CHAPTER
5
"IS
THE THING REALLY DESIRABLE?":
EMERSON'S
RECEPTION OF FOURIERISM
I.
". . . Fourier had skipped no fact but
one, namely Life." When Ralph Waldo
Emerson penned this devasting line for his 1842 Dial essay "Fourierism and the Socialists," he may have
lifted the underlying idea from Thomas Carlyle.
If so, the theft was pardonable, for it had been Emerson who had moved Carlyle
to damn Fourier in the first place. In
his introduction to the British edition of Emerson's 1841 Essays, Carlyle had hailed his American friend as an alternative to
the moribund movements of the day:
While so many
Benthamisms, Socialisms, Fourierisms, professing to have no soul, go
staggering and lowing like monstrous moon-calves, the product of a heavy
moonstruck age . . . shall not any voice of a living man be welcome
to us, even because it was alive?[1]
Carlyle was not alone in his opinion. Other friends of Emerson, even those with one
foot in the Fourierist camp, portrayed him as an anti-Fourierist. In Summer
on the Lakes, for example, Margaret Fuller staged an imaginary debate on
the utility of mesmerism. Fuller, as the
allegorical character Free Hope, argued that mesmerism might give the mind a
window into a higher mode of being, Fourier's "aromal state." Another character, Self-Poise, disagreed, and
advised Free Hope to steer clear of "nonsense." Self-Poise's advice ends with an unacknowledged
quotation of Emerson's
Henry James,
somebody says, 'is very mad about Emerson's criticism on Fourier; he says
Emerson knew nothing about Fourier, and has confessed to him that he never read
his works, but only knows of them from extracts which Mrs Emerson read to him
while he was shaving.'
James repudiated the
details of this account, claiming that he was misquoted, but affirmed the
substance of the story: "[I]t is true . . . that I complain of
Emerson's incompetence to criticize Fourier on his present basis of knowledge,
and to none more frankly than to Emerson himself . . . ."[3] All of the foregoing suggests that Emerson
had from the outset ridiculed Fourier and his bizarre tenets. The James anecdote further suggests that
Emerson considered Fourierism too outlandish to merit more than passing
consideration.
But a closer examination shows that Emerson's reaction
was far more complex. At roughly the
same time that Orestes Brownson was learning to despise Fourier, Emerson was
learning to admire the utopian. It is
true that from 1842 to 1844, when most of Emerson's knowledge of Fourierism was
gleaned from Albert Brisbane, his comments on the movement were overwhelmingly
negative, often mocking. After reading
several volumes of the Oeuvres complètes
in early 1845, however, Emerson came to distinguish Fourier's original theory
from adulterated American Associationism.
The mockery continued, but it was now juxtaposed with profound,
occasionally extravagant appreciations of Fourier's views on diverse topics:
social reform, sexual liberation, economics, antislavery, human nature
itself. Emerson's complex dialogue with
Fourierism suggests that Emerson, in coming to distinguish Fourier from the
Associationists, found more merit in the Frenchman's "crazy" thought
than in the watered-down socialism of his American interpreters. And in Fourier, Emerson also found an uncanny
echo of himself.
To understand what Fourierism had meant to Emerson in
the 1840s, it may be useful to begin by asking what Emerson's postbellum
audience thought it had meant to him.
Their prevailing assumption—that Emerson had had little use for
Fourier—was rapidly incorporated into the myth of Emerson as the ideal of
American individualism. The day after
Emerson's death, two obituaries highlighted his critique of socialism. The
Daily Evening Traveller's necrology implied that the publication of
"Fourierism and the Socialists" in the July 1842 Dial, Emerson's first issue as editor, signalled his desire to move
the journal in a different direction (rpt., Cameron, Emerson, Thoreau and
[Emerson
protested] especially against the phalansteries of Fourier and insist[ed] that
it was individualism rather than communism of which men had the greatest
need. The strong Yankee sagacity which
was no less a characteristic of the man than his poetic imagination doubtless
impelled him in this matter. (rpt.,
Cameron ET&C 28)
The two obituaries had
independently come to similar conclusions, hailing Emerson's rejection of
Fourierism, first made some four decades earlier, as proof of his common
sense. While Emerson might have had
flights of fancy, his idealism was counterbalanced by "Yankee
sagacity," making him safe for American consumption.
Emerson's
final public lecture did much to sanction this interpretation of his
career. "Historic Notes of Life and
Letters in New England," first published posthumously in 1883, had been
written and delivered years earlier, perhaps as early as 1867 (see WRWE 10:572-573); it may well have
occasioned James's 1868 complaint.
Emerson delivered "Historic Notes" at the Concord Lyceum on
More recently, however, Sacvan Bercovitch has shown that
Emerson, in rejecting Fourierist theory as impracticable, did not dismiss the
movement itself as counter-productive.[4] "Historic Notes" argued that
[These
philanthropists] were not the creators that they believed themselves, but they
were the unconscious prophets of a true state of
society. . . . The large
cities are phalansteries; and the theorists drew all their argument from facts
already taking place in our experience.[5] The cheap way is to make every man do what he
was born for. (WRWE 10:357-358)
The patriarch of
American culture closed "Historic Notes"—and his career—by bestowing
his blessing upon the "quiet power" of "our American mind,"
which had begun to realize a vision less "eccentric" and
"rude" than European socialism, and "whose genius is not a lucky
accident, but normal, and with broad foundation of culture, and so inspires the
hope of steady strength advancing on itself, and a day without night" (WRWE 10:369-370). In celebrating
In
claiming that "Historic Notes" was a relatively accurate "glance
backward" over young Emerson's road, Bercovitch advances his central
thesis, that Emerson's "confrontation with the theory and practice of
socialism" circa 1842 catalyzed the shift from his early radicalism to his
later conservatism ("EILD" 341, 318).
Bercovitch juxtaposes Emerson's hostility towards European socialists
(who had coined "individualism" as a pejorative) with his simultaneous
rejection of the Jacksonian alternative, the attempt to establish
"individualism" as a political structure.[6] Instead, Emerson created a third way, the
unstructured play of a utopian "individuality," as exemplified in
this famous journal entry from late 1842:
The
world is waking up to the idea of
union
ideal,—in actual individualism, actual union (JMN 8:251)
Bercovitch persuasively
argues that Emerson here embraced the goals of Fourierism and similar social
reforms—specifically, "union"—while simultaneously rejecting the
magical methods of the socialists as "the dreams of Bedlam"
("EILD" 310-318). Bercovitch
further proposes that Emerson's unideological ideology of individuality was
developed out of his engagement with the "crazy" (Emerson's word)
European socialists: Leroux, Saint Simon, Chartists, and, Bercovitch suggests,
"perhaps Fourier in particular" (JMN
9:402; "EILD" 330). In other
words, Bercovitch argues that Emerson's "individuality" was the
dialectical negation of European socialist ideology, especially that of
Fourierism.
It is not difficult to find support for Bercovitch's
claim in Emerson's writings. Clearly he
thought the otherworldly Associationists did not see what was under their
noses: "What room for Fourier phalanxes, for large & remote schemes of
happiness when I may be in any moment surprized by contentment?" (JMN 8:216). He playfully considered the possibility of
banding together with a few close friends to form a "Sacred Phalanx"
for the self-reliant, a "Concord Socialism" devoted to "the most
holy Trinity Truth, Goodness, & Beauty" (Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, 31
Aug. 1843, LRWE 3:203). But although Bercovitch's argument is
generally compelling, it does not fully account for Emerson's specific
responses to Fourierism, particularly in the years after 1844. As we shall see, Emerson's continual
engagement with Fourier's ideas outlasted the collapse of Associationism as a
national socialist movement.
II.
While Emerson's first reference to
Fourierism dates from 1842, he would have known of the movement from an
unsigned one-paragraph notice of Social
Destiny of Man that appeared in the October 1840 Dial, a mere month after the book was published. The author was almost certainly George
Ripley, who had learned of
Beyond his ties to the Brook Farmers, Emerson had
reason to take note of the nascent Associationist movement. From the late 1830s, his lectures had often
expressed dissatisfaction with the hollowness of early industrial capitalist
society, as in the "One Man" fable of "The American
Scholar": "The state of society is one in which the members have
suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a
good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man" (54). To cure Americans of such profound
alienation, extreme measures might be required.
In the 1841 address "Man the Reformer," Emerson asked his
working-class audience whether the wealth of civilization was so
"tainted" that it must be wholly "renounced" in favor of a
return to "the manual labor of the world" (139). This faintly Maoist proposal, made a few
years before Thoreau's sojourn at Walden Pond, found a partial parallel in
Brisbane's diagnosis of American anomie and his marketing of agricultural
Association as its cure. But prior to
1842, there is no evidence of any direct influence: Emerson's knowledge of
Fourierism was probably slight.
Emerson's first recorded contact with American
Fourierists came in late February 1842: at the beginning of his
Mr Brisbane
promised me a full exposition of the principles of Fourierism & Association
[. . . .] Il faut
soumettre: Yet I foresaw in the moment when I encountered these two new friends
here, that I cannot content them. They
are bent on popular action: I am in all my theory, ethics & politics a poet
and of no more use to them in their
Consistently with his
evolving anti-socialist stance, Emerson argued that Brisbane and Greeley's new
doctrine—whatever its specifics might happen to be—was a potential threat to
the self-reliant. Emerson further
objected to the Fourierists' reduction of his own thought to a competing system
"whereof you know I am wholly guiltless, and which is spoken of as a known
& fixed element like salt and meal" (LRWE
But Emerson himself, not yet initiated into Fourierist
arcana, had also misunderstood Brisbane and Greeley. The two men, despite their long and vigorous
propaganda campaign for Associationism, were hardly "bent on popular
action"; their socialist praxis, like that of Fourier himself, was
essentially limited to the promulgation of the theory. Thus it is amusing that Emerson paints these
utopian dreamers as pragmatists, and himself as the fanciful idealist. Emerson elaborated this elaborated this
faulty opposition in another letter written that day:
Alas, how shall I
content Mr Brisbane? [. . .]
These kindly but too determinate persons, the air of Wall Street, the
expression of the faces of all the male & female crowd in Broadway, the
endless rustle of newspapers all make me feel not the value of their classes
but of my own class—the supreme need of the few worshippers of the Muse—wild
& sacred—as counteraction to this world of material & ephemeral
interest.[9]
Emerson saw Brisbane and
Greeley as half-formed: a capitalist and a journalist, quotidian trippers and
askers.[10] On Emerson's side, one might place the
traditional heroes of the American Renaissance, those egotists who preferred
not to.
Emerson's initial error—his confusion of Fourierism
with vulgar materialism—was the understandable result of
Emerson finally submitted to
In fact,
Emerson's public criticism in "Fourierism and the
Socialists" was more guarded yet equally pointed: "Mr. Brisbane
pushes his doctrine with all the force of memory, talent, honest faith, and
importunacy" ("F&S" 1205).
The verb choice is telling, and Emerson had toned down the first draft: "importunacy"
had originally been "impudence" (JMN
8:208). Another excised passage
suggested that
[He] seems as one
who should laboriously arrange a heap of shavings of steel by hand in the
direction of their magnetic poles instead of thrusting a needle into the heap,
and instantaneously they are magnets. (JMN 8:210)
"Fourierism and the Socialists" was an
occasional essay, introducing the only article by
Although
such bombast was not difficult to skewer, "Fourierism and the
Socialists" performed the task with elegance. With tongue in cheek, Emerson praised
Fourier's system as "the perfection of arrangement and contrivance
. . . . Mechanics were
pushed so far as to fairly meet spiritualism" (E&L, 1205-1206; cf. JMN
8:208)—faint praise tantamount to dismissal.[12] Playfully slipping from appreciation to
satire and back again, Emerson transformed the Fourierist plan for curing
"the disorders of the planet" into a burlesque:
"Attractive
Industry" would speedily subdue [. . .] the pestilential tracts;
would equalize temperature, give health to the globe, and cause the earth to
yield 'healthy imponderable fluids' to the solar system, as it now yields noxious
fluids. The hyena, the jackal, the gnat,
the bug, the flea, were all beneficent parts of the system, but the good
Fourier knew what those creatures should have been, had not the mould slipped,
caused, no doubt, by those same vicious imponderable fluids. (E&L
1206)
In their March meetings,
Emerson's ridicule signals a rapid shift in the ground
of his critique. After he assailed the
theory for its pedantic coherence, Emerson then shifted from Orphic to Yankee
gear to lampoon the incoherence of Fourierism. The rhetorical strategy is interesting. After the virtuoso sendup from a commonsense
perspective ("Genius, grace, art, abound, and it is not to be doubted but
that [JMN: Mr. Brisbane does not doubt that], in the reign of
"Attractive Industry," all men will speak in blank verse."),[13]
the charge against Fourier is transformed once again, from insanity back to
spiritual inanity. Specifically, Fourier
had erred in insisting that there was only one path to the Over-Soul "to
be . . . carried into rigid execution" (E&L 1207-1208).
Emerson's distaste for such spiritual totalitarianism is the point of
his "namely, Life" jibe.[14]
It may seem peculiar that Emerson, immediately after
having bashed Fourier's vulgar materialism, suddenly turned on the two great
systems of Western idealism. This move
has its underlying logic, however, for Emerson was not rejecting the
materialist perspective per se, but rather all systematic thought. The anti-rational voice of Emerson reasserts
itself:
[L]et us be lovers
and servants of that which is just; and straightaway every man becomes a centre
of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law,
like that of Plato, and of Christ. Before
such a man the whole world becomes Fourierized or Christized or humanized, and
in the obedience to his most private being, he finds himself, according to his
presentiment, though against all sensuous probability, acting in strict concert
with all others who followed their private light. (E&L
1208)
Fourier provided Emerson
with an opportunity to repeat his paradoxical claim in
"Self-Reliance," that the unideological "obedience to [one's]
most private being" will somehow result in the most highly ordered society
possible. This declaration, repeated
decades later in "Historic Notes," nicely summarizes Emerson's
crucial contribution to the American capitalist ideology—the mapping of the
economic doctrine of the hidden hand onto the metaphysical realm.
While the material we have examined so far largely
supports Bercovitch's argument, Emerson's response to Fourierism was even more
complex than Bercovitch allows. The call
to obey the voice within becomes problematic in an essay intended to refute
Fourierism, for reliance on this inner voice is also the cornerstone of
Fourier's passional ideology. Fourier's
first "scientific discovery" was that each person had an accurate
moral compass within, the compass of desire: "if God has given so much
influence to passional attraction and so little to reason, its enemy, He did
this to lead us to this order of progressive [series] that satisfy attraction
in every sense" (OC 1:11).
This unacknowledged congruence may explain why Emerson
reconsidered his rejection of Fourier in his next Dial essay, "English Reformers." Bronson Alcott, idiosyncratic even by
Transcendentalist standards, had become interested in Fourierism during his
1842 tour of
Perhaps Emerson approved of Lane's schema because he
detected some general similarities between it and his own doctrine of the
Over-Soul. Indeed, Doherty's London Phalanx, which Emerson had
complimented, had previously cited a passage from "The Over-Soul"
with approval: ". . . .
All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the great soul have its
way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey."[16] In 1842, Emerson was more favorably inclined
towards Lane, Doherty, and other members of the English Fourierist movement
than he was towards Brisbane and the American Fourierists. His personal distaste for
But in his private audiences with Emerson,
Mr Brisbane
. . . shames truer men by his fidelity & zeal, and already begins
to hear the reverberations of his single voice from most of the states of the
Furthermore, this letter
shows that Emerson was no longer confusing Fourierism with materialism and
other "
But Emerson would not become this venturesome until
1845. Through 1844, Emerson interrogated
the viability of Fourierism as a pragmatic plan for social reform, as Bercovitch
has shown. His lecture on "The
Young American," delivered in February 1844, less than a month after the
Fourierizing of Brook Farm, anticipated "Historic Notes" in arguing
that the communitarian groundswell was one of several harbingers of a coming
"revolution." However, Emerson
argued that the agent of the race's manifest destiny would not be Fourier but
At the same time, Emerson admitted that the economies
of scale afforded by the phalanx might force a reorganization of labor. He was impressed by Fourier's proposed
"Sacred Band" (not to be confused with the "Little Horde"
of manure-loving boys) and predicted that Fourierism would force a
reorganization of American agriculture (E&L
223). Even book clubs and boarding
houses suggested that "society [was] trying Fourierism in small
pieces" (JMN 9:371; cf.
Fuller's
interest in Fourier's doctrine of the "aromal state" led her to
develop a critique of Emerson's social conservatism in Summer on the Lakes (Zwarg, "Footnoting the Sublime"
629-633). Emerson's difference of
opinion with Fuller may have contributed to the rigidification of his public
opposition to Fourier in the 1844 Essays,
in which he once again mounted an attack upon Associationist doctrine.[18] In musing upon the relative merits of the
particular and the universal, Emerson wrote that "Mesmerism,
Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church . . . are poor
pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, philosophy, and
preaching of the day. ("Nominalist
and Realist," E&L 580) This verdict is similar to that of Engels:
both men praised Fourier's diagnosis of society's disease, but dismissed the
movement's proposed cure. Even if
communitarianism was ineffective, Emerson added, it might offer a welcome
diversion: "Why have only two or
three ways of life, and not thousands?
Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much" (E&L 583). In private, Emerson was even more dismissive:
he cautioned Fuller that the Associationists' experiments were no better than
other pseudoscientific fads popular among her New York friends. Such theories might furnish "novelty and
recreation," he argued, but could not "heal us of our deep
wound":
I think it is part
of our lesson to give a formal consent to what is farcical, and to pick up our
living & our virtue amidst what is so ridiculous, hardly deigning a smile,
and certainly not vexed. (11 Apr. 1844, LRWE 3:246)
Apparently Emerson was
already feeling the need to warn Fuller from edging towards the Fourierist
camp.
Indeed, Emerson had already mounted another full-scale
assault upon the Fourierists in his March 1844 lecture at Boston's Amory Hall,
"New England Reformers." Linck
C. Johnson's "Reforming the Reformers" (1991) reconstructs the
forgotten context of Emerson's lecture, demonstrating that his audience was a
potentially hostile group of radical reformers.
Emerson may have been alarmed to find that Fourier's more risible
doctrines were attracting American adherents.
For example, only a few days after Emerson spoke at Amory Hall, Dana
announced that the adoption of industrial association would ultimately lead to
a "Heaven on Earth":
the conversion of
this globe, now exhaling pestilential vapors and possessed by unnatural climates,
into the abode of beauty and health, and the restitution to Humanity of the
Divine Image, now so long lost and forgotten.
("Association, in its Connection with Religion," qtd., L.
Johnson 252-253)
In 1844, Emerson doubted
the wisdom of political engagement in general, and had absolutely no faith in
Fourier's plan to renovate our "pestilential" world—Emerson had
already appropriated this Fourierist term of art in his Dial satire (E&L
1206). An attack on Fourierism would
separate him from the other speakers (excepting of course Thoreau). Emerson might also have been anxious to
correct misconceptions about where his sympathies lay in the reform
debate. Two days before he spoke, an
article on Brook Farm had referred to the Dial
as "the organ of the community party" (qtd., L. Johnson 254).
In his lecture, which drew heavily from the
anti-socialist journal entries examined by Bercovitch, Emerson assailed
"piecemeal" reformers—those who were obsessed with only one of many
social evils. Here the American
Fourierists would have no quarrel: at the Boston convention, they had agreed
that such competing movements as abolition and temperance were too narrowly
focused.[19] But Emerson had equally harsh words for those
who replaced self-reliance with "reliance on Association" (E&L 597). As Bercovitch rightly notes, Emerson
sympathized with the socialists' attempt to restore the fractioned, alienated
individual to a sense of wholeness, but he simultaneously rejected the
Fourierists' proposed means, fearing that it would "mortgag[e]" the
individual to the community (E&L
598). Thoreau was in full agreement on
this point, as Emerson noted with satisfaction: "H.D.T. said that the
Fourierists had a sense of duty which led them to devote themselves to their
second-best" (JMN 9:166).[20] In 1844, Emerson would grudgingly admit that
the potential economies of scale to be afforded by association might mean that
Fourier's theory had limited practical value.
At the same time, he, like Thoreau, was convinced that proponents of
Association were running away from the divine voice within.
III.
So
far, we have been reviewing familiar ground: it is hardly news to claim that
Emerson distrusted socialism in general, that he repudiated Fourierism in
particular, or that he disliked many of the Fourierists. But these received opinions are not the whole
truth, and they have obscured the complexity of Emerson's ongoing dialogue with
Fourierism—indeed, the very existence of that dialogue.
One might begin this excavation process by noting one
baffling reaction to Essays: Second
Series. Despite Emerson's clear
rejection of Fourierism, many allies of the mid-1840s—in sharp contrast to his
postbellum audience— continued to link him to the movement. For example, one self-described "Disciple,"
in reviewing the 1844 Essays for the
June 1845 Democratic Review, argued
that "[t]he great truth to which all Emerson's affirmations point is
Absolute Identity—the unity of all things in God." The Transcendentalist ditto-head then hailed
the same tendency in Schelling, Hegel, Saint Simon, and two others:
The idea of
Absolute Identity furnishes the type, in conformity with which thought
developes itself in all the master spirits of the time. It suggested to Swedenborg his doctrine of
correspondences—to Fourier his doctrine of "universal unity" and
"universal analogy" . . . . ("A Disciple,"
"Emerson's Essays" 595)
Emerson's enemies also linked him to Fourier. In an essay published one month after the Democratic Review article, Brownson the
convert claimed that the assumptions underpinning Transcendentalism and
Fourierism were identical:
The Fourierists
all place, confessedly, the passional nature, which corresponds exactly
to the impersonal nature of the transcendentalists, at the summit of the
psychical hierarchy, and contend that man's good consists not in controlling
his passions, but in harmonizing them, and that they are to be harmonized not
by being crucified, but by having all things so arranged as to secure their
free and full satisfaction. . . . Fourierism is nothing but a form of
transcendentalism, as may be inferred from the fact that nearly all the
transcendentalists are either avowed Fourierists or very favorable to them. Fourierism is simply an attempt to realize in
society the leading principles of transcendentalism; and if some
transcendentalists reject it, it is not because they question the philosophy on
which it rests, but because they doubt its competency, as a practical scheme of
social organization, to secure the end proposed. ("Transcendentalism, or
the Latest Form of Infidelity" 310)
The final sentence, with
its transparent allusion to Emerson's criticism of Fourier in the 1844 Essays, smacks of Brownsonian hyperbole,
but Brownson was not alone in making the charge. As late as 1852, John Custis Darby launched a
scathing attack on Emerson for attempting
to carry back the
American mind from the noon-day light of Gospel truth, and of Anglo-Saxon
thought, to the mysteries of Egypt, the naturalism of Germany and the Fourierrism
of France. (149)
Darby branded Emerson a
heretic for denying "a personal Deity" and "the fall of
man"—typical anti-Fourierist rhetoric.
And after reading the Swedenborg lecture in Representative Men, he even accused Emerson of being a libertine who
"adopts the Fourrier and Eugene Sue doctrine of marriage" (154). Even
if Brownson's and Darby's charges were misguided, they suggest why Emerson came
to reconsider his anti-Fourierist stance.
The ideological base for Brisbane's "practical scheme of social
organization," his adulterated version of Fourier's socialist praxis, was
the vision of Universal Unity.
Granted, Emerson never collapsed the difference
between Transcendentalism and Fourierism.
In his dealings with Associationists, he always remained aloof from
their publications. For example, he
declined John Sullivan Dwight's 1845 invitation to write for The Harbinger, explaining that he did
not want to associated with its "sectarian" platform. If civilization truly needed reforming, he
argued, Fourier might well contribute as a "subordinate coadjutor,"
but Emerson believed that the utopian was "deficient in the first
faculty."[21]
Nevertheless, Emerson would come to see the
Associationists as potentially useful allies.
As early as 1843, he noted a Fourierist interest in Transcendentalism
independent from the Brook Farm venture.
Of the three European periodicals that wanted to exchange free
subscriptions with The Dial, two—the London Phalanx and La Démocratie pacifique, were Fourierist.[22] In 1847, when the London editor John A.
Heraud asked Emerson to suggest possible American contributors to his new
magazine, his first choice was the Fourierist editor of the Boston Daily Chronotype, Elizur
Wright. Emerson specifically praised
Wright's "catholicity"—the antonym of sectarianism.[23] Also in 1847, Emerson praised the
"victorious tone" of the Chronotype
(JMN 10:46). And in 1849, when Theodore Parker invited
Emerson to review Thoreau's A Week
for the Massachusetts Quarterly Review,
Emerson advised Parker to choose a "good foreigner" instead, and
suggested five writers, three of whom (James, Godwin, and Dana) were
Fourierists (LRWE 4:151).
These brief favorable allusions to Fourierist writers
and publications suggest another metamorphosis in Emerson's attitude towards
Fourierism. This rethinking may well
have begun in 1844, when Godwin's Popular
View and similar publications made Fourier's worldview widely
accessible. This grandiose
Fourierism—far more ambitious than the socialist doctrine promulgated in the New York Tribune—had been generally
known to the Transcendentalist circle for some time. Months before Godwin's book was published,
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody had published a second Dial article that accurately characterized Fourier's project—the
attempt to discern the divinely-ordained plan that would allow the earth to
play its part in the "Sidereal Universe" ("Fourierism" 434,
437). While Brisbane had given Emerson a
private, partial initiation into these secret doctrines, it seems likely that
Emerson did not at first fully comprehend the Fourierist cosmogony. JMN
suggests that in early 1845—roughly the same time that Marx and Engels were
dismissing the French Fourierists as "doctrinaire bourgeois, the very
antipodes of Fourier"—Emerson began to distinguish Fourier's theory from
Brisbane's interpretation.
It would have been difficult to do so without French
texts of Fourier. In January 1843, The Dial acknowledged receipt of an 1840
edition of Nouveau monde industriel
(416); Emerson may well have browsed this copy.
The Ecole Sociétaire's publication of Fourier's Oeuvres complètes in 1841-45 made the three major treatises more
accessible to American readers. In the
April 1845 letter to Dwight mentioned above, Emerson said that he had
"looked a little into [Fourier's] books" (LRWE 8:22). Decades later,
in "Historic Notes," he would charge the "charlatans" at
the head of the Associationist movement with misrepresenting their Master's
doctrines: "It argued singular courage, the adoption of Fourier's system,
to even a limited extent, with his books lying before the world only defended
by the thin veil of the French language" (WRWE 12:???). One may
reasonably infer that Emerson had taken the trouble to discover what the
American Associationists were conceal.
The Associationist leaders had a lot to hide. Whatever their private beliefs, Brisbane,
Greeley, and Ripley were anxious to avoid drawing too much attention to the
embarrassing metasocialist cosmogony.
But they also attempted to defer public discussion of Fourier's views on
another topic likely to arouse interest: marital reform. The official Associationist platform hinted
at the existence of the nouveau monde amoreux, but avoided sanctioning
extramarital sexuality. Opponents of
Associationism denied the validity of this distinction, equating the Fourierist
term of art "passional attraction" with carnal desire. After the New York journalist Henry J.
Raymond made this charge in a public debate, for example, Greeley was forced to
distance himself from Fourier.[24] In any case, whatever the Fourierist
influence was on the free-love radicals of the 1850s, the movement posed no
immediate threat to the conventional sexual mores of the 1840s. At the Brook Farm Phalanx, for example, young
singles were apparently guilty of nothing more than promiscuous flirting (see
Guarneri 197-203).
But outsiders' suspicions were not wholly
unwarranted. Other Fourierists were less
inhibited, if only in theory, than Greeley and the Brook Farmers. By 1857, Brisbane was willing to collaborate
with Henry Clapp on a translation of Quatre
mouvements that neither concealed nor disavowed Fourier's sexual
reforms. One passage forthrightly mocked
the absurd ideas of love advocated by "Civilizees": "They preach
nothing but exclusiveness and constancy, which are incompatible with the
desires of Nature, and to which no one submits, when he possesses full
liberty" (1857, 70). Even when Brisbane later censored this
translation for republication in the 1870s, he coyly instructed the printer to
replace this passage with a string of asterisks certain to pique the reader's
curiosity.[25]
John
Spurlock has argued that the Fourierist and Transcendentalist critiques of
marriage in the 1840s paved the way for the free-love movements of the 1850s
(43-72). As we shall see in later
chapters, some members of the Transcendentalist circle had difficulty
concealing their enthusiasm when contemplating sexual liberation. Emerson was not quite so emancipated. He had had some inkling of Fourier's amorous
utopianism as early as 1843, when the "magnificent dreamer" Alcott
had spoken to him of the "secret doctrines of Fourier." At that time, Emerson professed a lack of
interest, rejecting Alcott's proposal quickly:
I replied, as usual—that,
I thought no man could be trusted with [reform of the marriage institution];
the formation of new alliances is so delicious to the imagination, that St Paul
& St John would be riotous; and that we cannot spare the coarsest muniment
of virtue. (JMN 9:50)
For all his
anti-institutional rhetoric, Emerson was a bluenose on the subject of marital
reform. (This was, after all, the man
who would advise Whitman to tone down Leaves
of Grass.) True, Emerson followed
Fourier in condemning those hypocritical opponents of sexual freedom who
countenanced the rise of prostitution in the city:
Society
lives on the system of money & woman comes at money & money's worth
through compliment. I should not dare to
be woman. Plainly they are created for
that better system which supersedes money.
But today, —————————. On our
civilization her position is often pathetic. . . (JMN
10:392)
But throughout his
career, Emerson would avoid taking issue with the institution of matrimony,
even when he was only able to half-heartedly defend it as the least of evils:
"[Marriage] is bad enough, but is far the best solution that has yet been
offered of the woman's problem.
Fourierism, or Mormonism, or the New York Socialism, are not solutions
that any high woman will accept as even approximate to her ideas of
well-being" (JMN 14:13).