This is a full-scale intellectual biography of the French utopian socialist thinker, Chales Fourier (1772 - 1837), one of the great social critics of the nineteenth century. It is certain to become an invaluable resource for all students of modern European intellectual history.

 

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

"Jonathan Beecher gives us exactly what his subtitle announces--a picture of this visionary and his world that is detailed, meaty, colorful and sympathetic, but not uncritical. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World is a thorough and thoroughly professional job." --Eugen Weber, New York Times Book Review

 

"Jonathan Beecher's long-awaited intellectual biography of Fourier . . . is an authentic chef d'oeuvre: thorough, balanced, amply documented, warmly appreciative of Fourier's genius. . . . A vigorous and absorbing book . . . brimming with insight and life." --W. Warren Wagar, American Historical Review

 

"This is a marvelous book. . . .Beecher spent years looking at old archives and papers relating to Fourier in order to produce what is by far the most readable, intelligent, and satisfying biography of this extraordinary thinker." --Stanley Hoffmann, French Politics and Society

 

"Jonathan Beecher has written an important, and, in many ways, beautiful book on a complex and misunderstood thinker. . . . Beecher has set a magnificent standard for himself and other historians." -- Carl Strikwerda, Fides et Historia

 

"A great accomplishment. . . .The best work on Fourier in existence." --Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, University of California, Berkeley