Peter Marshall - Demanding the Impossible

Having witnessed the excesses of the nobles before the French Revolution and the Terror of the revolutionaries, he was fully aware of the desire for domination in human beings and wanted it to be channelled into sexual activity rather than cause social havoc. It is extremely difficult to follow de Sade in his fantasies of torture, murder and arson but at least he had the courage and frankness to recognize the existence of such desires and tried to sublimate them. Both the feminist Simone de Beauvoir and the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet have acknowledged positively the cathartic function of the sexual cruelty described by de Sade. 21

De Sade was also a revolutionary thinker in attacking the right to property. He saw the real struggle as lying between the people and the ruling class – made up of the crown, aristocracy, and clergy, as well as the bourgeoisie. For this he has been called the ‘first reasoned socialist’. 22 He undoubtedly anticipated Fourier in his project of a harmonious society based on the free play of passions. 23 Like Wilhelm Reich, he also realized that repressed sexuality can lead to tyrannical behaviour on a large scale and that a real democracy must be sexually liberated.

This knowledge forms the basis of de Sade’s libertarian philosophy: aware that men in positions of unrestrained power over others, whether in governments or prisons, will dominate and torture, he argued that they should not be given such power and their desires are best satisfied in play. His abiding passion was freedom from oppression. Indeed, no writer at the turn of the nineteenth century expressed more lucidly the incompatibility of traditional religion and conventional morality with the idea of freedom. 24

Charles Fourier was also one of France’s greatest libertarian thinkers. He not only influenced the young Proudhon (they both came from Besançon), but Kropotkin later acknowledged Fourier to be a ‘forerunner of Anarchy’. 25 Murray Bookchin has recently described him as ‘the most libertarian, the most original, and certainly the most relevant utopian thinker of his day, if not of the entire tradition’. 26 Fourier not only influenced the surrealists but his teachings found a direct echo in the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies.

Fourier was born in Besançon in 1772, and he studied at the local academy. He abandoned his studies to become a commercial traveller, covering Holland, France and Germany. During the revolutionary Terror, he was imprisoned and nearly guillotined, but emerged to do two years’ military service. He then pursued his desultory commercial career and developed a grandiose scheme to replace the corrupt civilization of his day which he knew so well.

Bookchin observes that Fourier was in many ways the earliest social ecologist to surface in radical thought. Certainly Fourier conceived of the universe as a vast living organism. In order to complete Newton’s work, he proposed his own ‘law of passionate attraction’ in which even stars have sexual proclivities. In his ‘theory of universal analogy’, he presents man as a microcosm of the universe: the universe is a unified system, a web of hidden correspondences, and man is at its centre. Man is not therefore separate from nature, but an integral part of it. Moreover, behind the apparent chaos of the world, there is an underlying harmony and natural order governed by universal law. If the universal law is understood it would ‘conduct the human race to opulence, sensual pleasures and global unity’. 27

Fourier went far beyond the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity put forward by the lawyers of the French Revolution. He recognized that social liberty without a degree of economic equality is meaningless. The philosophes of the eighteenth century were right to vaunt liberty—‘it is the foremost desire of all creatures’—but they forgot that in civilized societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth: ‘When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations.’ 28 While accepting the inequality of talents and remuneration according to work done, Fourier’s utopia undoubtedly presupposes the gradual levelling of the privileges of the wealthy and the end of class antagonism.

Like de Sade, Fourier applied the notion of rights to women as well as men. It was Fourier and not Marx who first asserted as a general proposition that ‘Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of women towards liberty’ and that the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress. Rejecting the degradation and bondage of women and conjugal slavery in modern civilization, he observes: ‘A slave is never more contemptible than when his blind submission convinces the oppressor that his victim is born for slavery.’ Fourier’s egalitarian and libertarian vision even embraces animals. He does not recommend vegetarianism but it is a rule in his ideal society that ‘a man who mistreats them is himself more of an animal than the defenceless beasts he persecutes.’ 29

The method Fourier adopted in his social analysis involved ‘absolute doubt’ and ‘absolute deviation’. 30 The uncompromising application of this method led him to mount a devastating indictment of Western civilization and capitalism. His critique of its dehumanized market relations warped by deceit and falsehood, its punishing and repulsive work, and its psychic and sexual frustration are trenchant indeed. He rejected the whole economic system based on free competition and the work ethic itself. Freedom for Fourier not only meant free choice, but freedom from the psychological compulsion to work. In place of the existing order, he proposed a hedonistic utopia called ‘Harmony’ in which there would be agreeable and voluntary labour, non-repressive sexuality, communal education and communal living. Passion, pleasure, abundance, and love would all find their place in his new moral world.

Each community of Harmony would be a Phalanx housed in a palace or ‘phalanstery’. Each Phalanx would consist of a self-managing and self-sustaining association of co-operative workers. The members would work in voluntary groups of friends or a series of groups who have gathered together spontaneously and who are stimulated by active rivalries. Work would be made as attractive as possible, and the division of labour would be carried to the supreme degree in order to allot suitable tasks to different individuals. While work would be co-operative and property enjoyed in common, members would receive dividends proportional to their contributions in capital, work and talent. Everyone would have a right to work and as a key principle Fourier insists on a ‘social minimum’, a guaranteed annual income. Every effort would be made to combine personal with social freedom and promote diversity in unity. The equality of unequals would prevail.

When it came to desire, Fourier was even more revolutionary. Although a rationalist, he rejected the mechanical rationalization of contemporary society which repressed the passions; they are natural and meant to be expressed. He stands as a forerunner of psychoanalysis in his understanding of the dynamics of repression: ‘Every passion that is suffocated produces its counter passion, which is as malignant as the natural passion would have been salutary. This is true of all manias.’ 31

Rather than being disruptive in society, the gratification of individual desire and passion serve the general good: ‘the man who devotes himself most ardently to pleasure becomes eminently useful for the happiness of all.’ 32 In his notebooks collectively entitled The New Amorous World , Fourier called for the satisfaction of material and psychological needs, a ‘sexual minimum’ as well as a ‘social minimum’. He was convinced that complete sexual gratification would foster social harmony and economic well-being. The only kind of sexual activity he condemned as vicious was where a person was abused, injured, or used as an object against his or her will. Only in Harmony could such ‘amorous anarchy’ prevail. 33