Charles Fourier Quotes

French utopian socialist and philosopher (1772–1837)

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François Marie Charles Fourier (April 7, 1772 – October 10, 1837) was a French philosopher who wrote on a variety of topics such as social philosophy, natural science and normative ethics. He was an influential early socialist thinker and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become mainstream thinking in modern society. For instance, Fourier is credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837. Fourier is best remembered for his strong support for women's rights, his conception of socialist economics (referred to as "Fourierian economics), and his passional theory of metaphysics. Fourier, along with other early socialist theorists such as, Proudhon, Owen, Saint-Simon and Blanqui, were famously derided as "Utopian socialists" by the philosopher Karl Marx in The Manifesto of the Communist Party.

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When we see civilization elated with this declining and decrepit phase of its career, we are reminded of a faded belle who, boasting of her attractions in her fiftieth year, excites at once the remark that she was fairer at twenty-five. So it is with civilization, which, dreaming of perfection and progress, is constantly deteriorating, and which will find but too soon in its industrial achievements new sources of political oppression, crimes and commotions.

Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.

The possibility of associating two or three hundred families in agricultural and manufacturing industry depends upon a system so entirely different from what now exists, that it will open to the reader a new social world. He must consequently, in the study which opens before him, follow the guide with confidence, bearing constantly in min the gigantic results which will flow from association. Such results are well worth the sacrifice of a few prejudices. Every sensible reader will be of this opinion, and will concur to follow the advice which I shall constantly give, namely, to neglect the form and style of presentation, and occupy himself solely with the substance of the theory, seeking to determine whether the process of association is really discovered or not.

Ignorant as regards the unity of man with himself, the world is still more ignorant in respect to the two other unities - unity of man with God and the universe.

There is no idea more novel, more surprising, than that of associating three hundred families of different degrees of fortune, knowledge and capacity.

Marriage and dependent children are a trap for the people! Morality carefully hides this distressing truth from us because it knows no remedy for the evil. But I , who bring a remedy must not dissimulate the woes from fathers, and I must not dissimulate from society its radical vice of pushing seven-eighths of all families into evil practices through poverty.

The seeds of heavenly bodies are deposited and cared for in the Milky Way, from which they emanate in swarms of comets that travel a ;long time and ordinarily gravitate towards various suns before becoming fixed in orbit.

If children are a joy for the well-to-do, they are a torment for seven-eights of all civlizees, who cannot afford to maintain and educate them.

There was very little that prevented the vandalism of 1793 from suddenly producing a second revolution as marvelous as the first was horrible. The whole human race was approaching its release; the civilized, barbarian, and savage order would have disappeared forever if the Convention, which trampled down all prejudices, had not bowed down before the only one that had to be destroyed, the institution of marriage.

Those who have taken the planets to be inanimate bodies without function, limited to traveling geometric paths, resemble idiots who would believe that the brain is inanimate because it has no visible function, or that the stomach is idle because it does no visible work as do our limbs. Civilizees have always been reproached for believing nature to be limited to known effects. If the planets were not animate creatures endowed with functions, God would then appear to be an advocate of laziness. He would have created universes furnished with large inert bodies spending eternity in purposeless meandering as do the idlers in our society.

Woman is degraded and made to believe that nature destined her exclusively to menial domestic labors, which in the combined order will be so abridged as to be performed without oppression to either sex.

An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.

Hitherto men have speculated vaguely on the unity of universes; it is now about to be demonstrated by reasoning from the passional world to material, guided by the analogy which exists between the two.

As for civilization, from which at last we are about to escape, so far from being the social destiny of man, it is only a transient stage - a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their career; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term, owing to the neglect on the part of the ancient philosophy to study association and passional attraction.

This miracle of social concord would result not from direct conciliation, which would be impossible, but from the development of new interests, and especially from the amazement with which the minds of men would be filled on being convinced of the radical falseness of the civilized social order by comparison with the associative or combined, and of the errors in which the social world has been so long plunged - misled by speculative philosophy, which upholds and extols this order with all its defects to the entire neglect of the study of association.