Title: The utopian alternative : Fourierism in nineteenth-century America /
Authors: Guarneri, Carl, 1950-
Publisher: Cornell University Press,
Year: 1991
Subjects: Fourier, Charles, Influence History; Utopian socialism United States History; Collective settlements United States History
Abstract: "The utopian socialism of Charles Fourier spread throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was in the United States that it generated the most intense excitement. Carl J. Guarneri traces the American Fourierist movement from its roots in the religious, social, and economic upheavals of the 1830s, through its bold communal experiments of the 1840s, to its lingering twilight after the Civil War. Guarneri demonstrates that Fourierist communitarianism was not a colorful sideshow to the main events of American history, but a serious and influential attempt to restructure the emergent society of individualism along cooperative line's."--BOOK JACKET.
Contents: I. Origins of American Fourierism -- 1. Fourierism Crosses the Atlantic -- 2. Apostles of Association -- 3. Roots of Popular Participation -- II. The Doctrine of Association -- 4. Association and American Society -- 5. The Utopian Alternative -- III. Building the New Industrial World -- 6. The Communitarian Boom and Bust -- 7. Life in the Phalanxes -- 8. Organizing a National Movement -- 9. The Problem of Slavery -- 10. The Movement Retreats -- 11. Campaigns with Labor -- 12. The Last Communities -- IV. The Decline and Evolution of Utopia -- 13. The Fading of the Utopian Dream -- 14. New Directions of the 1850s -- 15. Fourierism and the Coming of the Civil War -- 16. The Fourierist Legacy.