The son of merchants, Fourier worked all his life in the trade he hated while writing about a new society. He proposed communities called phalansteries, where work would be attractive and human passions, far from being repressed, would be combined in harmony. He sharply criticized marriage and the condition of women.
Core ideas
Human passions are good and should be satisfied, not repressed by morality
Work can be pleasurable if organized according to each person's inclinations
Cooperative communities, the phalansteries, should replace commercial civilization
The tradition: Utopian socialism
Utopian socialism imagined just, cooperative societies to be built by example, before Marx. Fourier stands out in this line for basing his utopia on the liberation of pleasures and passions.
