François Marie Charles Fourier, the French social critic, utopian socialist, and eccentric, was born into a merchant family in Besançon. Except during the French Revolution, Charles Fourier led a quiet and isolated life as a minor business employee and bachelor in Paris, Lyons, Rouen, and elsewhere in France, with occasional trips abroad. Shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, Fourier began to develop his doctrine, publishing his first major work, Théorie des quatres mouvements et des destinées générales, in 1808. He continued throughout his life to elaborate and propagate his views with a single-minded devotion, acquired some followers, and was able to dedicate his last years entirely to his self-appointed task.

After a superficial classical secondary education in a Jesuit school in Besançon, Fourier was entirely self-taught...