THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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future. The goal was a co­operative organization of the manufacture and distribution of goods; strangely enough, Fourier saw the beginnings of this in the existing
savings­banks, in co­operative insurance companies and similar bourgeois caricatures of a socialist guaranteeism. Although Foutier foresaw later stages of production:
specifically the formation of industrial monopolies, he simply feared them and did not, like Saint­Simon and especially Marx, welcome them and include them in his
utopia as riper stages. Fourier's outlook and evaluation here remained fixedly petit­bourgeois, and moreover anarchist sympathies made their presence felt in his
federalist guaranteeism. Like Owen he plans small communes, so­called phalanstères, in fact even without the total abolition of private property — an anomaly in
utopias. Instead, the man of the future is also to be allowed to gain his independence by acquiring a small fortune; certainly not for the exploitation of others (there is no
private ownership of the means of production), but rather with the aim of preventing individual nullification in the collective. Even the phalanstères are nothing but
individually autonomous communities, manageably intimate communes of one and a half thousand people or a little more; every phalanx preserves within it a careful
balance between individual and collective. Even amongst themselves, the phalanstères are only associated, although under a fantastically embellished world­leadership;
no other socialism than the personal­federative one is permitted here. The business of agriculture and skilled trades in the phalanstères, and the absence of large­scale
industry, was to preserve for the community the sweetness of a pastoral in the midst of a socialist front. Two hours work are enough, so that work should remain a
pleasure, and an abundant change of occupation is likewise envisaged — in keeping with the ‘butterfly passion’ of human beings and the makings of at least thirty jobs
which everyone has in him according to Fourier. At this point the utopian becomes almost American: the resourcefulness and versatility of the pioneer is introduced not
into the prairie, of course, but rather into the safe garden cities of the future phalanstères. Also, just as in Owen, all this freedom without the division of labour and this
pronounced federative utopia serves not so much a lavish production as the victory of our ‘basic passion’; according to Fourier — with a sudden astonishing optimism
— this is the Christian love of mankind. Capitalist civilization does of course already bear within it the tendency towards the new phase of society (just as every epoch
has inherent within it the one which follows), despite the feared monopolies, those which are already to be nipped in the bud by socialism: but with more than historical,
with ‘geometrical necessity’ Fourier's future