Richard Heilbroner on the ideas of the businessman Charles Fourier, born 1772, who proposed utopian communities named phalanst
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hiding the ellipsis
hiding the ellipsis
Richard Heilbroner on the ideas of the businessman Charles Fourier, born 1772, who proposed utopian communities named phalanst
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“None of the dream communities took solid root. ”
Hm… except that the Hutterites and Mennonites and Amish are still living by intent. The Shakers survived as an organization into my lifetime – only just, I admit; I think there are a few very old Shakers alive.
I’ve known someone who grew up on “The Farm” commune, or one of them, and I understand it’s split up and some parts reformed but there’s still a core as powerful as a sourdough starter.
(Sidelight I always think of at this point; why did they turn into kitchen goods’ brand-names? Amana, Oneida, Shaker… I know the Shakers sold food. Did Amana produce iceboxes?)
It may be true that no dream community took root without the advice of some actual farmers or builders. Few children are big enough to slaughter an ox, for instance, and it’s not the best work for anyone whose immune system isn’t fully operative yet.
On the other hand, Ostrom again; there are other ways people have coöperated. On a third hand, to be almost totally unserious, there’s the Ken MacLeod space marine character who does coffeemaking and washing-up because “Who’s going to do the dirty work? I will.”, which extends to morally dirty work.
Kids in the slaughter houses? Wow! I suppose kids could do a good job on chickens and ducks and rabbits and the like.
One of my best friends from graduate school formed a commune near Cottage Grove, Oregon, back in the 70s when that particular era of idealism led urbanites into the country (three families from St. Louis buy a small farm and give as much acreage to zuchhini as to corn–the August we visited they had a zuchhini explosion). Two anecdotes from that experience. One winter, there were over 30 people living and or hangin out on th land–my friend Jerome who was teaching in Eugene was the only one with an income.
When we visited with our kids, there was friction among the women — Judith, mother of two daughters, was buying conditioner to keep the girls’ hair untangled, but the woman with no children saw this as wasteful. There was ongoing, genuine tension over a couple dollars’ expenditure. I love ideology right up to the point it wants me to do something stupid: then I say, too bad for the ideology.
If taken as an ideological root, we could probably trace Fourier’s idealistic strands far and wide. So while his model didn’t manifest into many grand-scale socialist co-ops in the U.S. or elsewhere, he was influential on Emerson, Thoreau, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bronson Alcott and the Fruitlands troop, Samuel Sewell, and so on (please forgive the list; for some notes, I’m using up the end of a composition book that coincidentally holds other notes from a seminar in transcendentalism). And we know that Gandhi and M.L. King Jr. (to name two), were up on Emerson, Thoreau, et al.
So when I read that “dream communities” didn’t take solid root, I wonder whether Fourier planted the concept of antinomianism (in my notes–rel. to destabalizing moral certitude) sufficiently deep that years later, through conviction and hope, bolstered by hard labor and dirty work, dream-change was possible. I hazard this somewhat sheepishly because I’m not sure if it makes sense, but I wanted to suggest a connection between this and the soul-force (commonly in the midst of grave material conditions) that, spun distantly out of Fourierism and other influences, transformed civil society in the 20th century for the good. Perhaps such transformations were possible because Fourier and antinomianism were and remain in the flanks.
Possibly another thinker affected by Fourier’s idealistic strand is Marx. Jerome Siegel, in his book, Marx’s Fate: the Shape of a Life claims that the famous description of life under communism in The German Ideology as one where a man could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, criticize in the evening, etc., is an allusion to Fourier’s account of day in the life of a member of his ideal community Harmony. This communitarian, named Mondor (an ominous name in these Tolkien-tinged times, but the hell with him), starts his summer day with hunters, then moves on to fisherman, and…well, you get the idea.
What an interesting thread. If anyone doesn’t mind me butting in, I’m actually a graduate student writing my thesis on the last remaining Shakers, on their commune in Maine. I’m trying to figure out why this particular group of Shakers has survived – can anyone recommend any good books (academic or otherwise) on utopian philosophy, or religious utopianism, or anything that anyone feels might be relevant? People on this board seem to know what they are talking about (at least, at first lurk). Thanks a million in advance!