Charles Fourier Archives - Page 3 of 4 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Charles Fourier on Free Will — I

May 26, 2012

[ezcol_2third] FREE WILL ____ NOTICE ON THE TREATISE ON FREE WILL. ____ The Treatise on Free Will does not appear in the first edition of the Treatise on Universal Unity. It is the first of Fourier’s manuscripts delivered for publication since the death of the author. The notebooks left by Fourier are in general only preliminary sketches that he condensed and published when he published then. Quite a number of these manuscripts date from the period prior to the appearance of the first edition of the Treatise on Universal Unity (1822). The Treatise on Free Will is of this number. […]

Charles Fourier on the Antienne, or first repast

May 26, 2012 anarchisms_w4l2ii

Charles Fourier and Charles A. Dana (translator), “An Unpublished Fragment of Fourier,” The Harbinger 3, no. 10 (August 15, 1846): 150-151. Charles Fourier [main page] AN UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENT OF FOURIER. Translated [by Charles A. Dana] from La Democratie Pacifique. Each repast of the day has a special character, a tone which prevails generally at the three classes of tables. I will confine myself to the description of the Antienne, or first repast, which takes place in the morning before leaving the palace. The Antienne cannot be made perfectly regular; — a beautiful disorder will distinguish it. As the hour of […]

Anarchist Beginnings

Charles Fourier on the Papillon, or Butterfly Passion

May 25, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

[A bit from Charles Fourier’s Passions of the Human Soul, dealing with dinner parties and the passion for variation, the papillon. Some of Fourier’s influence no doubt comes through in Stephen Pearl Andrews analogy of the dinner party.] According to the property common to the three distributives, the papillon is of two species, distinguished into contrasted and identical. 1st. The contrasted papillon arises from transitions from one extreme to another. For example: a company of sybarites, accustomed to sumptuous banquets, will eat with great pleasure in a cottage, rustic fare,—milk and fruit served up in earthern vessels; they will find […]

Charles Fourier on the Pear-Grower’s Series

May 25, 2012 anarchisms_w4l2ii

This illustration of Fourier’s theory of the play of passional attractions and progressive series is something I have referred to in the past, in “The Lesson of the Pear-Growers’ Series.” Ian Patterson has done a lovely, complete translation of it for the Cambridge edition of The Theory of the Four Movements, but I’ve wanted for some time to spend enough time with the French to work up a usable translation of my own, since I expect to have recourse to the example again in forthcoming work. Working through Fourier’s prose is at once maddening and delightful, since there is frequently […]

Joseph Déjacque, “The Universal Circulus” (revised translation)(1858)

May 9, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

[This remarkable bit of libertarian philosophy by Joseph Déjacque poses all sorts of difficulties for the modern reader, not the least of which is it borrowings from, and reworkings of, the works of Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux. And there are places where it ha been necessary to translate things rather literally, since terms are used suggestively, according to the established uses of none of the writers or schools that they were drawn from. There are also a couple of times when Déjacque’s enthusiasm clearly ran away with the syntax: where catalogs of conditionals come to abrupt stops, without ever […]

Charles Fourier on the Pear-Growers’ Series

June 3, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

This illustration of Fourier’s theory of the play of passional attractions and progressive series is something I have referred to in the past, in “The Lesson of the Pear-Growers’ Series.”Ian Patterson has done a lovely, complete translation of it for the Cambridge edition of The Theory of the Four Movements, but I’ve wanted for some time to spend enough time with the French to work up a usable translation of my own, since I expect to have recourse to the example again in forthcoming work. Working through Fourier’s prose is at once maddening and delightful, since there is frequently a […]

Contr'un

Charles Fourier on the Papillon, or Butterfly Passion

March 2, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[For Roderick, a bit from Charles Fourier’s Passions of the Human Soul, dealing with dinner parties and the passion for variation, the papillon. Some of Fourier’s influence no doubt comes through in Stephen Pearl Andrews analogy of the dinner party.] According to the property common to the three distributives, the papillon is of two species, distinguished into contrasted and identical. 1st. The contrasted papillon arises from transitions from one extreme to another. For example: a company of sybarites, accustomed to sumptuous banquets, will eat with great pleasure in a cottage, rustic fare,—milk and fruit served up in earthern vessels; they […]

A Fourierist account of property

February 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] I’ve been ranging through my personal archives, and through pretty much everything else I can get my hands on lately, looking for material to help fill gaps in the general analysis of property that I’m writing for The Mutualist #2: “Owning Up.” The plan is to dedicate the whole issue to a fleshed-out summary of the property theory I’ve been developing over the last 3-4 years (hopefully in time for the Bay Area Bookfair), and finish up a radically-rewritten version of “The Anarchism of Approximations,” so I can focus much of […]

The Circulus in Universality

July 12, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Circulus in Universality (1858) [revised translation available] Joseph Déjacque I The circulus in universality is the destruction of every religion, of all arbitrariness, be it elysian or tartarean, heavenly or infernal. The movement in the infinite is infinite progress. This being the case, the world can no longer be a duality, mind and matter, body and soul, which is to say a mutable thing and an immutable one, which implies contradiction—movement excluding immobility and vice versa—but must be, quite to the contrary, an infinite unity of always-mutable and always-mobile substance, which implies perfectibility. It is by eternal and infinite […]

Not just for pear-growers anymore

February 18, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] [Commentary coming soon.] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] The anarcho-Fourierist renaissance continues. In “The Lesson of the Pear Growers’ Series,” I had suggested that there might still be some lessons to be learned from Charles Fourier’s approach to questions of individual passion, competition, etc. Unfortunately, “Note A,” which contains the most concise explanation of Fourier’s associative model, is not available (yet) in a public-domain translation online—and it is a bit of a stretch, at times, to make the analogies between growing pears (and apples, and quinces) and other sorts of labor we might actually be planning on engaging in. Fortunately, one of […]