Picture yourself in a commune near Boston
With lions as butlers and lemonade seas
Everyone’s willing to share their possessions
And work for the community
Happy small children collect all the trash
Riding on Shetland ponies
Free education, free love
Total equality
The magnificent failure known as Brook Farm, a utopian commune set up in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was more fantastic than anything dreamed up by John Lennon. Founded by free-thinking New Englanders in 1841—the hippies of their generation—its ambitious program gave ownership of the community to anyone who lived and worked there, one share distributed for each day a member worked, and provided a high-quality education from preschool through college for all of the colony’s children. Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the original shareholders; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and Transcendentalist, along with feminist author Margaret Fuller, and the fathers of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe were all enthusiastic about the enterprise.
The experiment was based on the socialist ideals of the French reformer Charles Fourier. Like other late-18th-century rationalists, including Ben Franklin, Fourier believed you could solve all the problems of the world if you just put your mind to it. Putting his mind to the problems of urban and industrial society, he came up with the “back-to-the-land” philosophy that inspired not only Brook Farm, but numerous communes throughout the United States, not to mention the Kibbutz model in Israel.
But Fourier didn’t stop at social engineering. He predicted that a new planetary alignment would change the earth. The North Pole would melt and the seas would lose their saltiness and turn to lemonade. Wild animals would become the servants of humankind. So maybe he went off the deep end, but his ideas were incredibly influential. Karl Marx “borrowed” his criticism of capitalism, the exploitation of workers for the benefit of factory owners, and his understanding of the way that factory work alienated workers. Others picked up on his support of women’s rights—Fourier coined the word “feminism”— his critique of the institution of marriage and advocacy of sexual freedom, including same-sex unions.
All in all, he was a pretty radical guy, not only for his time, but for ours as well. “The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum wage,” he said. “This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work.”
Charles Fourier was born on April 7, 1772, and died on October 10, 1837.
Lisa Lieberman's translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Paris Under the Occupation" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads, Barnes and Noble Nook Books and Google Books.
Learned something here that I didn't know: that Fourier inspired the kibbutzim of Israel. Thanks for that and for the report on Brook Farm. What's there nowadays?
ReplyDeleteNineteenth-century utopians and utopianism could be a good subject for a book. Which may already have been written.