Phalanxes of Fourier
A reader with the Edwardian but yummy name of Ed Pie asks why so many of the utopian communities founded in antebellum America were called “Phalanxes.”
The term comes from an early socialist writer Charles Fourier.
He envisioned a world organized into thousand-man work cooperatives called Phalanxes housed in uniform dormitories called Phalansteres.
Fourier claimed to have discovered a mathematical basis for social organization, based on five senses, fours appetites and three passions.
Fourier believed that man is capable of becoming perfect. Man, by reason, discovering the laws of the fundamental forces of the universe, can and should apply them to the organization of society. This done, harmony will reign, and unhappiness will be unknown.
Within the phalanxes, salaries are abolished, each man works but ten years, all work is pleasant to him, and the fruits of the common labor distributed back to the workers according to a mathematical formula — five parts to labor, four to capital, and three to talent.
Each phalanx is ruled by a unarch. Four phalanxes form a union ruled by a duarch; four unions a district, ruled by a triarch; which form districts, provinces, nations, empires, caliphates, regions, continents, and so on in like pattern of mathematical hierarchy. The unified world is ruled by an omniarch.
The result?
The description below is taken, in large part from the entry on Fourierism of the New International Encyclopedia:
There are no drones, since all the people are anxious to confer benefits upon society. Surplus products are exchanged between phalanxes. Industrial armies are sent out to prepare new lands for occupation. Government, so far as there is any, is republican, with annual election of officers. Since there is no discord, there are no soldiers, policemen, or criminals.
Fourier maintained that the law of gravitation governs not only matter, but the other three movements — social, animal, and organic — as well. He found three indestructible principles — God, or spirit, the active and moving principle; matter, the passive principle; and justice or mathematics, the regulating principle to which reason corresponds.
He expected great transformations to result from a social organization which would allow these natural forces to co-operate freely.
Wild animals would willingly become man’s servants, the North Pole would become habitable, sea-water would be as palatable as lemonade, and man would develop new organs, such as an eye in the back of his head.
This is the crackpot thinking that formed the soil from which Marx and Lenin sprang, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and all the current world leaders in China, Europe, and the Democrat Party.
This lunacy. Eyes growing on the back of the head, thanks to changes in the social organization.
From this, comes all the woe and wasted lives, the bloodshed and barbarism, the falsehoods, expropriations, slave-driving and vileness of the Twentieth Century.
Since 1912, one hundred million men or more were murdered in the name of Utopia.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
