Charles Fourier Quotes

The method of doubt must be applied to civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.

Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.

The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.

The peoples of civilization see their wretchedness increase in direct proportion to the advance of industry.

the family is a group that needs to escape from itself...

Social progress and changes of historical period take place in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty, and social decline occurs as a result of the diminution of the liberty of women.

The philosophers say that the passions are too lively, too fiery; in truth they are weak and languid. All around one sees the mass of men endure the persecution of a few masters and the despotism of prejudices without offering the slightest resistance... their passions are too weak to permit them to derive audacity from despair.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself.

To speak frankly, the family bond in the civilized regime causes fathers to desire the death of their children and children to desire the death of their fathers.

Love in the Phalanstery is no longer, as it is with us, a recreation which detracts from work; on the contrary it is the soul and the vehicle, the mainspring, of all works and of the whole of universal attraction.

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

The unity of man and nature is the fundamental principle of a sound society.

Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich. The newly freed slave takes fright at the need of providing for his own subsistence and hastens to sell himself back into slavery in order to escape this new anxiety that hangs over him like Damocles' sword. In thoughtlessly giving him liberty without wealth, you merely replace his physical torment with a mental torment. He finds life burdensome in his new state... Thus when you give liberty to the people, it must be bolstered by two supports which are the guarantee of comfort and industrial attraction...

It is easy to compress the passions by violence. Philosophy suppresses them with a stroke of the pen. Locks and the sword come to the aid of sweet morality, but nature appeals these judgments; she regains her rights in secret. Passion stifled at one point reappears at another like water held back by a dike; it is driven inward like the fluid of an ulcer closed to soon.

More pertinent, however, is that capitalism tends to stultify the worker’s creativity, his human urge for self-expression, freedom, mutually respectful interaction with others, recognition of his self-determined sense of self, recognition of himself as a self rather than an object, a means to an end. Karl Marx called it “alienation.” Capitalism alienates the worker—and the capitalist—from his “fundamental human need” for “self-fulfilling and creative work,” “the exercise of skill and craftsmanship,”8 in addition to his fundamental desire to determine himself (whence comes the desire to dismantle oppressive power-relations and replace them with democracy). Alternative visions of social organization thus arise, including Robert Owen’s communitarian socialism, Charles Fourier’s associationist communalism, Proudhon’s mutualism (a kind of anarchism), Marx’s communism, Bakunin’s collectivist anarchism, Kropotkin’s anarchist communism, Anton Pannekoek’s council communism, and more recently, Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, Michael Albert’s participatory economics, Takis Fotopoulos’s inclusive democracy, Paul Hirst’s associationalism, and so on. Each of these schools of thought differs from the others in more or less defined ways, but they all have in common the privileging of economic and social cooperation and egalitarianism.

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.

Civilization is the subordination of the individual to the welfare of the community.

Everything that exists is moral to the extent that it produces an equilibrium.

The character of a society can be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable members.

Civilization is built upon the unhappiness of others.

Charles Fourier, in France, and Robert Owen, in England, propounded the original idea of socialism in the 1820s. It was to achieve the unrealized demands of the French Revolution, which never reached the working class. Instead of pitting workers against each other, a cooperative mode of production and exchange would allow them to work for each other. Socialism was about reorganizing society as a cooperative community.

Feminism is a combination of social and political movements with a common goal to define, develop, and demand political, social, and fiscal rights for women. I'm sorry to tell you that a man coined the term. Charles Fourier, Utopian French Philosopher, came up with the word. Of course he did. It was 1837 when no one listened to women. I'm willing to bet his girlfriend coined it half an hour before, but no one took it seriously until he said it and then mansplained it to her. He didn't have a wife because he thought traditional marriage was damaging to women's rights. He was also a queer positive, socialist.

Morgan’s argument that prehistoric societies practiced group marriage (also known as the primal horde or omnigamy—the latter term apparently coined by French author Charles Fourier) so influenced Darwin’s thinking that he admitted, “It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” With his characteristic courteous humility, Darwin agreed that there were “present day tribes” where “all the men and women in the tribe are husbands and wives to each other.” In deference to Morgan’s scholarship, Darwin continued, “Those who have most closely studied the subject, and whose judgment is worth much more than mine, believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world….

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.

Frances Wright was a writer, founder of a utopian community, immigrant from Scotland in 1824, a fighter for the emancipation of slaves, for birth control and sexual freedom. She wanted free public education for all children over two years of age in state-supported boarding schools. She expressed in America what the utopian socialist Charles Fourier had said in France, that the progress of civilization depended on the progress of women. In her words: I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly. . . . Men will ever rise or fall to the level of the other sex. . . . Let them not imagine that they know aught of the delights which intercourse with the other sex can give, until they have felt the sympathy of mind with mind, and heart with heart; until they bring into that intercourse every affection, every talent, every confidence, every refinement, every respect. Until power is annihilated on one side, fear and obedience on the other, and both restored to their birthright—equality.

There is a class of writers who are ever boasting of the progress of civilization and of the human mind in modern times. If we were to credit their pretensions, we should be led to believe that the science of society had reached its highest degree of perfection, because old metaphysical and economic theories have been somewhat refined upon. In answer to their boasts of social progress, it is not sufficient to refer to the deeply-rooted social evils which exist, and which prey upon our boasted civilized social order. We will mention but a single one, the frightful increase of national debts and of taxation.

T'is but too true, that for five and twenty centuries since the political and moral sciences have been cultivated, they have done nothing for the happiness of mankind. They have tended only to increase human perversity, to perpetuate indigence, and to reproduce the same evils under different forms. After all their fruitless attempts to ameliorate the social order, there remains to the authors of these sciences only the conviction of their utter incompetency. The problem of human happiness is one which they have been wholly unable to solve. Meanwhile a universal restlessness attests that mankind has not attained to the destiny to which nature would lead it, and this restlessness would seem to presage some great event which shall radically change its social condition. The nations of the earth harassed by misfortune, and so deceived by political empirics, still hope for a better future, and resemble the invalid who looks for a miraculous cure. Nature whispers in the ear of the human race, that for it is reserved a happiness, the means of attaining which are now unknown, and that some marvelous discovery will be made, which will suddenly dispel the darkness that now enshrouds the social world.

Susurrus whispers through the grass and gorse, godling of the Martian wind, gene-spliced tyke of Zephyros and Ares. His story needs no Ovid, tells itself in the rustle of striplings and flowers he loves, the tale that he is: a zygote collaged from: spermatazoa flensed to nuclear caducei; a mathematical transform by the Fréres Fourier, Jean and Charles, flip of an axis changing Y to X; and the egg from which Eros hatched, is always hatching, offered up blithely to a god of war gone broody, Ares a sharper marksman than any brat with bow and arrow, no more to be argued with than the groundling Renart in a frum.

Fourier believed the world would eventually contain thirty-seven million poets equal to Homer, thirty-seven million mathematicians equal to Newton, and thirty-seven million dramatists equal to Molière—although, he admitted, these were only “approximate estimates.

From this premise, the usual conclusions follow: humankind is now separated from the true and the real; its destiny is to arrive at the consummation intended for it by God; philosophers are here to help the rest of us understand what that consummation is. James’s particular conception of it was derived in part from his reading of Swedenborg and in part from a writer with whom Swedenborg was often paired in the nineteenth century, the French socialist Charles Fourier: ‘Man’s destiny on earth,’ as James expressed it in Substance and Shadow (1863), ‘…consists in the realization of a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men.’ The chief impediment to arriving at this redeemed state was belief in an independent selfhood (what Swedenborg called the ‘proprium’). James considered this belief ‘the great parental fount of all the evils that desolate humanity.’ Belief in selfhood was bad because it led some people to regard themselves as superior to other people.

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.

A hole in a hole in a hole—Numberphile Around the World in a Tea Daze—Shpongle But what is a partial differential equation?—Grant Sanderson, who owns the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel Closer to You—Kaisaku Fourier Series Animation (Square Wave)—Brek Martin Fourier Series Animation (Saw Wave)—Brek Martin Great Demo on Fibonacci Sequence Spirals in Nature—The Golden Ratio—Wise Wanderer gyroscope nutation—CGS How Earth Moves—vsauce I am a soul—Nibana

The French are the greatest cuckolds to be found in the world. There is unquestionably less cuckoldry in Germany.

Enclaves called phalanxes, experiments in communal living based on the ideas of the French social philosopher Charles Fourier, caught fire and burned brightly, if in most cases briefly. The religious community of Oneida, founded on the principles of a former theology student named John Humphrey Noyes, supported “complex marriage,” a system in which all community members were married to one another. In western New York, the time was always right for a new philosophy, theory, controversy, or utopia.

The passions in domestic mechanism are an orchestra with 1620 instruments: our philosophers in wanting to direct them are comparable to a legion of children who would introduce themselves to the orchestra of the opera, seize the instruments and make a terrible hullabaloo; should we conclude from this that music is the enemy of man, and that we must repress the violins, stop the basses, stifle the flutes? No; we should chase away these little goslings, and give the instruments to expert musicians. Thus the passions are no more the enemies of man than musical instruments: man has no enemies except the philosophers who want to direct the passions, without having the least knowledge of the mechanism assigned to them by nature.

What! the passions of a Nero, of a Tiberius, could be useful? - Without doubt, very useful in corporate industry. Let us explain this mystery. Nero is a being born with bloodthirsty inclinations. Nature wants him to take sides in some of the butchery groups of his phalanx from the age of three. If he had a horror of bloodshed, he could not passionately exercise a job in the butcheries, get used to it for pleasure from an early age, and become at twenty a very skilled butcher, as nature wants. But I hear Agrippina reply: What a ridiculous vision! to pretend that my son, heir to the throne of the world, is made for the profession of butcher! - On this, Agrippina has her son indoctrinated by Seneca and other scholars who will teach him that nature is vicious, that bloodthirsty inclinations are odious, that a young prince should love only commerce and the Charter, and that he would debase himself by sneaking around with butchers. Here, then, is one passion of young Nero hindered, and twenty other of his tastes will be similarly thwarted by the healthy doctrines of gentle and pure morality. Such will be the opinion of Seneca; but Horace and La Fontaine are of a very different opinion, and judge much more soundly when they say: If you chase her out the door, she comes back through the window.

Eh! what does it matter that he begins at a young age with the job of butcher, since everything is linked in the system of societary studies! The work of butchery will lead like others to all sciences. Indeed, Nero will learn early to judge by eye the difference in the flesh and fat of animals fed with such and such fodder, fattened according to such and such system. These remarks are linked to the rivalries which exist between the butchers of Tibur and those of the neighboring phalanxes, then between the Tiburians partisans or rivals of such and such system of fertilizer. Nero will thus become an agronomist on fodder and vegetables given to livestock. This knowledge will lead him to others. Let us add that the young Nero, raised in a Phalanx, will have satisfied there from the age of 4 twenty other inclinations that the wise Seneca would have stifled for the good of morality, and these various tastes, developed early, will lead the young Nero to twenty kinds of useful studies. Little by little he will find himself initiated into all the sciences by the sole impulse of these inclinations reputed to be vicious in Civilization and repressed in children. What happens today with this repression? Nature is hindered, but it is not destroyed; it was not able, from a young age, to exercise itself usefully on industry, it will reappear later, usque recurret , and the bloodthirsty inclinations of Nero will be exercised at the expense of humanity. It is therefore not Nero who is vicious, it is Civilization which did not know how to use its inclinations, and which forces them to reappear in countermarch or recurrence, an effect which is always disastrous and which disguises the passions and makes them as harmful as they would have been useful.

Without fortune, old age in Civilization becomes for both sexes an anticipated hell, and yet the great majority of old people are without fortune. People pretend to love old people, and to speak frankly no one loves them; everything that surrounds them, except childhood, proscribes and mocks them in secret, and in the class of villagers and artisans, to whom they are a burden, they are mistreated, they are openly cursed. As for the present, old age is most often only a long torture. Thus life in Civilization is only a painful journey to arrive at an even more unfortunate lodging since the goal is old age.