page_title: Fourierism
section_title: Social life
hierarchical_section_title: Fourierism / Doctrine / Social life
caption_attribution_description: English: Perspective view of Charles Fourier's Phalanstère. The rural areas and the gardens are not represented.
context_page_description: Fourierism is the systematic set of economic, political, and social beliefs first espoused by French intellectual Charles Fourier. Based upon a belief in the inevitability of communal associations of people who worked and lived together as part of the human future, Fourier's committed supporters referred to his doctrines as Associationism. Political contemporaries and subsequent scholarship has identified Fourier's set of ideas as a form of utopian socialism—a phrase that retains mild pejorative overtones.
  Never tested in practice at any scale in Fourier's lifetime, Fourierism enjoyed a brief boom in the United States of America during the mid-1840s owing largely to the efforts of his American popularizer, Albert Brisbane, and the American Union of Associationists, but ultimately failed as a social and economic model. The system was briefly revived in the mid-1850s by Victor Considerant, a French disciple of Fourier's who unsuccessfully attempted to relaunch the model in Texas in the 1850s.
context_section_description: Fourier's prescription was the establishment of communities called Phalanxes or Associations in the countryside. Housed inside gigantic serpentine edifices called "phalanstries" would be 1620 people of various occupations and social classes. The residents were to be arranged in occupational "series"—major divisions such as between agrarians and industrial producers and artisans—that would be further divided into smaller "groups" to cooperatively conduct specific aspects of the work. Mobility of the individual between various groups and even sections according to personal desires was to be allowed.
  Fundamental to the Fourierian ideal was the notion of collective living and the rational performance of domestic duties. Individual households were seen as both wasteful in terms of duplicated effort performed and isolating of individuals—standing in the way of true cooperation and social harmony.
  Remaining in unpublished manuscript form until 1967 were Fourier's imaginative predictions about degrees of sexual promiscuity and the institutions and moral codes that would emerge to govern love and interpersonal relationships in the harmonious world of Compound Association.
caption: Elevated view of a Fourierist Phalanstère from the works of Victor Considerant.
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