Socialist Tradition

Chapter 7. Charles Fourier

‘I suspect, indeed, that it is not accident that both the teaching of Jesus and the doctrine of the Communist Manifesto are at one in their emphasis upon the danger of the family which, in an acquisitive society, acts as a barrier between men and women, instead of a link which binds them together. For it is the central faith, alike of the Gospels and of Socialism, that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free; but where the claim of son upon parents, or brother upon brother, is set in terms of the view that proximity of relationship means that one’s property is proportionately available to one’s kin also, the family becomes the nurse of avarice and narrowness, a hindrance, rather than a help, to fraternity in the commonwealth’ (Faith, Reason and Civilisation, p. 97).

While the family gets all the knocks in this matter, it may be observed that there is a potential conflict with the ultimate socialist ideal, wherever there is, in the pedantic words of Godwin, any preference among our fellows, not based on ‘reasons which equally appeal to all understandings.’ The anti-social consequences of such irrational preferences are admirably depicted by Zorobabel in his hymn in praise of women: ‘A man taketh his sword, and goeth his way to rob and to steal, to sail upon the sea and upon rivers; and looketh upon a lion, and goeth in the darkness; and when he hath stolen, spoiled and robbed, he bringeth it to his love.’

‘Le parcours est l’amalgame d’une masse de plaisirs goûtés successivement dans une courte séance, enchaînés avec art dans un même local, se rehaussant l’un par l’autre, se succédant a des instants si rapprochés qu’on ne fasse que glisser sur chacun, y donner seulement quelques minutes, à peine un quart d’heure à chaque jouissance’ (vol. 4, p. 188).

Secondly, and perhaps with greater advantage, he may study a parcours in concrete form, and observe a crowded hour of glorious life, as experienced by Dorval, who in the course of sixty minutes experienced eight major pleasures: (1) and (2)—a double pleasure of the senses and the soul, and therefore counting as two—he succeeds with a woman to whom he has been making advances; (3) she hands him the commission of a lucrative post she has obtained for him; (4) they pass to the salon, where he meets a dear friend whom he had thought dead; (5) presently there enters a great man, a Buffon, a Corneille, whom Dorval had wished to meet; (6) an exquisite dinner, at which (7) Dorval finds himself next to an influential personage who engages to help him; and lastly (8) in the course of the repast he receives a message that he has won a law-suit. It happens, just like that, in Harmony. And apparently, even with three parcours a day, the springs of happiness continue to well, though doubtless the constituent elements vary. Presumably the man who lost the law-suit was not having his parcours just then.

Substantially the same parcours figures in vol. 6, pp. 348–349, with Léandre as the happy man.