Albert Brisbane: American Utopian Socialist
Brisbane was the main promoter in America of the ideas of the French utopian, Charles Fourier. Born in New York in 1809, son of a wealthy landowner, Brisbane studied in Paris and Berlin, mixing with a number of European intellectuals, becoming a follower of Saint-Simon. He then became a pupil of Charles Fourier, with whom he studied for two years. Returning to America in 1840, he published Social Destiny of Man, subtitled Association and Reorganization of Industry, which presented an interpretation of Fourier’s ideas (extracts below). Three years later, Brisbane published a shorter book, though with a somewhat longer title: A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association or Plan for the Re-organization of society, which will secure to the human race, individually and collectively, their happiness and elevation (based on Fourier’s theory of domestic and industrial association).
Brisbane’s books were widely read, including by Horace Greeley, a New York publisher who had been elected to the House of Representatives. Greeley was to promote Brisbane’s ideas in his newspaper, The New Yorker, and offered Brisbane a column in its successor paper, the New York Tribune. This led to the establishment of some thirty Fourierist settlements or phalanxes. Brook Farm, the transcendentalist agrarian community in Massachusetts, adopted Fourierism. A convention of Associationists was held in New York city in April 1844. Brisbane however decided to return to France to study Fourier’s writings and share his experiences with French associationists, and in his absence, the American movement dissipated. In France, Brisbane switched his focus to developing a range of inventions such as a vacuum cleaner and an oven which could bake yeastless bread. He returned to America in 1889, dying the following year.
Other promoters of Fourierism included Charles Dana, who edited the Brook Farm journal, the Harbringer, later commissioning Marx to write for the New York Daily Tribune, also promoting the French anarchist Proudhon’s proposals for a mutual bank. He became an antislavery campaigner and later assistant Secretary of State for War under Abraham Lincoln during the American civil war. Another was Parke Godwin, a journalist who published a book advocating Fourierism, and a further book with the title Democracy, Constructive and Pacific, contributed to the Phalanx journal and was later an abolitionist.
“The veil of prejudice must be torn away. We assert that the evil, misery and injustice, now predominant on the earth, have not their foundation in political or administrative errors, in the defects of this or that institution, in the imperfection of human nature, or on the depravity of the passions; but in the FALSE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY ALONE. We assert that the present social mechanism is not ADAPTED to the nature of man and his passions; that its laws are in flagrant opposition to those which regulate or govern their action; that it perverts, misdirects and develops them subversively, and that the selfishness, oppression, fraud, injustice and crime, which mark the course of his societies, are attributable to that artificial or social misdirection and perversion, and not to any inborn, inherent depravity in the human being himself.”
“ The object of the work, therefore, in its criticisms, will be to prove that industry exercised by isolated families, or as – it might be termed- piece-meal, fragmental cultivation, is a miserable system of waste and poverty. The positive object of the work on the other hand will be to show – which we will do in the succeeding parts, in which we treat of the practical organisation of industry – that Association is possible, that it is the destiny of man, the only order in which his attractions, passions and instincts find a true development and a useful employ. We will also show, that Labour, exercised in groups and series of groups, can be rendered ATTRACTIVE, and that the solution of the two vast problems, HARMONIC ACTION OF THE PASSIONS, and ATTRACTIVE INDUSTRY, solves all those social and political difficulties, which have baffled the efforts of legislators, and for which remedies have been and are still vainly sought in legislative enactments, administrative reforms, moral codes and revolutions.”
Further Reading:
Brisbane, Albert Social Destiny of Man or Association and Reorganisation of Industry (Philadelphia 1840; reprint Kelley, New York 1969)
Brisbane, Albert A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association (New York, 1843; reprinted Ann Arbor 2001)
The Phalanx ed Brisbane 1843-1845 (reprint by Burt Franklin, New York 1967)
Godwin, Parke A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier (New York 1844; reprinted Porcupine Press, Philadelphia 1972)
Guarneri, Carl The Utopian Alternative. Fourierism in Nineteenth Century America (Cornell University Press 1991)
Southeran, Charles Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism (New York 1915)
Hillquit, Maurice History of Socialism in the United States (New York 1903)