Fourierism

Fourier, comparing himself to Newton and universal gravitation, called the fundamental force driving social development 'passionate attraction'; since twelve common passions yielded 810 types of character, the ideal phalanx would need 1,620 people. Most practical attempts came after his death: in France a phalanstery at Condé-sur-Vesgre (now Yvelines) founded in 1832 with the support of Fourier and Considerant, and in the later nineteenth century Godin's Familistère, which put part of his ideas into practice, while Victor Considerant tried to found the La Réunion community in Texas in the 1850s. In the United States, largely through Albert Brisbane's popularisation, some thirty Fourierist associations were set up in the mid-1840s; Brook Farm adopted a new constitution in 1844 to follow the phalanx system, but its phalanstery building burned down in 1846 and it closed in 1847. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels criticised the Fourierists for clinging to their master's outdated views and dreaming of founding isolated phalansteries, and noted that in France they opposed the Réformistes, the republican followers of the newspaper La Réforme.