The utopian alternative

"The utopian socialism of Charles Fourier spread throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was in the United States that it generated the most intense excitement. Carl J. Guarneri traces the American Fourierist movement from its roots in the religious, social, and economic upheavals of the 1830s, through its bold communal experiments of the 1840s, to its lingering twilight after the Civil War. Guarneri demonstrates that Fourierist communitarianism was not a colorful sideshow to the main events of American history, but a serious and influential attempt to restructure the emergent…