The Arcades Project - Operi

Fourier's point of departure: the reflection on small business. Compare, in this
connection, the following: "When one considers the number of people in Paris
whose lives depend on small business-the size of this fonnidable army exclu­
sively occupied with measuring, weighing, packaging, and transporting from one
end of town to the other-one is rightly alarmed . ... It must be recalled that, in
our industrial cities, a shop is generally nm by three or four families . ... 'Sordidi
etiam qui lnercantur a mercatoribus quod statim vendant; nihil emm proficiunt
nisi admodum mentiantur. Nec vero quicquam est turpius vanitate' (De Officiis).'
. . . The current president of the Chamber of Commerce last year formally
requested once again, as a remedy for commercial anarchy, the reestablishment
of guilds:' Eugene Buret, De la Misere des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en
Hance (Paris, IS40), vo!' 2, pp. 216-21S. [W4a,l]
r.The modern proletariat '8 lack of history, the detachment of the first generation of
factory workers from every historical tradition of class and profession, and the
diversity of its origin-in handicrafts, small landholdings, agrarian labor, and
domestic concerns of every sort-made this category of economic man receptive to
a vision of the world that would improvise ex novo a new state, a new economy, and
a new morality. The novelty of' what was to he achieved corresponded logically to
the novelty of the situation in which the new men and women found themselves."
Robert Michels "Psychologie der antikapitalistischen Massenhewegungen,"
p. 313 [Grundriss der SozialOkonomik, vol. 9, no. 1, Die gesellschaftliche
Schichtung im Kapitalismus (Tiihingen, 1926)]. [W4a,2]
"Grandville's life is unremarkable enough: peaceful, remote from all excess, at the
periphery of dangerous enthusiasms . ... His youth was that of an honest clerk in
a l'espectable shop, where, on rows of spotless shelves, were arrayed-not without
malice-the various images that cOlTesponded to the need for criticism which an
'average Frenchman' might feel in 1827." MacOrlan, "Grandville Ie
pre{urseur," Arts et metiers graphiques. 44 (December 15, 1934) .
[W4a,3]
Fourier and Saint-Simon: " Fourier is more interest.ing and more diversified in his
economic analysis and in his crit.ique of the existing social order. But, t.hen, Saint­
Simon has the advantage over Fourier in his representations of future economic
development. Obviously, this development had to move ... in t.he direct.ion of a
global economy . .. , and not in the direction of many self-sufficient little economies,
such as Fourier imagined. Saint-Simon conceives the capitalist order . .. as
a step . .. , while Fourier rejects it in the name of the petty bourgeoisie." V. Volgin,
"-oher die historische Stellung Saint-Simons," in (Marx-Engels Archiv, vol. 1
, p. 118. [W4a,4]
"In an exchange of views with the writer Camille Manclair, . .. Zola . .. declared
unequivocally that. he hore no love for collectivism; he found it smallhearted and
utopian. He was an anarchist rather than a socialist. ... Utopian socialism, . .. as