“My detractors condemn themselves in attacking me on account of my views touching the new sciences—cosmogony, psychogony, analogy—which lie outside of the domain of the theory of combined industry. Although it should prove true that these new sciences are erroneous and foolish,[71] it does not remain less certain that I am the first and the only one who has presented a plan for associating inequalities and for quadrupling the products of industry in employing such passions, characters, and instincts as nature has given us. This is the only point upon which people ought to fix their attention, and not upon sciences which have only been announced.”
The “Traité de l’Association” is prolix and tedious. It abounds in meaningless combinations of figures, letters, and hieroglyphics. New and strange words, coined without necessity, often render the thoughts difficult to understand. The wheat which it undoubtedly contains is buried beneath such an immense pile of chaff that it is too likely to be overlooked. Fortunately, Fourier has given us a better and more condensed exposition of his doctrine in the “Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire”—“The New Industrial and Social World”—published in 1829,[72] and the latest of his more important works.
The central idea of Fourier’s social scheme is association. The all-pervading attraction which he discovered draws man to man and reveals the will of God. It is passionate attraction—attraction passionnelle. It urges men to union. This law of attraction is universal and eternal, but men have thrown obstacles in its way so that it has not had free course. Consequently, we have been driven into wrong and abnormal paths. When we return to right ways—when we follow the directions given us by attraction, as indicated in our twelve passions or desires—universal harmony will again reign. Economic goods—an indispensable condition of human development—will be obtained in abundance. Products will be increased many fold, owing, first, to the operation of the passion to labor and to benefit society; secondly, to the economy of associated effort.
Since happiness and misery depend upon the latitude allowed our passions—our propensities—it is necessary to enumerate these. They are divided into three classes—the one class tending to luxe, luxisme, luxury; the second tending to groups; the third to series. By luxe is meant the gratification of the desires of the five senses—hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling—each one constituting a passion. These are sensual in the original sense of the word, or sensitive. Four passions tend to groups—viz., amity or friendship, love, paternity or the family feeling (familism), and ambition. These are affective. The three remaining passions are distributive, and belong to the series. They are the passions called cabaliste, papillonne, and composite. The passion cabaliste is the desire for intrigue, for planning and contriving. It is strong in women and the ambitious. In itself it would tend to destroy the unity of social life, as would also the passion papillonne, or alternante (the love of change). These are, however, harmonized by the passion composite (the desire of union). All twelve passions unite together into the one mighty, all-controlling impulse, called unitéisme, which is the love felt for others united in society, and is a passion unknown in civilization. It is rather difficult for the uninitiated to see how this differs from the passion composite, unless it be in strength. The following table serves to make the relations of the passions clearer:[73]
| Seeing | Passions tending (pertaining) to luxury (sensual or sensitive). | Unitéisme. |
| Hearing | ||
| Smelling | ||
| Feeling | ||
| Tasting | ||
| Amity | Passions tending to groups (affective). | |
| Love | ||
| Paternity | ||
| Ambition | ||
| Cabaliste | Passions tending to series (distributive). | |
| Papillonne, or alternante | ||
| Composite |
A social organization must be formed which will allow free play to our passions, so that they may combine harmoniously. Our present society, called civilization,[74] does not, and cannot, do this. It is a system of oppression and repression, and is necessarily a frightful discord. Harmony can only be found in combinations of suitable numbers in communities known as phalanxes, and occupying buildings called phalansteries. Each phalanx is a unit, a great family, and dwells in a single building, a phalanstery. What is it that determines the proper number for a single phalanx? It is again the twelve passions of man. These can be combined in eight hundred and twenty different ways in as many individuals, and no possible combination ought to be unrepresented in the workers of any phalanx, or there will be a lack of perfect harmony. But in every community there will be found old men, infants, and those disabled on account of illness or accident. Provision must also be made for absences. There ought not, then, to be less than fifteen or sixteen hundred members in a phalanx, though four hundred is mentioned as a possible but undesirable minimum. Eighteen hundred to two thousand members are recommended. A larger number would produce discord, and is, therefore, inadmissible. But a further arrangement is necessary. These different characters thrown together helter-skelter would no more produce harmony than it would for one blindfolded to draw from a bag two thousand combinations of notes for the piano and play them in the order in which they were drawn. On the contrary, they must be ordered intelligently in series, the series combined into groups, and the groups united into the phalanx. Those having similar tastes form a series, which must consist of some seven, eight, or nine members. Several series having related tastes and desires unite in a group. A group undertakes some one kind of labor, as the care of fruit-trees, and a series concerns itself with one particular branch of the labor of a group, as the care of apple-trees.
All labor becomes pleasant to man, as nature meant it should be. It is only when he is forced to do a kind which he does not like, or is obliged to over-work, that productive exertion becomes repulsive. This is avoided in the phalanxes, as each one is allowed to follow his own bent, being at perfect liberty to join any group of laborers or to change from group to group as he may see fit. In fact, the desire for change—the passion papillonne, or alternante—is so strong that at the expiration of two hours a change is usually made from one kind of labor to another. Work of this character becomes play, and children like it, while men are as fond of it as of athletic sports. We now discover men undergoing severe physical exertion for the sake of excelling in running, swimming, wrestling, rowing, etc. There will spring up a similar rivalry between groups of cultivators in the phalanxes. One set of laborers will endeavor to obtain more useful products from ten or one hundred acres than another similar group from the same extent of land of like quality. We find such a rivalry at present among cultivators of the soil, and it might undoubtedly be increased in organizations such as Fourier described. Every fall you see it reported in local papers that farmer A has raised, let us say, four hundred bushels of oats from ten acres; this at once provokes B to inform the world that his ten acres yielded five hundred bushels. C may report five hundred and fifty bushels in the coming year. This demonstrates the existence of a rivalry of a valuable kind, of which much might be made. But Fourier pushed things to an extreme when he thought that the productiveness of labor might thereby be increased fourfold, or even fivefold. He held that a man could produce enough under his social régime from his eighteenth to twenty-eighth year, so that he could pass the remainder of his life in elegant leisure. He maintained, too, that if England should introduce his socialistic phalanxes her labor would become so productive that she could pay off her national debt in six months by the sale of hens’ eggs. This is what he says on this point: “It is not by millions, but by billions, that we shall value the product of small objects which are to-day despised. It is now the turn of eggs to play a grand rôle, and resolve a problem before which those learned in European finance have grown pale. They only know how to increase public indebtedness. We are going to extinguish the colossal English debt on a fixed day with half of the eggs produced during a single year. We shall not lay violent hands on a single fowl, and the work of accomplishing our purpose, instead of being burdensome, will be an amusement for the globe.
“Let us make an arithmetical calculation. We wish to pay a debt of twenty-five billions during the year 1835, with hen’s eggs.
“Let us estimate, to begin with, the real value of these eggs. I appraise them at ten sous or half a franc a dozen, when they are guaranteed fresh and of a good size, like those of the hens of Caux....