![]() (Strangely, while Fourier had a great faith in the motivational spur of comradely rivalry, he had little trepidation about the dark power of jealousy as an entrenched human - perhaps even animal - trait.) Wages are, for Fourier, a scourge, and should be replaced by a dividend or share of profits, and no one should be obliged to toil for a pittance. Love, whether spiritual or physical, would be allowed to flourish whenever and however it began to blossom, and bitterness and resentment would subsequently evaporate almost overnight. Fourier was not a fan of bread.) By banishing monogamy, people would no longer be obliged to cheat, lie, and sneak. ![]() Removing obstacles was paramount, and the main obstacles in Fourier’s eyes were what we today call compulsory monogamy, wage slavery, alienated labor, financial insecurity, and finance capitalism. Everything else would follow smoothly and swiftly in its wake. (Where “Eros” is figured not in its reduced form, as merely the sexual, but as the pulse of life and joy which Lucretius believed lies at the origin of life’s spark.) In other words, Fourier provided a fully fledged theory of alienation, several decades before Marx, just as he had a fully fledged theory of repression nearly a century before Freud.įourier was insistent that we need not force a violent revolution in order to usher in a new age we just need to rearrange some of our social mechanisms and better regulate our intimate relations. While humanity has made great technical strides, according to our guide, which have led to astonishing leaps in our capacity to exploit nature for profit, we have not paid any attention to our own inclinations, our own souls, our own hunger for freedom, play, sensual exploration, artistic expression, confraternity, and collective erotic interaction. Civilization names a dark age of hypocrisy, disorientation, and universal unhappiness, where even the very rich are imprisoned in simply a more comfortable class of misery than the rest of us. Make no mistake, when Fourier uses the term “civilized”, he is not marking a higher state or achievement, but rather hurling an insult with a curled lip. The problem, according to Fourier, is not with our primal urges, but with the way these desires are stifled, stunted, and warped by civilization (a time period in the Western Hemisphere that dates from the ancient Greeks, by his reckoning). Fourier’s most essential claim would have seen him burnt at the stake a century or so earlier: specifically, that all of humanity’s various instincts and passions, including lust, are part of God’s grand design and should not be repressed or stigmatized as sinful. Even so, he enjoyed a staggering confidence in his own knowledge, and presumed unprecedented mastery of every branch of the human and natural sciences (cosmology, meteorology, geography, anthropology, etc. (Indeed, I would argue that Fourier is a more amusing satirist than Jonathan Swift, for the simple reason that the former is deadly serious.)įourier’s writing smells (pleasantly, to my nose) “of the lamp”, since he was obliged to work late into the night, after working as a traveling sales clerk during the day (mostly in connection with the silk trade of his native Lyon). Indeed, reading Fourier is quite a dissonant experience, given that he is as perceptive as he is naïve, and as prescient as he is absurd. He was a scientific fantasist, a pedantic fabulist, a colonialist abolitionist, a revolutionary thinker who hated and feared revolutions, and a hyper-controlling conductor of freedom. He was a passionate rationalist and a utopian pessimist (in the sense he believed we live in the worst of possible worlds, but are only a few months away from flipping this scenario on its head). (Or at least the way commerce was practiced in his day.) He was a cosmopolitan universalist, susceptible to selective racism. There is also no shortage of paradoxes in Fourier’s character. And most famously of all, he claimed a shift in our local cosmic conditions would change the chemical makeup of the earth’s oceans, so that they would taste like lemonade. He believed lions and sharks would soon die out, replaced by “anti-sharks” and “anti-lions”. He believed that children could be motivated to happily do most of the labor in our future communes, like Oompa-Loompas. So let’s get some of them out of the way from the get-go. It is impossible to broach the topic of Fourier, however, without discussing some of his many eccentricities.
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