Fourierism

Fourierism () is the systematic set of economic, political, and social beliefs first espoused by French intellectual Charles Fourier (1772–1837). It is based on a belief in the inevitability of communal associations of people who work and live together as part of the human future. Fourier's supporters called his doctrines associationism. Political contemporaries and subsequent scholarship have identified Fourier's set of ideas as a form of utopian socialism. Never tested in practice at any scale in Fourier's lifetime, Fourierism enjoyed a brief boom in the United States during the mid-1840s owing largely to the efforts of his American popularizer, Albert Brisbane (1809–1890), and the American Union of Associationists, but ultimately failed as a social and economic model. The system was briefly revived in the mid-1850s by Victor Considerant (1808–1893), a French disciple of Fourier's who unsuccessfully attempted to relaunch the model in Texas in the 1850s.