page_title: Albert Brisbane
section_title: Conversion to Fourierism
hierarchical_section_title: Albert Brisbane / Interest in socialism / Conversion to Fourierism
caption_attribution_description: Charles Fourier (1772-1837) English: François Marie Charles Fourier Suomi: François Marie Charles Fourier Français&#160;: François Marie Charles Fourier Русский: Франсуа Мария Шарль Фурье Eesti: François Marie Charles Fourier
context_page_description: Albert Brisbane was an American utopian socialist and is remembered as the chief popularizer of the theories of Charles Fourier in the United States. Brisbane was the author of several books, notably Social Destiny of Man, as well as the Fourierist periodical The Phalanx. He also founded the Fourierist Society in New York in 1839 and backed several other phalanx communes in the 1840s and 1850s.
context_section_description: Searching for new ideas, Brisbane read a newly published short work by the philosopher Charles Fourier (1772–1837) entitled Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Association and was immediately converted to the writer's ideas. Fourier, a French philosopher and writer, spent the greater part of his life attempting to uncover universal laws which he believed governed society so that productive enterprise could be reorganized on a rational basis, production expanded, and human needs more readily fulfilled. Fourier believed in a fundamental harmony of the universe and a preordained series of periods through which societies needed to necessarily travel from their primitive to their advanced state, and he considered himself a scientific discoverer akin to Isaac Newton.
  In 1832 Brisbane left for Paris, where he would stay two years studying Fourier's system, including obtaining direct tutelage from the 60-year-old theorist himself. He made the acquaintance of other devotees of Fourier's ideas during this initial phase of the Fourierist movement. He would return to the United States a committed believer and proselytizer of Fourier's idea of association and began work on a book to expound the ideas of his late master. Brisbane's first and most famous book, Social Destiny of Man, would see print in 1840.
caption: Brisbane was a disciple of the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837).
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