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Selections from the Works of Fourier
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1901 Edition.
210 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2007
37 people want to read
About the author
Charles Fourier
261 books100 followersFrançois Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society. Fourier is, for instance, credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837.
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March 12, 2024
OF THE VICES OF CIVILISATION
AUTHORS of the uncertain sciences, who pretend to labour for the good of the human race, do you believe that six hundred million barbarians and savages form no part of the human race? Yet they suffer; well, what have you done for them? Nothing. Your systems are only applicable to civilisation.
Twenty centuries of science elapsed before the least alleviation of the lot of the slave was proposed; thousands of years, then, are needed to open our eyes to a truth, to suggest an act of justice! Our sciences, which boast their love of the people, are totally ignorant of the means of protecting them.
Industrialism is the latest of our scientific chimeras; it is the mania of producing in confusion, without any system of proportional compensation, without any guarantee to the producer or wage-earner that he will participate in the increase of wealth; accordingly, we find the industrial regions sprinkled with beggars to as great, or, perhaps, a greater extent than those countries which are indifferent to this sort of progress.
Mr. Huskisson, Minister of Commerce, says: "Our silk factories employ thousands of children who are held in leash from three o'clock in the morning until ten o'clock at night: how much do they get a week? a shilling and a half, thirty-seven French sous, about five and a half sous per day, for being tied down to their work nineteen hours, superintended by foremen provided with whips with which they strike every child that stops for a moment." This is slavery actually restored: it is evident that the excess of industrial competition leads civilised nations to the same degree of poverty and servitude as the populace of China and Hindustan.
The newspapers of Dublin (1826) say: "There is an epidemic prevailing here among the people: the sick that are taken to the hospital recover as soon as they have been given food." Their sickness, then, is HUNGER. Have no fear that this epidemic will attack the great: you will
not see either the Lord-Lieutenant or the Archbishop of Dublin fall ill from hunger, but rather from indigestion.
This vicious circle of industry has been so clearly recognised, that people on all sides are beginning to suspect it, and feel astonished that, in civilisation, poverty
should be the offspring of abundance.
A good reply to the boastings of civilised perfectibility is a picture of the miseries which philosophy has actually created in the course of a single generation.
Progress of financiering, systems of extortion, indirect bankruptcy, anticipations of revenue, art of devouring the future.
Progress of the mercantile spirit: consideration accorded to commercial plundering and knavery. Stock-jobbing raised to a power which scoffs at law, encroaches upon all the fruits of industry, shares in the authority of governments, and propagates everywhere the frenzy of gambling in the public funds.
DIRECT DEPRAVITY OF THE SCIENCES: obstinate refusal to explore neglected fields of research; contempt of experience, which shows the sophists the nine scourges as the abiding fruit of their systems; jugglery of making believe that everything has been discovered, that those who offer inventions should be scoffed at; mercantile spirit of the learned world, reducing the arts and sciences to a commercial and intriguing gaming-house.
—INDIRECT DEPRAVITY OF THE SCIENCES; among other things, through progress in chemistry, the achievements of which only serve to plague the poor by furnishing commerce with the means of debasing all commodities: potato bread, wine of Indian wood, sham vinegar, sham oil, sham coffees, sham sugar, sham indigo; everything in provisions and manufactures is but a travesty, and it is the poor man who suffers by this chemical cheapening: he alone is the victim of all these mercantile inventions, which could be made to serve useful ends in a régime of genuine relations, but which will grow more and more harmful until the close of civilisation.
Commerce has a goal which has not been caught sight of by the economists; it tends to metamorphose civilisation into industrial feudalism.
Free competition, then, has as its ulterior result mercantile feudalism.
This established order is the last phase of civilisation, which, in accordance with the law of the meeting of extremes, must end as it began, by a feudalism reproduced in the direction opposite to the first.
To-day, when the streets are lined with merchants and bankers . . . we see them hatching plots every day, to cause a rise in some sort of commodity, and gorging themselves with gold, at the expense of general industry, whose various branches they convulse by turns,-all, the effect of free competition.
This state of things ought to fasten the attention of science: it is clear that civilisation has assumed a new aspect, that monopoly and stock-jobbing, which are two commercial characteristics, have overthrown the old order. Is this a cause for triumph or for alarm?
They produce the effect in the industrial world of a body of butchers who should go upon the field of battle to aggravate and tear open the wounds of the suffering.
Nothing is, to-day, more respected than monopolism and stock-jobbing, which, in the style of the day, are termed speculation and banking, because it is not proper to call things by their names.
Civilisation began with leagues of vassals or oligarchs, noble or patriarchal ; it is destined to end with the return of great vassals of a different species, the merchants or heads of joint stock companies.
In order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the labours which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction.
Morality teaches us to love work: let it know, then, how to render work loveable.
IN conformity with the thesis of counter-swing of movement, association should have the property of assembling productive armies, as civilisation assembles destructive ones.
In civilisation a physician's earnings are proportioned to the number of sick he treats; it suits him, therefore, to have much sickness prevail and that the ailments should be protracted, particularly among the wealthy class.
THERE are sixteen classes in civilisation, not including slavery; a corporative hatred is found prevailing between all these classes; the civilised order with all its talk about the charming fraternity of intercourse, and about morality, creates only a labyrinth of discords, which may be distinguished into :
An ascending scale of hatred;
A descending scale of contempt.
We may assert without exaggeration that the asses in Harmony will be much better housed and better kept than the peasants of the beautiful land of France.
Is it not sinking beneath the level of the lower animals, to ignore the consideration we owe to their instincts? The Little Hordes exercise supreme police power in regard to the animal kingdom: whoever should ill-treat quadruped, bird, insect, either by using them roughly or by making them suffer in the shambles, would be amenable to the divan of the Little Hordes; and, no matter what his age, he would find himself arraigned before a tribunal of children, as being inferior in reason to the children themselves. For it is a maxim in Harmony, that, animals being profitable only in so far as they are well treated, he who abuses these creatures, unable to avenge themselves, is himself more of a beast than the beast that he persecutes.
Every cook will burst out laughing if he is asked to kill or stupefy a fish before scaling and opening it.
The details of these attentions would appear ridiculous in the eyes of the French, who everywhere delight in torturing animals,—quadrupeds, birds, fish, even to butterflies. The affection of the Harmonians for the brute creation lends great prominence to the duties of a butcher intelligent in managing them, and this calling is classed in the first rank in necessity.—
More recently, we have seen modern politicians confess their discomfiture regarding the problem of population. I have quoted Stewart, Wallace, and Malthus, the only writers worthy of attention upon this subject, because they acknowledge the helplessness of science. Their wise views upon the vicious circle of population are stifled by economic jugglers, who shove aside this problem as they do so many others.
Besides, granting that it would be 300 years before the earth were fully peopled, such a theory would still be a very imperfect one, the theory of a happiness or pretended happiness which should disappear at the end of 300 years through a defect in social policy, through the exuberance of population.
AUTHORS of the uncertain sciences, who pretend to labour for the good of the human race, do you believe that six hundred million barbarians and savages form no part of the human race? Yet they suffer; well, what have you done for them? Nothing. Your systems are only applicable to civilisation.
Twenty centuries of science elapsed before the least alleviation of the lot of the slave was proposed; thousands of years, then, are needed to open our eyes to a truth, to suggest an act of justice! Our sciences, which boast their love of the people, are totally ignorant of the means of protecting them.
Industrialism is the latest of our scientific chimeras; it is the mania of producing in confusion, without any system of proportional compensation, without any guarantee to the producer or wage-earner that he will participate in the increase of wealth; accordingly, we find the industrial regions sprinkled with beggars to as great, or, perhaps, a greater extent than those countries which are indifferent to this sort of progress.
Mr. Huskisson, Minister of Commerce, says: "Our silk factories employ thousands of children who are held in leash from three o'clock in the morning until ten o'clock at night: how much do they get a week? a shilling and a half, thirty-seven French sous, about five and a half sous per day, for being tied down to their work nineteen hours, superintended by foremen provided with whips with which they strike every child that stops for a moment." This is slavery actually restored: it is evident that the excess of industrial competition leads civilised nations to the same degree of poverty and servitude as the populace of China and Hindustan.
The newspapers of Dublin (1826) say: "There is an epidemic prevailing here among the people: the sick that are taken to the hospital recover as soon as they have been given food." Their sickness, then, is HUNGER. Have no fear that this epidemic will attack the great: you will
not see either the Lord-Lieutenant or the Archbishop of Dublin fall ill from hunger, but rather from indigestion.
This vicious circle of industry has been so clearly recognised, that people on all sides are beginning to suspect it, and feel astonished that, in civilisation, poverty
should be the offspring of abundance.
A good reply to the boastings of civilised perfectibility is a picture of the miseries which philosophy has actually created in the course of a single generation.
Progress of financiering, systems of extortion, indirect bankruptcy, anticipations of revenue, art of devouring the future.
Progress of the mercantile spirit: consideration accorded to commercial plundering and knavery. Stock-jobbing raised to a power which scoffs at law, encroaches upon all the fruits of industry, shares in the authority of governments, and propagates everywhere the frenzy of gambling in the public funds.
DIRECT DEPRAVITY OF THE SCIENCES: obstinate refusal to explore neglected fields of research; contempt of experience, which shows the sophists the nine scourges as the abiding fruit of their systems; jugglery of making believe that everything has been discovered, that those who offer inventions should be scoffed at; mercantile spirit of the learned world, reducing the arts and sciences to a commercial and intriguing gaming-house.
—INDIRECT DEPRAVITY OF THE SCIENCES; among other things, through progress in chemistry, the achievements of which only serve to plague the poor by furnishing commerce with the means of debasing all commodities: potato bread, wine of Indian wood, sham vinegar, sham oil, sham coffees, sham sugar, sham indigo; everything in provisions and manufactures is but a travesty, and it is the poor man who suffers by this chemical cheapening: he alone is the victim of all these mercantile inventions, which could be made to serve useful ends in a régime of genuine relations, but which will grow more and more harmful until the close of civilisation.
Commerce has a goal which has not been caught sight of by the economists; it tends to metamorphose civilisation into industrial feudalism.
Free competition, then, has as its ulterior result mercantile feudalism.
This established order is the last phase of civilisation, which, in accordance with the law of the meeting of extremes, must end as it began, by a feudalism reproduced in the direction opposite to the first.
To-day, when the streets are lined with merchants and bankers . . . we see them hatching plots every day, to cause a rise in some sort of commodity, and gorging themselves with gold, at the expense of general industry, whose various branches they convulse by turns,-all, the effect of free competition.
This state of things ought to fasten the attention of science: it is clear that civilisation has assumed a new aspect, that monopoly and stock-jobbing, which are two commercial characteristics, have overthrown the old order. Is this a cause for triumph or for alarm?
They produce the effect in the industrial world of a body of butchers who should go upon the field of battle to aggravate and tear open the wounds of the suffering.
Nothing is, to-day, more respected than monopolism and stock-jobbing, which, in the style of the day, are termed speculation and banking, because it is not proper to call things by their names.
Civilisation began with leagues of vassals or oligarchs, noble or patriarchal ; it is destined to end with the return of great vassals of a different species, the merchants or heads of joint stock companies.
In order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the labours which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction.
Morality teaches us to love work: let it know, then, how to render work loveable.
IN conformity with the thesis of counter-swing of movement, association should have the property of assembling productive armies, as civilisation assembles destructive ones.
In civilisation a physician's earnings are proportioned to the number of sick he treats; it suits him, therefore, to have much sickness prevail and that the ailments should be protracted, particularly among the wealthy class.
THERE are sixteen classes in civilisation, not including slavery; a corporative hatred is found prevailing between all these classes; the civilised order with all its talk about the charming fraternity of intercourse, and about morality, creates only a labyrinth of discords, which may be distinguished into :
An ascending scale of hatred;
A descending scale of contempt.
We may assert without exaggeration that the asses in Harmony will be much better housed and better kept than the peasants of the beautiful land of France.
Is it not sinking beneath the level of the lower animals, to ignore the consideration we owe to their instincts? The Little Hordes exercise supreme police power in regard to the animal kingdom: whoever should ill-treat quadruped, bird, insect, either by using them roughly or by making them suffer in the shambles, would be amenable to the divan of the Little Hordes; and, no matter what his age, he would find himself arraigned before a tribunal of children, as being inferior in reason to the children themselves. For it is a maxim in Harmony, that, animals being profitable only in so far as they are well treated, he who abuses these creatures, unable to avenge themselves, is himself more of a beast than the beast that he persecutes.
Every cook will burst out laughing if he is asked to kill or stupefy a fish before scaling and opening it.
The details of these attentions would appear ridiculous in the eyes of the French, who everywhere delight in torturing animals,—quadrupeds, birds, fish, even to butterflies. The affection of the Harmonians for the brute creation lends great prominence to the duties of a butcher intelligent in managing them, and this calling is classed in the first rank in necessity.—
More recently, we have seen modern politicians confess their discomfiture regarding the problem of population. I have quoted Stewart, Wallace, and Malthus, the only writers worthy of attention upon this subject, because they acknowledge the helplessness of science. Their wise views upon the vicious circle of population are stifled by economic jugglers, who shove aside this problem as they do so many others.
Besides, granting that it would be 300 years before the earth were fully peopled, such a theory would still be a very imperfect one, the theory of a happiness or pretended happiness which should disappear at the end of 300 years through a defect in social policy, through the exuberance of population.
October 18, 2015
"the question to be determined is who is wrong, God or morality?"
June 17, 2016
lots of excellent pieces and points. others were weirder, but still thought out and developed
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews