Listen to part of a lecture from an Art History class.

Prof: Good morning. Ready to begin? Today I'd like to complement our study of Romanticism
by examining more closely the life of Charles Fourier. That's four like the number, then i-e-r.
But, before we study Mr. Fourier, let's review what we know about Romanticism. Who can tell
me what Romanticism was, and when it lasted? Yes, Mr. Stiles.

S: Romanticism was a cultural and, um, artistic movement in Europe. It lasted for the first
quarter of the 18th - no, I mean 19th -- Century.

P: Very nice, Mr. Stiles. Who would like to summarize the main message of Romanticism? Let's
see...Mr. Brown?

S: The main message was probably, um, that artists should, uh, that individuals should, use
their imagination to choose the form and content of all art. The Romantics thought that the
Enlightenment had kind of choked off imagination, and feeling, and creativity, and, um, like
stifled all individual freedom.

P: Well put, Mr. Brown. The Romantics loathed any type of rationalism. The Enlightenment had
emphasized rationality and reason so much that the Romantics felt the individual had been
demolished, reduced to an automated robot. It was time to liberate the soul, to break away and
stand out, to reclaim individual freedom. Rousseau penned the rallying cry in the beginning of
his Confessions: "...I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am
not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different."

So then, it was against this backdrop that Charles Fourier appeared on the historical stage. Mr.
Fourier was what Karl Marx would later dub a utopian socialist. He was one of three main
utopian socialists, along with Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon. A utopian socialist,
broadly speaking, was someone who employed socialist principles to create hypothetical
versions of perfect utopias - um, societies that were egalitarian or communal, in which people
would live in perfect fairness and harmony. Utopian philosophers believed these kinds of
societies could be achieved in the immediate future. They thus planted the first seeds of the
early 20th Century socialist movement.

Monsieur Fourier was born in northeast France on April 7, 1772, and he died in Paris on
October 10, 1837. He was widely regarded as the most utopian of the utopian socialists. He
argued vigorously, for instance, that women should have equal rights with men - and actually
coined our modern word feminism. Also, he thought the industrial revolution that was then
taking place in England was simply a passing phase; that mankind would move beyond
industrialism to something better. As to what that something better would be, Fourier had
some rather unusual ideas. He was born into a well-to-do family of cloth merchants, and after
he inherited his mother's estate in 1812, he had the money - and time - to pursue these notions.
In his four published works, Fourier laid out a vision of a future community built on emotional
bonds, fueled by what he called the laws of "passional attraction." Basic human passions and
drives had been repressed for too long, he argued. Now these emotions needed to be openly
expressed and harnessed. Men and women would live in self-contained housing units with
1,620 members. Why 1,620? Because Mr. Fourier had determined that people could be
classified into 810 different psychological types. If you multiply this by two, for men and
women, you get 1,620. With such precise pairing, he was certain that the laws of passional
attraction would produce ideal, harmonious relationships.

Many of Fourier's ideas, to be frank, were perfect nonsense. He projected that his new world
would last for 80,000 years, the last 8,000 of these in an era of perfect harmony. In this period
he predicted, among other things, that six moons would orbit the earth, and the seas would
become oceans of lemonade (laughter). But sprinkled amidst his nonsense were enough
kernels of fresh thought to qualify Fourier as an instrumental influence on later socialist
thinkers, such as Marx and Engels. Many think the most valuable of these kernels was
Fourier's idea that work, especially heavy manual labor, could be turned into play: something
deeply satisfying both mentally and physically. That was probably the one vision of Fourier's
that most captivated later socialist thinkers.