What is the Idea of Fourier, the Imaginary Socialist: Learning from the Life and Ideological Background of Marx Engels, the French thinker famous for his Phalange and Utopia" (17)
In the above article, we have provided a brief chronological overview of the lives of Marx and Engels, but in this series, "Learning from the Life and Thought Background of Marx and Engels," we will look at the lives and thought of Marx and Engels in more detail.
I will now refer to the book by Tristram Hunt.'TheEngels, The Man Marx Called General."This is a biography of Engels called.
What makes this book excellent is that it explains in an easy-to-understand manner which ideas influenced Engels and how his writings were produced from them.
It is very easy to understand the flow of history because you can learn along with the historical background of the time and the ideas that were popular at the time. It is easy to understand how the ideas of Engels and Marx were developed. The book also gives me a road map of what to read next to learn more about Marx and Engels. I appreciated this.
And this book made me realize how much Engels had influenced Marx's writings. It is quite amazing.
Although this book is a biography of Engels, it also goes into great detail about Marx. It was such a great biography that I thought I could learn more about Marx by reading this book than by reading a biography or commentary on Marx.
We may use other Marx biographies to supplement some of Marx's life and interesting episodes, but basically we will focus on this book and take a closer look at the lives of Marx and Engels.
For other reference books, see the following articles"List of 12 recommended Marx biographies--to learn more about the life and thought of Marx Engels."Please refer to this page for a summary.
So let's get started.
What is a fantastical socialist?
The Imaginary Socialist was published by Engels in 1880From Fancy to Science.These are the famous words preached in the
Engels described three famous pre-Marxian exponents of socialist thought, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, as "fantastical socialists."
He then declares that Marx's theory is "scientific" as opposed to their "fanciful" theories.
In my previous article I introduced Saint-Simon, and in this article I will talk about a man named Charles Fourier.
Who is Charles Fourier, a visionary socialist?
The idea of a post-capitalist, post-Christian utopia as portrayed by Saint-Simon was shared by Charles Fourier, one of the major French socialists of the early nineteenth century. More amiable than any of the heroes of progressivism, he was born in 1772 into a wealthy textile merchant family and spent his life as a silk broker and traveling salesman in southern France, especially in Lyon, where the silk weaving industry was located.
'I'm a market bastard,' he explained. 'I was born and raised in a commercial establishment. I have witnessed with my own eyes the injustices of commerce." But Fourier's socialism was not a mere product of experience. After spending a year studying the natural sciences at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, he described himself as the new Columbus, claiming to have discovered a new science of humanity that would end the impoverishment, exploitation, and misery of modern civilization with a single stroke. All this he wrote in a curious work, The Theory of the Four Motions, published in 1808.
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P95
Some line breaks have been made.
Fourier was born in 1772 to a French merchant family.
His father died when he was nine years old, and he moved all over Europe to train as a merchant in order to take over the family business.
In the chaos of the siege of Lyon in 1793, he was imprisoned and deprived of his property, and in the chaos of France after the French Revolution in 1789, he began to contemplate society itself. What he completed was "The Theory of the Four Movements.
Fourier's philosophy
In between stories about lemonade oceans and planetary encounters, Fourier offered a simple proposition. Men and women are governed by their natural and innate passions. On the contrary, each individual is classified into one of exactly 810 personality types drawn from 12 different passions, living in a world governed by the four movements of society, animals, organic matter, and matter that weave together the total system of nature (Fourier, the Linnaean of sociology, was a master list maker), (Fourier, the Linnaean of sociology, was a master list-maker).
To attempt to suppress any of these passions was the terrible mistake of society in this age. Nature, driven out the door, returns through the window." But this is precisely what the bourgeois class of nineteenth-century France was doing through artificial actions such as monogamy, from which, in very Newtonian fashion, unjustified anti-passions were generated that were "as pernicious as the natural passions are harmless.
For example, a comparable reaction against church-sanctioned monogamy could be seen in the existence of 32 different kinds of iniquity in France.
In Fourier's harmonious society, citizens would be allowed complete sexual freedom to initiate and end relationships as they desire. Women would be able to regulate fertility, and children would have the opportunity to choose their biological father or stepfather. In the economy, the same was true of sexuality. The repression of harmless passions turned ambition into greed, preying on the work that brought all kinds of pleasure and allowing exploitative and parasitic middlemen to flourish.
Displeased with the unemployment, poverty, and hunger of Marseilles in the 1970s, Fourier often expressed his disgust with the terrible vices of capitalism. It is a lie with all the usual trappings: bankruptcy, speculation, loan sharking, and all kinds of deceit. He especially despised the merchant class, who "do not sweat, do not spin a thread, but simply carry away enormous paper money profits.
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P95-96
Some line breaks have been made.
Fourier focuses a great deal of attention on the issue of gender relations. In France at that time, most marriages between the upper class and bourgeoisie were political marriages.
Especially after the French Revolution, aristocrats became poor and frequently married rich bourgeois daughters to support their families. And as expected, unfortunately, there is no love there. So, although they ostensibly assumed the appearance of a married couple, they would satisfy their unfulfilled desires by having mistresses for each other.
Please refer to the following reference book, which has been previously published on this blog, for more information on this type of living.
Fourier's idea of an ideal community, the "Phalange
Conventional politics had no answer to these human hardships. There were no reforms, no programs, no economic adjustments to deal with the unnatural oppression of modern society. The answer was to abandon the existing social order and reorganize mankind in a series of self-governing communities called phalanges.
These were to be based on the science of "emotional attraction" and were to be based on the truth of human nature, not on the moralist's point of view. Since each phalange was organized to accommodate different personality types, the ideal population was set at 1620. The guarantee of a "sexual minimum" for all inhabitants would eliminate the frustrations and desires that had distorted "colorful" relationships in patriarchal bourgeois society.
Fourier was happy to describe the carefully staged orgies that would ensue at the Phalange - a sensual inversion of the Catholic Mass. It corresponds to all forms of sexuality (including incest).
Some line breaks have been made.
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P96-97
Although the detailed description of Phalange is not given here, you can learn more about him in "Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World," written by Jonathan Beecher and translated by Tomoki Fukushima, published by Opus Publishing.
I read it too, but it no longer has a utopian but more of a creepy dystopian feel to it. My personal impression is that it is a worldview similar to Huxley's "A Wonderful New World".
Man was not born to suffer."
Along with "sexual minimum," "social minimum" was also considered. As well as restoring respect for sexuality, Fourier's system also restored the dignity of work. The problem with modern employment was that it denied the fulfillment of the natural human passions, again by making work unsuitable and monotonous for those with certain abilities. In Phalange, by contrast, the inhabitants could engage in up to eight different kinds of work per day in spontaneously formed groups of friends and lovers. This liberation of ability allows men and women to develop their talents at once, as they go with gusto to the farm, factory, workplace, workshop, or kitchen to satisfy their own industrious zeal. The Fourier is not the Catholic Church.converselyThe idea was that man was not born to suffer. By creating a new community, people would be able to thrive according to their innate passions.
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P97
Houllier is not a member of the Catholic Church.converselyThe idea was that man was not born to suffer. By creating a new community, people would be able to thrive according to their innate passions.
This is a very important idea in Fourier.
Catholics treated sexuality as something unclean. Even the mention of sexual matters in public was taboo. These taboos between men and women had a strong influence on the surface, but not on the reality.
And not only in sexual matters, but Catholics also value the idea of original sin. The idea was that human beings carried sin and had to redeem it.
In contrast, Fourier was quite a bold and pioneering thinker, as he proudly declared, "Man was not born to suffer.
Why Engels called Saint-Simon and Fourier "fanciful socialists"
Nowhere to be found in either Saint-Simon or Fourier is a demand for radical equality ("social poison," in Fourier's words) or a call for a violent seizure of power in the name of "the people." Their socialism was aristocratic and often eccentric, but it was a fundamentally imaginative conception focused on human fulfillment.
On the contrary, for all their experience with and readiness for the bloodshed and terror of the French Revolution, neither thinker showed much interest in violently threatening existing social institutions. Instead, they strongly advocated a program of gradual moral reform. One led by a harmonious community, detached from the inequalities and injustices of existing society.
As Engels stated, "Society presented only bad examples. To eliminate them was the task of reason. It was therefore necessary to find a new and more complete system of social order, to impose this on society from the outside by means of propaganda, and to set examples of exemplary experience wherever possible."
In the United States, the 1840s saw the most practical fruits of the Fourierist vision with the creation of a series of communities in Brook Farm, Massachusetts; La Reunion, Dallas County, Texas; and Raritan Bay Union, New Jersey.
But even these phalanges were inadequate when it came to bringing the rest of American society into the Hooligan project. Such failures led Engels to reject his and Marx's rigorous and pragmaticscientific socialismcompared to Saint-Simon and Fourier (with Robert Owen).fictitious socialistThe company has come to be looked down upon as a
Although Engels later revealed that Fourier's analysis of bourgeois marriage was deeply significant and that he greatly admired his social critique ("Fourier thoroughly scoured the hypocrisy of worldly society, the contradictions between its theory and practice, and the monotony of its way of life in general"), he critiqued the failure of these utopian thinkers to understand the function of the proletariat or the revolutionary forces that propelled history forward. These new social institutions were destined from the beginning as utopian ideas. The more one tries to realize them more fully in detail, the more inevitable it becomes that they will somehow fall into mere fantasy.
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P97-98
Some line breaks have been made.
It is true that the social ideas preached by Saint-Simon and Fourier are utopian. In particular, Fourier's Phalange seems to be exactly what one would call "fanciful.
However, Engels refers to Marx's teachings as "scientific socialism," but today it is difficult to say in what ways Marx's socialism is scientific. Engels would later say that Marx's thought is a law like Newton's, but unfortunately, it seems that a natural law like Newton's and Marx's thought are not the same. Persuasiveness as an idea and scientific law are two different things. To begin with, many contradictions have also been pointed out in Marx's economic theory.
However, it seems that Engels' criticism of "fanciful socialism" by calling themselves "scientific socialism" succeeded in giving the impression that "Marxism is more scientifically correct".
Knowing Saint-Simon and Fourier helped me to understand that this is where the "scientific socialism" often preached in Marx's thought came from.
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