So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism,
Fourierism, and the Millennial Church; they are poor pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, philosophy, and preaching of the day.
Specifically, I argue that the novel portrays
Fourierism in ways that call attention to its failure to account adequately for the depth, complexity, and unpredictability of human affections.
Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative:
Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 103.1 include those engaging with Owenism, the Working Men's Party, or its successor, the Equal Rights Party.
There is one inconsistency, however, in
Fourierism, and a very important one too, and that is, his non-abolition of private property.
His writings found a meandering way into the hands of sympathetic and influential Americans, among them Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, who gave him and
Fourierism a lengthy hearing afforded to no utopian idea before or since.
Fourierism was far more to Mill's taste--"[t]he most skillfully combined, and with the greatest foresight of objections, of all the forms of Socialism" (2:211-12).
The followers of Charles Fourier, another early utopian socialist, set up cooperative communities (which he called "phalanxes") in Europe and America; "
Fourierism" found expression in locations as far-flung as Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and counted among its adherents prominent American author Nathaniel Hawthorne.
And both these articles printed, as all her pieces, on the New-York Tribune's front page, along with the umpteenth installment of an ongoing debate about
Fourierism and the latest vote on an ongoing battle over the abolition of capital punishment--all read by tens of thousands of farmers and mechanics throughout the North.
Barrett Browning's distrust of Christian Socialism on the one hand and
Fourierism on the other is based in part on her belief that both approaches were overly abstract: "What is [Christian Socialism], after all, but an out-of-door extension of the monastic system?
Greeley, brilliant as he was, had a liberal weakness for all sorts of nostrums -- socialism,
Fourierism, vegetarianism, phrenology, spiritualism, utopianism -- you name it.
In its earliest use, "avant-garde" denominated the artistic groups around 1825, commonly associated with Saint-Simonism and
Fourierism. The presocialist Olinde Rodrigues called upon artists "to serve as an avant-garde" for social change and for a "glorious future." He considered that art had the power to affect its audience and to produce sensations that would ennoble thought as well as provide the energy for social change towards the common good.