Even so, he enjoyed a staggering confidence in his own knowledge, and presumed unprecedented mastery of every branch of the human and natural sciences (cosmology, meteorology, geography, anthropology, etc. (Indeed, I would argue that Fourier is a more amusing satirist than Jonathan Swift, for the simple reason that the former is deadly serious.)įourier’s writing smells (pleasantly, to my nose) “of the lamp”, since he was obliged to work late into the night, after working as a traveling sales clerk during the day (mostly in connection with the silk trade of his native Lyon). Indeed, reading Fourier is quite a dissonant experience, given that he is as perceptive as he is naïve, and as prescient as he is absurd. He was a scientific fantasist, a pedantic fabulist, a colonialist abolitionist, a revolutionary thinker who hated and feared revolutions, and a hyper-controlling conductor of freedom. He was a passionate rationalist and a utopian pessimist (in the sense he believed we live in the worst of possible worlds, but are only a few months away from flipping this scenario on its head). (Or at least the way commerce was practiced in his day.) He was a cosmopolitan universalist, susceptible to selective racism. There is also no shortage of paradoxes in Fourier’s character. And most famously of all, he claimed a shift in our local cosmic conditions would change the chemical makeup of the earth’s oceans, so that they would taste like lemonade. He believed lions and sharks would soon die out, replaced by “anti-sharks” and “anti-lions”. He believed that children could be motivated to happily do most of the labor in our future communes, like Oompa-Loompas. So let’s get some of them out of the way from the get-go. It is impossible to broach the topic of Fourier, however, without discussing some of his many eccentricities.
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