By abolishing the individual household, the phalanx gives a new freedom to women; and Fourier does not see how it is possible to maintain the system of monogamic proprietorship once women have a free choice of mates. So the women of the phalanx are not intellectual nonentities; and since they no longer preside over the individual home, they help run the whole community. Is it necessary to add the common nurseries, the common schools, the informal education of the children, and the number of other things which follow from this emancipation?
Perhaps one of the most remarkable characteristics of this utopia is its utilization of a moral equivalent for war, long before Professor William James invented the phrase. One of the great functions of the phalanx is the assemblage of productive armies even as “civilization” assembles destructive ones. There is a fine passage in which Fourier pictures an industrial army of golden youths and maidens, “instead of devastating thirty provinces in a campaign, these armies will have spanned thirty rivers with bridges, re-wooded thirty barren mountains, dug thirty trenches for irrigation, and drained thirty marshes.” It is for lack of such industrial armies, says Fourier, that civilization is unable to produce anything great.
IV
What strikes us when we put together the fragments of Fourier’s utopia—as one might put together a jigsaw puzzle—is the fact that he faces the variety and inequality of human nature. Instead of erecting a standard for men to live up to, and rejecting mankind as unfit for utopia because the standard is far beyond its height, the standard itself is founded upon the utmost capacity which a community might be able to exhibit. Fourier meets human nature halfway: he endeavors to project a society which will give regular channels to all its divergent impulses, and prevent them from spilling unsocially all over the landscape. In his statement of this aim there are plenty of weaknesses and absurdities; and I confess that it is hard to take this pathetic little man seriously; but when one has grappled with Fourier’s thought one discovers that there is something to take.
Fourier died without persuading anyone to give a trial to his scheme of association; and yet his work was not without its practical influence. The Brook Farm experiment in America was a fumbling attempt to plant a phalanstery without paying any attention to the conditions which Fourier would have rigorously imposed; and the familistère of the great steel works of Godin at Guise, in France, is another direct result of Fourier’s inspiration. He remains, I believe, the first man who had a plan for colonizing the wilderness of industrial barbarism that existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and redeeming that wilderness to civilization.
V
The name of Robert Owen is usually associated with utopianism; but his work belongs more to the “real” world than to the idola of utopia; and I pass over him with the briefest mention, for his projects for a model industrial town have more of the flavor of a poor colony than that of a productive human society. Let us grant him good intentions, organizing ability, and moral fervor: without doubt he is a noble figure, even when his attitude is strained and his tone strident. The series of essays he wrote on love and marriage are marked by fine sympathy and common sense; and it is to be regretted that they are not as widely known as his plans for a new moral world. If this little note can repair the neglect, I have done Owen ample justice: as an active figure in English and American public life he is properly a subject for the social historian. With Owen I must also dismiss John Ruskin, who began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to develop plans for a “Guild of St. George.” This guild was to form a little island of honest labor and sound education in the midst of the turbid sea of industrialism; but it did not embrace the whole of society, and it was utopian only in the sense that the Oneida Community, let us say, was utopian. While they are full of pregnant suggestions, the plans for the Guild are as fragmentary as the New Atlantis.
VI
One of the neglected utopias of the mid-nineteenth century is that of James Buckingham.
James Buckingham was one of those erratic men of affairs which the fertile soil of British individualism produces, and which hard British common sense persistently ignores. Like Owen, Buckingham was acquainted with industrial and commercial affairs from the inside: he travelled widely and wrote upon various matters with that copious, amateurish dogmatism and spirit which marks him, perhaps, as the philistine counterpart of John Ruskin. If the utopias of the past express the ideals of the soldier, the farmer, and the artisan, the community which Buckingham projected represents the ideal of the bourgeoisie. Buckingham’s Victoria is the ideal aspect of that Coketown which in a later chapter we shall attempt to describe.
We talk loosely of the individualism of the nineteenth century; but in reality it was a period that was thriving with associations. The scope of joint stock companies and philanthropic societies had immeasurably widened. Along with the Mudfog Association, “for the advancement of everything,” which Dickens satirized, there sprang up a hundred different societies for performing some special function in the industrial system or realizing some particular purpose in society. Buckingham gives us a picture of his contemporaries which is also a criticism:
“We have the government of the country itself, passing acts of parliament for the better drainage of towns, and a more ample supply of water and air for ventilation. … Hence, too, arise associations of noblemen and others for building model
