1833. In the phalanstery, utopian socialism comes to life

Series Charles Fourier wanted to change life by establishing small communities responding to the rules of “Harmony”. An “immature” project for Marxists, but which we are rediscovering today.

It's an apple that has nothing to envy of those of Eve, Newton or Steve Jobs. It is located in a Parisian inn and is bought by a traveler for the tidy sum of 14 cents. We are at the end of the 18th century^e century, and a man witnesses this transaction. His name is Charles Fourier, the son of a draper, himself a traveling salesman. Years later, he would say, with his sense of storytelling, that this moment awakened him to the reality of what was not yet called the “social question”: outside the capital, fruits “superior in quality and size” sold for a hundred times less. “Struck by this price difference”, he begins to smell rot in the kingdom of men. This intuition of a “fundamental disorder in the industrial mechanism” will lead him to question what he calls the « Civilisation » and what others will designate by the word “capitalism”.

“Utopian socialism”, to which Fourier would contribute, is often presented as a hinge between the 18th^e and the 19th^e century. We remember with tenderness the desire to change life, with irony the naivety and the oddities. In his pamphlet “Utopian Socialism and Scientific Socialism”, published in 1880, Friedrich Engels thus incriminates the gap between “pompous promises” of Enlightenment and “social and political institutions…

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