Get Thee to a Phalanstery: Or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade

Hot on the heels of the French revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Fourier was insistent that we need not force a violent revolution in order to usher in a new age; we just need to rearrange some of our social mechanisms, and better regulate our intimate relations. Among all the remarkable claims in Fourier’s seemingly tireless accounts of this tantalizing collective life, which exists just past our own selfish and self-defeating horizon (to the extent that he sometimes slips into the present tense when describing it), one in particular stands out as striking.

Source: publicdomainreview.org