| 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. |
| Romanticism was a cultural and, um, artistic movement in Europe. |
| It lasted for the first quarter of the 18th - no, I mean 19th, Century. |
| Very nice, Mr. Stiles. |
| Who would like to summarize the main message of Romanticism? |
| Let's see... Ms. Brown? |
| 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. |
| Well put, Ms. 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. |
| Thus they 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 that the seas would become oceans of lemonade. |
| 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. |