Charles Fourier

Charles Fourier HOME from: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
Charles Fourier “Universal Harmony” The calculus of Harmony, for which Madame A. F. seeks publicity, is a discovery that the human race was far from expecting. It is a mathematical theory concerning the destinies of all the globes and their inhabitants, a theory of the sixteen social orders which can be established on the diverse globes throughout eternity. Of the sixteen possible societies, only three are to be seen on our globe: Savagery, Barbarism and Civilisation. Soon they will come to an end, and all the nations of the earth will enter the fifteenth stage which is Simple Harmony. Great men of all the centuries! Newton and Leibnitz, Voltaire and Rousseau, do you know in what you are great? In blindness. You will soon seem like no more than great madmen for having thought that civilisation was the social destiny of the human race. How could you have failed to understand that these three societies, the savage, the barbarian and the civilised, are but rungs to be climbed, that they are reason’s age of childhood and imbecility, and that God would be improvident if he had conceived of nothing better adapted to human happiness? These three societies are the most disastrous among the sixteen. Of the sixteen there are seven which will see the establishment of perpetual peace, universal unity, the liberty of women. I owe this astonishing discovery to the analytic and synthetic calculus of passionate attraction which our savants have deemed unworthy of attention during their two thousand five hundred years of study. They have discovered the laws of material movement; that’s all very well, but it doesn’t get rid of poverty. It was necessary to discover the laws of social movement. Their invention is going to lead the human race to opulence, to sensual pleasures, to the unity of the globe. I repeat, this theory will be geometrical and applied to the physical sciences. It is not an arbitrary doctrine like the political and moral sciences, which are going to meet a sad fate. There is going to be a great disaster at the libraries. If ever war was deplorable, it is at this moment. Soon the victors will be on the same level as the vanquished. What point is there in conquests when the entire globe will comprise but a single nation, will be run by a single administration? In spite of this unity, there will be no equality in harmony. To the chief of France can be reserved the honour of extracting the human race from social chaos, of being the founder of Harmony and the liberator of the globe. The rewards which this honour entails will not be modest, and they will be transmitted in perpetuity to the descendants of the founder. Some readers will cry out: “dream,” “visionary.” Patience! In a short time we will wake them from their own frightful dream, the dream of civilisation. Blind savants, just look at your cities paved with beggars, your citizens struggling against hunger, your battlefields and all your social infamies. Do you still believe that civilisation is the destiny of the human race? Or was J.-J. Rousseau right in saying of the civilised: “These are not men; there is a disorder in things, the cause of which we have not yet fathomed.” [...] [...] Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilised societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich. The newly freed slave takes fright at the need of providing for his own subsistence and hastens to sell himself back into slavery in order to escape this new anxiety that hangs over him like Damocles’ sword. In thoughtlessly giving him liberty without wealth, you merely replace his physical torment with a mental torment. He finds life burdensome in his new state. Thus when you give liberty to the people, it must be bolstered by two supports which are the guarantee of comfort and industrial attraction... Equality of rights is another chimera, praiseworthy when considered in the abstract and ridiculous from the standpoint of the means employed to introduce it in civilization. The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum. This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work. They begin with pompous lists of the elect from privileged families to whom the law guarantees an income of fifty or one hundred thousand francs for the simple task of governing the people or sitting in an upholstered seat and voting with the majority in a senate. If the first page of the constitutions serves to provide administrators with guarantees of affluence and idleness, it would be well for the second page to pay some attention to the lot of the lower classes, to the proportional minimum and the right to work, which are omitted in all constitutions, and to the right to pleasure, which is guaranteed only by the mechanism of the industrial series... Let’s turn to fraternity. Our discussion here will be amusing, at once loathsome and learned. It is amusing in view of the imbecility of the theories which have purported to establish fraternity. It is loathsome when one recalls the horrors that the ideal of fraternity has masked. But it is a problem which deserves particular attention from science; for societies will attain their goal, and man his dignity, only when universal fraternity has become an established fact. By universal fraternity we mean a degree of general intimacy which can only be realized if four conditions are satisfied: • Comfort for the people and the assurance of a splendid minimum; • The education and instruction of the lower classes; • General truthfulness in work relations. • The rendering of reciprocal services by unequal classes. Once these four conditions are met, the rich Mondor will have truly fraternal relations with Irus who, despite his poverty, will have no need of a protector and no motive to deceive anyone, and whose fine education will enable him to associate with princes.. As for the present, how could there by any fraternity between sybarites steeped in refinements and our coarse, hungry peasants who are covered with rags and often with vermin and who carry contagious diseases like typhus, mange and other such fruits of civilized poverty? What sort of fraternity could ever be established between such heterogeneous classes of men? “It is easy to compress the passions by violence. Philosophy suppresses them with a stroke of the pen. Locks and the sword come to the aid of sweet morality, but nature appeals these judgments; she regains her rights in secret. Passion stifled at one point reappears at another like water held back by a dike; it is driven inward like the fluid of an ulcer closed to soon.” Despite all its vices, commerce is regarded as a perfect method of exchange because the contracting parties are free to come to terms or to decline to do so. This freedom is only a negative benefit. It has no value except by comparison with the methods of the barbarians, with requisitions, maximums, tariffs, etc. It is far from sufficient in itself to secure equity, fidelity, confidence or economy in exchanges. These and other benefits have no place in the commercial order, which establishes all the opposite vices. Commerce allows deceit and plunder to triumph; it creates a climate of mistrust which impedes the development of economic relations and necessitates expensive precautions. Finally it hinders and complicates the whole process of exchange.

Charles Fourier HOME

from: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;

Charles Fourier

“Universal Harmony”

The calculus of Harmony, for which Madame A. F. seeks publicity, is a discovery that the human race was far from expecting. It is a mathematical theory concerning the destinies of all the globes and their inhabitants, a theory of the sixteen social orders which can be established on the diverse globes throughout eternity.

Of the sixteen possible societies, only three are to be seen on our globe: Savagery, Barbarism and Civilisation. Soon they will come to an end, and all the nations of the earth will enter the fifteenth stage which is Simple Harmony.

Great men of all the centuries! Newton and Leibnitz, Voltaire and Rousseau, do you know in what you are great? In blindness. You will soon seem like no more than great madmen for having thought that civilisation was the social destiny of the human race. How could you have failed to understand that these three societies, the savage, the barbarian and the civilised, are but rungs to be climbed, that they are reason’s age of childhood and imbecility, and that God would be improvident if he had conceived of nothing better adapted to human happiness? These three societies are the most disastrous among the sixteen. Of the sixteen there are seven which will see the establishment of perpetual peace, universal unity, the liberty of women.

I owe this astonishing discovery to the analytic and synthetic calculus of passionate attraction which our savants have deemed unworthy of attention during their two thousand five hundred years of study. They have discovered the laws of material movement; that’s all very well, but it doesn’t get rid of poverty. It was necessary to discover the laws of social movement. Their invention is going to lead the human race to opulence, to sensual pleasures, to the unity of the globe. I repeat, this theory will be geometrical and applied to the physical sciences. It is not an arbitrary doctrine like the political and moral sciences, which are going to meet a sad fate. There is going to be a great disaster at the libraries.

If ever war was deplorable, it is at this moment. Soon the victors will be on the same level as the vanquished. What point is there in conquests when the entire globe will comprise but a single nation, will be run by a single administration? In spite of this unity, there will be no equality in harmony.

To the chief of France can be reserved the honour of extracting the human race from social chaos, of being the founder of Harmony and the liberator of the globe. The rewards which this honour entails will not be modest, and they will be transmitted in perpetuity to the descendants of the founder.

Some readers will cry out: “dream,” “visionary.” Patience! In a short time we will wake them from their own frightful dream, the dream of civilisation. Blind savants, just look at your cities paved with beggars, your citizens struggling against hunger, your battlefields and all your social infamies. Do you still believe that civilisation is the destiny of the human race? Or was J.-J. Rousseau right in saying of the civilised: “These are not men; there is a disorder in things, the cause of which we have not yet fathomed.”
[...]

[...]
Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilised societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich. The newly freed slave takes fright at the need of providing for his own subsistence and hastens to sell himself back into slavery in order to escape this new anxiety that hangs over him like Damocles’ sword. In thoughtlessly giving him liberty without wealth, you merely replace his physical torment with a mental torment. He finds life burdensome in his new state. Thus when you give liberty to the people, it must be bolstered by two supports which are the guarantee of comfort and industrial attraction...

Equality of rights is another chimera, praiseworthy when considered in the abstract and ridiculous from the standpoint of the means employed to introduce it in civilization. The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum. This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work. They begin with pompous lists of the elect from privileged families to whom the law guarantees an income of fifty or one hundred thousand francs for the simple task of governing the people or sitting in an upholstered seat and voting with the majority in a senate. If the first page of the constitutions serves to provide administrators with guarantees of affluence and idleness, it would be well for the second page to pay some attention to the lot of the lower classes, to the proportional minimum and the right to work, which are omitted in all constitutions, and to the right to pleasure, which is guaranteed only by the mechanism of the industrial series...

Let’s turn to fraternity. Our discussion here will be amusing, at once loathsome and learned. It is amusing in view of the imbecility of the theories which have purported to establish fraternity. It is loathsome when one recalls the horrors that the ideal of fraternity has masked. But it is a problem which deserves particular attention from science; for societies will attain their goal, and man his dignity, only when universal fraternity has become an established fact. By universal fraternity we mean a degree of general intimacy which can only be realized if four conditions are satisfied:

• Comfort for the people and the assurance of a splendid minimum;
• The education and instruction of the lower classes;
• General truthfulness in work relations.
• The rendering of reciprocal services by unequal classes.

Once these four conditions are met, the rich Mondor will have truly fraternal relations with Irus who, despite his poverty, will have no need of a protector and no motive to deceive anyone, and whose fine education will enable him to associate with princes..
As for the present, how could there by any fraternity between sybarites steeped in refinements and our coarse, hungry peasants who are covered with rags and often with vermin and who carry contagious diseases like typhus, mange and other such fruits of civilized poverty? What sort of fraternity could ever be established between such heterogeneous classes of men?

“It is easy to compress the passions by violence. Philosophy suppresses them with a stroke of the pen. Locks and the sword come to the aid of sweet morality, but nature appeals these judgments; she regains her rights in secret. Passion stifled at one point reappears at another like water held back by a dike; it is driven inward like the fluid of an ulcer closed to soon.”

Despite all its vices, commerce is regarded as a perfect method of exchange because the contracting parties are free to come to terms or to decline to do so. This freedom is only a negative benefit. It has no value except by comparison with the methods of the barbarians, with requisitions, maximums, tariffs, etc. It is far from sufficient in itself to secure equity, fidelity, confidence or economy in exchanges. These and other benefits have no place in the commercial order, which establishes all the opposite vices. Commerce allows deceit and plunder to triumph; it creates a climate of mistrust which impedes the development of economic relations and necessitates expensive precautions. Finally it hinders and complicates the whole process of exchange.