SOURCE: "Utopian Socialism in America," in Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1944, pp. 196-226.

In the following excerpt, Tyler discusses the formation of Fourierist phalanxes in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s.

Fourierist Phalanxes

Through a series of articles entitled "What Shall Be Done about Labor?" which he wrote for the New Yorker, Horace Greeley came in touch with Albert Brisbane, who had studied in Paris the theories of the French socialists, Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Greeley accepted many of Brisbane's ideas, and together they wrote for the Future, the Tribune, and also occasionally for the Plebeian, the Democrat, and the Dial. Brisbane was already the author of The Social Destiny of Man, an exposition of the doctrines of Fourier, and in 1843 he published A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association, which became the Bible of American...