The Arcades Project - Operi

he saw it, took its rise from the individual workshop, proceeded to the idea of the
association of producers, and aimed to achieve a communism of the general community.
This was before 184·8 . ... Zola, however, wanted to revive the method of
this period; he . .. took up the . .. ideas of Fourier, which were conditioned by the
embryonic relations of capitalist production, and attempted to ally them to the
modern form of this production, which had grown to gigantic proportions. ?? Franz
Diederich, '!.Zola als Utopist" (on Le r" avail), Die neu.e Zeit, 20, no. 1 (Stuttgart),
pp. 326-327, 329. [W5,1]
Fourier (in Le Nouveau Monde indus/n'el e/ socidaire, 1829) disapproves of the
contempt for gastronomy. "This gaucherie is yet another of those exploits of
morality calculated to turn us into enemies of our own senses, and into friends of
that commercial activity which serves merely to provoke the abuses of sensual
pleasure:' E. Poisson, Foun'er [contains selected texts] (Paris, 1932), p. 131. Thus,
Fourier here views immoral businesses as a complement to idealist morality. To
both he opposes his hedonistic materialism. His position recalls, from afar, that of
Georg Biichner. The words quoted above might have been spoken by Biichner's
Danton. [W5,2]
"A phalanx does not sell a thousand quintals of flour of indifferent quality; it sells
a thousand quintals classified according to a scale of five, six, or seven varieties of
flavor, which it has tested in a hakery and distinguished in terms of the field where
it was harvested and the method of cultivation . ... Such an agricultural mechanism
will contrast sharply with the practices of our backward world, our civilization
so in need of perfecting. . . . We see among ourselves ? furthermore,
merchandise of inferior quality that is twenty times more abundant and more
easily sold than better-quality goods . ... As a result of this circumstance, we can
no longer even recognize the inferior quality; morality accustoms the civilized to
eating the good and the bad indiscriminately. From this coarseness of taste follow
all the knaveries of mercantilism." TheOl'ie des quat1'e mouvements (1828), cited
in E. Poisson, Fourier (Paris, 1932L pp. 134-135.7-Already children are taught
to " clean their plates." [W5,3]
"Knowing . .. that sometimes, in the region of the North Pole, there is generated
an electrical discharge which lights up those lands plunged in darkness for six
months of the year, Fourier announces that, when the earth shall have been rationally
cultivated in all its parts, the aurora borealis will be continuous. Is this
absurd?" The author endeavors, following this, to provide an explanation: the
transformed earth will absorb less electricity from the SUll, and. whatever is not
absorbed will encircle it as a ring of Northern Lights. Charles-M. Limousin, Le
Fourierisme: Reponse a un article de Edmond Villey intiw1.e "Fourier et son oeuvre"
(Paris, 1898), p. 6. [W5a,1]
"There would be nothing very surprising in the fact that Fourier had been associated
. . . with a Martinist lodge, or at the very least had felt the influence of a