Deux visions du bonheur selon la nature chez Camille Lemonnier et Georges Eekhoud

Dans les dernières années du XIXe siècle, l’écrivain belge Camille Lemonnier publie trois romans, L’Île vierge, Adam et Ève, et Au cœur frais de la forêt, qui véhiculent le rêve de voir l’humanité libérée du carcan imposé par une société qui asservit l’homme et la femme et dénature leur instinct. Le Belge Georges Eekhoud publie en 1912 Les Libertins d’Anvers, qui retrace l’histoire des hérésies chrétiennes à Anvers du XIIe siècle jusqu’à leur répression par la Réforme protestante et la Contre-réforme. Nourris par les mêmes préoccupations identitaires, Lemonnier et Eekhoud proposent des modèles de communautés utopiques qui s’inspirent à la fois du paganisme et de l’évangélisme chrétien. Les deux écrivains font l’apologie de la charité et du respect du prochain et de la nature. Toutefois, ils diffèrent dans l’intérêt qu’ils accordent au couple et à la famille comme fondement social, Lemonnier appliquant les leçons du naturisme, tandis qu’Eekhoud se situe davantage dans un courant de la pensée anarchiste représenté notamment par Charles Fourier, Raoul Vaneigem et Michel Onfray.

‘A very exclusive experiment in communism’: the radical origins of the Manhattan co-op

Though it has long been the residence of choice for Manhattan's rich, the co-operative apartment building has an intellectual lineage that originates in pre-Marxian communitarian socialism. In the early nineteenth century, radical philosophers Charles Fourier and Robert Owen first theorized a multifamily dwelling owned in joint stock by its residents that could deliver economies of scale in the production and delivery of household necessities. Using previously untranslated French sources and archival material (New Harmony Working Men's Institute), this article demonstrates how early socialist ideas about housing, domestic labour and ownership evolved into the idea for the New York City co-operative apartment building.

Renace: armonía pasional del estallido social

The current text seeks to complement the concept of social outbreak referring to the political events of October 2019 in Chile with an idea of harmonization and utopian updating in affective-political terms. To do this, in the first place it will be established that it is possible to make a political-affective reading of the social outbreak, taking a detour through what would be the function of the affects in their political dimension, as articulators of communities, to later specify the affective political sense in the context of our social outbreak. Secondly, it will be affirmed that, without denying the very idea of an explosion, at least in part there is also a decantation of a process of utopian harmonization and updating. To deploy these two statements, we will rely mainly on a 19th century author, Charles Fourier, who builds a materialist-affective theory that can provide important insights into our contingency. We will also carry out a reading of the RENACE intervention by Delight Lab to illustrate our thesis.

Entrevista a Michael Löwy, galardonado con el Premio europeo Walter Benjamin 2020

Professor Marc Berdet gets into a dialogue with the brasilian-french thinker Michael Löwy, to establish the origin of his career; authors who have influenced his theoretical work such as Walter Benjamin and Max Weber, Karl Marx, Gersom Scholem, Georges Sorel, André Breton, Auguste Blanqui, Anna Zeghers, José Carlos Mariátegui, Charles Fourier, among others; and the evolution of a reflection that touches both European and Latin American critical thought.

Utopian Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch

This chapter demonstrates that George Eliot’s investigation of the early, “utopian” socialists catalyzed the writing of perhaps the most iconic of all Victorian novels, Middlemarch (1871–2). The utopian socialists (as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and their followers were increasingly known) frequently suggested that the transition to a new, nongovernmental social order hinged upon the emancipation of women. Their untimely calls for female liberation became newly salient with the coalescence, in the 1860s, of Britain’s first national campaign for women’s suffrage. This chapter’s reading of Middlemarch shows that socialist discourse provides Eliot a rich symbolic vocabulary with which to conduct her own novelistic investigation of the “Woman Question”—and to engage in a clandestine meditation on the claims of the suffragists. By incorporating socialist elements into her novel, Eliot could unobtrusively position herself in relation to the ideals and activities of this burgeoning movement—a movement in which a number of her closest friends were involved. Attending to Middlemarch’s socialist motif demystifies the novel’s shrouded origins and decodes a hitherto illegible record of Eliot’s proto-feminist aspirations which, like the early socialists’ own, were inextricably intertwined with skepticism about institutional politics. This chapter also provides a genealogy of “utopian socialism,” a category that has exerted a distorting influence on scholarship since Marx and Engels tarred their rivals with it in The Communist Manifesto.

« Il n’y aura point de nuit dans l’ordre combiné » : Charles Fourier du jour au lendemain

The nights of Harmony will be bright, writes Charles Fourier: instead of the “pallid mummy” (the moon), dazzling stars will give them “the appearance of our gardens illuminated at parties with multi-coloured glasses”. Each sleep will be but the prelude to a desired awakening. Fourier’s thought, particularly in its cosmogonic dimension, is thus a call for us to overcome “civilized” nights, which are the realm of subjugation, boredom and suffering. Doing away with nights is a way of achieving the “absolute gap” dear to Fourier.

The Image of a Vicious Circle in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Art World

The article examines the image-symbol of a vicious circle in the work of the social satirist M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. This image, plays an important role in creating a picture of the Russian national world. The circle embodies integrity, continuity, initial perfection and – hopelessness, fate, dead end. In the works of the satirist, the image-symbol of a vicious circle carries the meaning of stagnation, lifelessness, denial of the future, mysterious predestination. With regard to the social sphere, this image-symbol was used in the 19th century. French socialist-utopian Charles Fourier in his work “The New Economic and Societal World, or the Invention of a Method of Attractive and Naturally Appropriate Labor Distributed in Series of Passions”, a representative of the radical democratic wing in Russian journalism D. I. Pisarev (article “Realists”). In the works of Saltykov-Shchedrin, the idea of avicious circle appears repeatedly. The satire “The History of a City” testifies that the despotic forms of government, replacing one another, the power of the reactionary dark forces are a kind of fate for the country and the people. The existence of representatives of the local nobility, the popular masses, moves in a vicious circle, marked by stagnation, hopelessness, emptiness, and lack of hope for the future. The same can be said about the situation in the Russian outback: there only meaningless repetitions of events, the renewal of identical phenomena are possible. The conservative-protective desire to mythologize history, an apology for absolutism, is fraught with the danger of distorting the meaning of history, its driving forces, denying the centuries-old trials that have befallen the country and the people. For Saltykov-Shchedrin, the image of a vicious circle is associated with the riddle of Russian national destiny, which he has been trying to comprehend over the years. Striving for the ideal of social harmony, overcoming the vicious circle of predetermination for the enlightener, moralist was associated with both social transformations and moral renewal of the individual, with the awakening of Shame, Conscience and Truth in an individual and in the whole society, with their spiritual transformation, which gives an opportunity to make a breakthrough, initiate a purposeful life-giving movement forward.

Socialist Schemes and Suburban Dreams

Socialist reform schemes served as the dominant venue for utopian dreaming in the first half of the 1800s. Proposals for radical shifts away from urban life emerged from the minds of famous figures such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, whose faith in scientific progress was matched only by their hatred of the miserable industrial slum. In addition to socialist visionaries, well-meaning politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, and architects exhausted much labor, most of it futile, in their attempts to ameliorate the conditions of the rookeries of London and other cities, either by bringing parks into the city or by dispersing working-class residents into the meadows with railroads. Their goals were only realized on paper, where the futuristic terms of utopian architecture were also being set: glass, metal, mechanization, and the use of cosmopolitan ornamentation were placed before the reading public as the building forms of the great, green age to come.