Fantastic Metropolis

I should confess: I don’t always know what I’m doing with these essays, these little heresies. The idea behind this particular ramble is a simple one, but at the same time it’s complex, as is fitting for that which inspired it. I looked at one of the foremost of the founders of my homeland and a discredited Frenchman who dreamed of communal society before Marx, and I saw a kinship. That perceived kinship led me further on, to others I also thought I saw some familiar traits, and then to a friend of mine, the editor of this lovely periodical, who introduced me to gentlemen who, either directly or through their descendants, helped alter reality itself, in a manner of speaking, like epistemic pirates. And so here we begin our trip through strange places, with the phalanstere, where men will flit like butterflies from pleasant task to pleasant task and mankind will finally be perfected, in the ancient way of the alchemists.

Association was Fourier’s term for the advanced stages of society. Its basic unit, the Phalanx, requires about sixteen hundred people, and they must be carefully selected to balance personality types. Having the right people assures high productivity, and the right mix of personalities creates harmony. A Phalanx must have a variety of talents to create the musical and other cultural events that are absolutely essential to life.

Phalanx people live, work, and enjoy recreation and culture all under one roof in a huge building called the Phalanstery. An underground transportation system moves people quickly to distant locations within it, a necessity in a society where everyone, free as le papillon, switches to other work when a task becomes boring. The building’s wings enclose an open, central area with gardens, fountains, and plazas large enough for parades and mass festivities. Outside the Phalanstery walls, farms and orchards recede into the distance. Owen had a similar but less elaborate utopian palace in mind for New Harmony and showed a model to congress in 1825.

—Seymour R. Kesten, Utopian Episodes

François Marie Charles Fourier was a fascinating man, I think even his ideological enemies would have to agree. Born the son of a cloth merchant, dispossessed by the French Revolution and nearly executed, self-educated and a talented pamphleteer, he mixed interestingly telling observations about human nature and progressive arguments for total female suffrage and equality between the sexes with an internal mythology of potent strangeness and compelling imagination. Unlike Robert Owen and Etienne Cabot, his contemporaries and fellow “utopian socialists” (as later thinkers such as Friedrich Engels would somewhat derisively label them in order to foster a separation between their ideas and those of his own, “scientific socialist” friends and allies like Marx), Fourier was an outsized, grandiose writer who crafted fantastic, some would even say grotesque visions of the truth behind natural phenomena. I promise I’ll cover exactly what Fourier believed in a little bit, but I don’t want to do that until we cover his impact on the Utopians in general, and specifically groups like the Oneida and Owenite movements in the United States. Unlike Robert Owen, who while considered one of the fathers of the utopian movement was still a businessman who created textile mills according to his principles in Scotland and built practical communes in Indiana, Fourier had no patience, toleration or even much desire to understand the industrial era: he rejected it outright, and indeed all modern civilization, as a stage of “growing pains” the human race had to endure on its way from “Chaos” and “savagery” towards the ultimate goal, “Harmony.” “Civilization” was, in a Fourier-inspired view, a domestication process for the human race itself, the means by which it learned to move from untamed aggression and instinctual repression to a free and open expression of the individual self which would lead to a happy, efficient and orderly state which could produce enough to sustain itself without exploitation or suffering.

Fourier’s views on human nature and the root causes for human suffering are too complex for me to do more than summarize, so let me do so now: he believed that people were unhappy when they were forced to do work they were unsuited to, and happy when allowed to do work they were attracted to. Furthermore, as even the most dedicated human being will grow bored with any task if it is repeated enough, in order to maintain happiness (which Fourier viewed as essential to efficiency and productivity, since happy people work harder without complaint) it becomes necessary for the maintenance of an efficient society to allow human beings in said society to move to a new task when an old task has begun to bore them. This view of human nature and happiness extended to sexual relationships (Fourier’s ideas for love and human relationships are exceedingly complex and very detailed: we’ll attempt to get back to them at some point, but if we don’t make it, just know that he supported total freedom from the typical restrictions lovers must endure in Civilization) as well, to the degree that Fourier believed a society could be gauged as having progressed or regressed from Harmony in how close it came to gender equality. As intimated above, Fourier’s ideas soon became popular enough to even influence those of Owen, who had first achieved notoriety among the nascent “Bible Communists” and other utopia-leaning folks of America in the 1830’s.

So, what went wrong? Why aren’t we today living in a nation of strongly religious communes where all property is held in common and all sexual relationships are open and consented to by all, much like the Oneida community attempted for three decades between the 1840s and 1870s? Well, a lot of things. There was plenty of resistance to the idea of dismantling society in favor of Owenite palaces like New Harmony or, to take it even further, huge underground phalansteries like those Fourier proposed. It was hardly an alluring prospect to the mill owners of the Blackstone Valley in Rhode Island, for example, where the Industrial Revolution that had been cleverly stolen and shipped back to New England (in the head of Samuel Slater, a young Englishman who brought knowledge of the Arkwright technologies to the Blackstone River, creating water powered textile mills at the behest of Moses Brown, and then for his own sake—interestingly, the British had by 1789 forbidden the emigration of engineers out of fear of this exact thing happening, yet Slater made it through their net… a note: trade secrets never stay secret) from the old one had so eagerly been grafted. The idea that they should smash their machines, to borrow a phrase from the Luddites, and create these pastoral enclaves to live in common with all other men and women in a highly structured manner, especially to the degree that Fourier proposed (a structure decided entirely on personality types Fourier himself invented and one in which all people, male and female, were free to abandon a task as soon as he or she became bored with it) seemed alien and unusual to those who had made their way in the world through determined focus on one field of study. Robert Heinlein would argue years later that specialization was for insects, but it was specialization that helped grease the wheels of the Industrial Revolution: one considers the development by Eli Whitney in 1799 of the so-called “American System of Manufacture,” based on ideas by Honoré le Blanc, who himself may have based his ideas on the techniques of the Renaissance Venice Arsenal, but we won’t quibble too much with the nomenclature. The simple fact is that Whitney’s ideas had caught on, especially because they were being used in the manufacture of weapons, and the idea of the United States’ abandoning its burgeoning industrialization and specialization of trades for Fourier’s butterfly approach to work was a hard sell as it is.

But Fourier made it an even harder sell himself.