[1] An excellent edition of the works of Saint-Simon and Enfantin was begun by survivors of the sect in (Paris) 1865, and now numbers forty vols. See Reybaud, Études sur les réformateurs modernes (7th edition, Paris 1864); Janet, Saint-Simon et le Saint-Simonisme (Paris, 1878); A. J. Booth, Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism (London, 1871).

FOURIER

Considered as a purely literary and speculative product, the socialism of Fourier was prior to those both of Owen and Saint-Simon. Fourier’s first work, Théorie des Quatre Movements, was published as early as 1808. His system, however, scarcely attracted any attention and exercised no influence till the movements originated by Owen and Saint-Simon had begun to decline.

The socialism of Fourier is in many respects fundamentally different from that of Saint-Simon; in the two schools, in fact, we find the two opposing types of socialism which have continued to prevail ever since. Saint-Simonism represented the principle of authority, of centralisation; while Fourier made all possible provision for local and individual freedom. With Saint-Simonism the State is the starting-point, the normal and dominant power; in Fourier the like position is held by a local body, corresponding to the commune, which he called the Phalange. In the system of Fourier the phalange holds the supreme and central place, other organisation in comparison with it being secondary and subordinate.

The deviser of the phalange, François Marie Charles Fourier[[1]] was a very remarkable man. He was born at Besançon in 1772, and received from his father, a prosperous draper, an excellent education at the academy of his native town. The boy excelled in the studies of the school, and regretfully abandoned them for a business career, which he followed in various towns of France. As a commercial traveller in Holland and Germany he enlarged his experience of men and things. From his father Fourier inherited a sum of about £3000, with which he started business at Lyons, but he lost all he had in the siege of that city by the Jacobins during the Reign of Terror, was thrown into prison, and narrowly escaped the guillotine. On his release he joined the army for two years, and then returned to his old way of life.

At a very early age Fourier had his attention called to the defects of the prevalent commercial system. When only five years old he had been punished for speaking the truth about certain goods in his father’s shop; and at the age of twenty-seven he had at Marseilles to superintend the destruction of an immense quantity of rice held for higher prices during a scarcity of food till it had become unfit for use. The conviction grew within him that a system which involved such abuses and immoralities must be radically evil. Feeling that it was his mission to find a remedy for it, he spent his life in the discovery, elucidation, and propagation of a better order; and he brought to his task a self-denial and singleness of purpose which have seldom been surpassed. For the last ten years of his life he waited in his apartments at noon every day for the wealthy capitalist who should supply the means for the realisation of his schemes. The tangible success obtained by his system was very slight. His works found few readers and still fewer disciples.

It was chiefly after the decline of the Saint-Simon movement that he gained a hearing and a little, success. A small group of enthusiastic adherents gathered round him; a journal was started for the propagation of his views; and in 1832 an attempt was made on lands near Versailles to establish a phalange, which, however, proved a total failure. In 1837 Fourier passed away from a world that showed little inclination to listen to his teaching. A singular altruism was in his character blended with the most sanguine confidence in the possibilities of human progress. Perhaps the weakest point in his teaching was that he so greatly underestimated the strength of the unregenerate residuum in human nature. His own life was a model of simplicity, integrity, kindliness, and disinterested devotion to what he deemed the highest aims.

The social system of Fourier was, we need not say, the central point in his speculations. But as his social system was moulded and coloured by his peculiar views on theology, cosmogony, and psychology, we must give some account of those aspects of his teaching. In theology Fourier inclined, though not decidedly, to what is called pantheism; the pantheistic conception of the world which underlay the Saint-Simon theory of the ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’ may be said to form the basis also of the social ethics and arrangements of Fourier. Along with this he held a natural optimism of the most radical and comprehensive character. God has done all things well, only man has misunderstood and thwarted His benevolent purposes. God pervades everything as a universal attraction. Whereas Newton discovered that the law of attraction governs one movement of the world, Fourier shows that it is universal, ruling the world in all its movements, which are four—material, organic, intellectual, and social. It is the same law of attraction which pervades all things, from the cosmic harmony of the stars down to the puny life of the minutest insect, and which would reign also in the human soul and in human society, if the intentions of the Creator were understood. In the elucidation of his system Fourier’s aim simply is to interpret the intentions of the Creator. He regards his philosophy, not as ingenious guesses or speculations, but as discoveries plainly traceable from a few first principles; discoveries in no way doubtful, but the fruit of clear insight into the divine law.

The cosmogony of Fourier is the most fantastic part of a fantastic system. But as he did not consider his views in this department an essential part of his system, we need not dwell upon them. He believed that the world is to exist for eighty thousand years, forty thousand years of progress being followed by forty thousand years of decline. As yet it has not reached the adult stage, having lasted only seven thousand years. The present stage of the world is civilisation, which Fourier uses as a comprehensive term for everything artificial and corrupt, the result of perverted human institutions, themselves due to the fact that we have for five thousand years misunderstood the intentions of the Creator. The head and front of this misunderstanding consists in our pronouncing passions to be bad that are simply natural; and there is but one way of redressing it—to give a free and healthy and complete development to our passions.