Background
Charles Fourier was born on April 7, 1772, in Besançon, France. He was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant.
(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1857 edition. Excerpt: ... No one can go against public opinion with impunity; and philosophy, which reigns over the nineteenth century, will raise more prejudices against me than superstition raised in the fifteenth against Columbus. Still, if he found in Ferdinand and Isabella sovereigns less prejudiced and more enlightened than all the brilliant geniuses of the age, may not I, like him, count on the support of some sovereign more far-seeing than his contemporaries? And although the sophists of the nineteenth century will repeat with those of the fourteenth that there is nothing new to discover, may it not happen that some potentate will be willing to try the experiment which was made by the sovereigns of Castile? They certainly hazarded very little in risking a vessel with the chance of discovering a New World, and of acquiring empire over it; and a sovereign of the nineteenth century might say: "Let us risk a square league of land for trying the experiment of Association; it is certainly hazarding very little to have the chance of extricating the human race from Social Chaos, of ascending the throne of Universal Unity, and transmitting the sceptre of the world through all time to our descendants." What is the cause of the greater or legs eccentricity of orbits? What are the Iuws of the grouping and the revolutions of the heavenly bodies? Why do certain stars revolve, as moons, round a centre, like the satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, and Herschel? Why do other;, like Venus, Mars, etc., move in an independent orbit? Why has Herschel, sixteen times smaller than Jupiter, eight moons, while the latter has only four? Is not the colossal Jupiter entitled to the greater number of moons? He should, according to his dimensions, attract sixteen times ns many as Herschel....
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(This remarkable book, written soon after the French Revol...)
This remarkable book, written soon after the French Revolution, has traditionally been considered one of the founding documents in the history of socialism. It introduces the best known and most extraordinary Utopia written in the past two centuries. Charles Fourier was among the first to formulate a right to a minimum standard of life. His radical approach involved a systematic critique of work, marriage and patriarchy, together with a parallel right to a "sexual minimum."
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(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTION More than one of our readers perhaps will be somewhat scandalised to see the name of Fourier enter into this collection,1 following upon that of Adam Smith, of J. B. Say, of Ricardo:--but no one, surely, will be more surprised than Fourier himself would have been, had he been able to behold himself in such company. He professed, in fact, for all economists (whom, indeed, with the exception of J. B. Say, he appears not to have read), and for political economy itself, a supreme contempt, and he classed this science, along with metaphysics, moral philosophy, and politics, under the head of the "four uncertain sciences," an epithet which really implies nothing very dishonourable; but neither is it one altogether undeserved. Everybody knows Fourier by name; nobody has read his books: consequently, although almost a contemporary, he already belongs to a legendary world. Cham's albums of caricature, which represent him with a tail having an eye at its extremity, Louis Reybaud's "Etudes sur les ReTormateurs modernes," inspired by somewhat the same spirit, some words of his vocabulary, which by their oddity impressed themselves upon the mmd--phalanstire, papillonne, cabaliste, Pattraction passionelle--: these are about the only records by which the public has been able to form an idea of Fourier, and this idea may be summed up in two words: he was a socialist of the worst type, that is, of the communist type, and a madman. And I may add that those who perchance might have the courage to go back to Fourier's books themselves, would find themselves rather confirmed in their unflattering opinion, at least if they consulted the original editions, and if they stopped at a first examination. And indeed the sight of those enormous 1 The...
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(Admired by Marx and Engels, the Surrealists, the Situatio...)
Admired by Marx and Engels, the Surrealists, the Situationists, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, the great utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) has been many things to many people: a proto-feminist, a Surrealist ancestor, a cantankerous cosmologist, a social critic and humorist and to this day one of France's truest visionary thinkers. He was also, as this volume demonstrates, a maniacal taxonomist. In this zoological guidebook to cuckoldry and commerce, Fourier offers a caustic critique of the bankruptcy of marriage and the prostitution of the economy, and the hypocrisies of a civilization that over-regulates sexual congress while allowing the financial sector to screw over the public. Gathered together here for the first time are Fourier's two Hierarchies --humorously regimented parades of civilization's cheaters and cheated-on in the domestic sphere of sex and the economic sphere of buying and selling commodities. The Hierarchy of Cuckoldry --translated into English for the first time--presents 72 species of the male cuckold, ranging from such common class cases as the Health-Conscious Cuckolds, to the short-horned Sympathetic, Optimist and Mystical Cuckolds, and the Long-horned varieties of the Irate, Disgraced and Posthumous Cuckolds. For Fourier, these amount to 72 manifestations of women's secret insurrection against the institution of marriage. The Hierarchy of Bankruptcy presents 36 species of the fraudulent bankrupt: a range of Light, Grandiose, and Contemptible shades of financial manipulators who force creditors, cities and even nations to bail them out of ultimately profitable bankruptcies. In these attacks on the morality of monogamy and the perils of laissez-faire capitalism, Fourier's Hierarchies resonate uncannily with our contemporary world.
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Charles Fourier was born on April 7, 1772, in Besançon, France. He was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant.
In 1823 Charles Fourier settled permanently in Paris. The sole thought of his life was to find a “way out” that he might propose to his contemporaries. The goal is the free governance of things by individuals who are at once completely free, fully mature, and highly organized. Had not the French monarchy already shown great adaptability, having been feudal in the Middle Ages, absolute under Louis xiv, and bourgeois under Louis Philippe? There seemed to Fourier no reason why it could not also adapt to the new industrialism.
Yet the only thinkers who acknowledged a direct debt to Fourier were the Russian revolutionaries Herzen, Petrachevsky, and Tchernichevsky.
Nevertheless, Fourierism did not remain an abstract Utopia. One of these enterprises took on an urban and industrial aspect—the familistere at Guise (in northern France).
Some of Fourier’s disciples put little trust in the success of these partial realizations of his scheme and held that a total transformation of society was called for.
Rallying around Victor Considerant, 1808-1893, they entered into political life and became a real force for some years, but with the advent of Napoleon in they could do no better than merge into the bourgeois opposition to the Second Empire.
(Admired by Marx and Engels, the Surrealists, the Situatio...)
(This remarkable book, written soon after the French Revol...)
(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
Father
Fourier