the decline in utopian thought after Fourier, with honourable exceptions such as William Morris. Utopia and Icaria, Mumford emphasises, are dictatorships. The dominant strains of utopianism came to be taken over by the technocratic mentality, reducing ends to means and inflating means to the status of ends. Mumford condemns the modern utopians for their lack of imagination: “the Utopian revolutionists were guilty of an even graver weakness—not the fact that they dreamed so copiously, but the fact that their dreams were so mediocre. Try as they would, the most optimistic minds of the nineteenth century were all obsessed by the utilitarian ideology: Bellamy no less than Marx, Engels no less than Spencer, could conceive of a better future only in terms of the widening triumphs of industrialism. For all these thinkers, the command of materials and natural forces might be only a preliminary step: but their goals were indefinable except in terms of this step—and beyond that their notions of a developing human life were nebulous. It is important to understand this obsession: the most extreme idealists shared it with the most sordid practical men. It explains the sense of fear that "progressive" and "liberal" minds still experience at the very possibility of a more human orientation. Their vision of perfection too rarely rises above the level of the machine. They do not suspect that when Prometheus stole the fire from Heaven he left even more valuable gifts behind.” (Mumford The Condition of Man 1944 ch 9 p.329).
Precisely so. The technocratic mind is characterised by the fear of and contempt for a more human orientation. To technocrats, human beings are erring, deviant, mediocre, limited creatures falling far short of the perfect reasoning machines they take as their ideal. Which is to say that technocrats are really intent on building a casing for robots, the arid environment of the machine.
This is light years away from Fourier. And thoroughly mediocre, a perfect inhumanism. It resolves the difficult issues of life by dismissing and ignoring them. It focuses on the easy, that which can be objectified, quantified, and measured (and commodified), and disregards the human. It wasn't a mistake that Charles Fourier, for all of his quirks, made. I'll end on this note: Fourier was the man who coined the term 'feminism,' who argued that women should have equal rights with men, and who is the founder of the feminist tradition within socialism. He was an incredibly advanced thinker in many respects. Read up on him. I don't always agree with him. I read that many women were enthusiastic followers of Fourier, who argued for the total emancipation of women: “The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.”
Utopia or dystopia? Agree, disagree, argue, discuss, Charles Fourier offers a lot of food for thought. I'll go for the associational development of his thought.
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