Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

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He mercilessly exposes the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He holds this up against both the glittering promises of the earlier Enlightenment thinkers regarding a society in which only reason would reign, a civilization that would bring happiness to all, and infinite human perfectibility, as well as the flowery rhetoric of the contemporary bourgeois ideologues. He demonstrates how the most pathetic reality corresponds everywhere to the most high-sounding phrase, and pours biting ridicule upon this irredeemable fiasco of phrases. Fourier is not merely a critic; his eternally cheerful nature makes him a satirist, and indeed one of the greatest satirists of all time. He describes the swindling speculation that flourished with the decline of the revolution, as well as the general shopkeeper mentality of the French commerce of that time, as masterfully as he does amusingly. Even more masterful is his critique of the bourgeois organization of sexual relations and the position of women in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of general emancipation. But Fourier appears most magnificent in his conception of the history of society. He divides its entire course to date into four stages of development: savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, and civilization. The latter coincides with what is now called bourgeois society, that is, the social order introduced since the 16th century. He demonstrates that "civilized order raises every vice that barbarism practices in a simple manner to a complex, ambiguous, equivocal, and hypocritical mode of existence." He shows that civilization moves in a "vicious circle," in contradictions that it constantly reproduces without being able to overcome, so that it always attains the opposite of what it wants to achieve or pretends to want to achieve. Thus, for example, "in civilization, poverty is born of overabundance itself." Fourier, as one can see, handles dialectics with the same mastery as his contemporary Hegel. With equal dialectics, he points out, in contrast to the chatter about unlimited human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its ascending but also its descending branch, and applies this view to the future of all of humanity. Just as Kant introduced the future demise of the earth into the study of natural science, Fourier introduces the future demise of humanity into the study of history.

While the storm of the revolution was sweeping the land in France, a quieter but no less powerful transformation was taking place in England. Steam and the new machine tools transformed manufacture into modern large-scale industry, and thereby revolutionized the entire foundation of bourgeois society.