business as a broker. Amidst his dealings with Society, he was early struck by the shortcomings and injustices of individualism and competition. In his first book, The Theory of the Four Movements, he elaborates the proposition that human nature 1s perfectible through the free play of the appetites and passions, and asserts that misery and vice spring from the restraints imposed by Society. His criticism of modern Society is most valuable as anticipating that of scientific Socialism ; unlike his contemporaries he has an insight into the historical growth of mankind: “He divides it into four periods of development, Savagery, Barbarism, Patriarchalism, and Civilisation, meaning by the latter the Bourgeois Civilisation.”172 His saying, “In civilisation poverty is born even of superabundance,” may well be noted in these days, and compared with Robert Owen’s in 1816, “our best customer, the war, is dead.”
As a basis of the reconstruction of 215 Society, Fourier advocated Industrial Co-operation; but here his Utopianism led him into the trap of formulating dogmatically an elaborate scheme of life in all its details, a scheme which could never be carried out, however good the principles on which it was based might be. His proposal arranges for phalansteries as the unit of co-operation, in which all life and all industry, agricultural and other, should be carried on, and all details are carried out by him most minutely, the number of each phalanstery being settled at 1600 souls. The most valuable idea was the possibility and necessity of apportioning due labour to each capacity, and thereby assuring that it should be always pleasurable, and his dictum that children, who generally like making dirt-pies and getting into a mess, should do the dirty work of the community, may at least be looked on as an illustration of this idea, though laid down as a formal law. His system was not one of pure equality, but admitted distinctions between rich and (comparatively) poor, and advocated a fantastic division of wealth between 216 labour, capital, and talent. The abolition of marriage was a point he laid special stress upon.