Fourierism found its principal apostle in this country in Arthur Brisbane, whose Social Destiny of Man, published in 1840, brought to America the French philosopher’s naive, social regimen of reducing the world of men to simple units called phalanxes, whose barrack-like routine should insure plenty, equality, and happiness.  Horace Greeley, with characteristic, erratic eagerness, pounced upon the new gospel, and Brisbane obtained at once a wide circle of sympathetic readers through the Tribune.  Thirty-four phalanxes were organized in a short time, most of them with an incredible lack of foresight.  They usually lasted until the first payment on the mortgage was due, though a few weathered the buffetings of fortune for several years.  Brook Farm in Massachusetts and the Wisconsin phalanx each endured six years, and the North American phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, lasted thirteen years.

Icaria is a romantic sequel to the Owen and Fourier colonies.  It antedated Brisbane’s revival of Fourierism, was encouraged by Owenism, survived both, and formed a living link between the utopianism of the early nineteenth century and the utilitarian socialism of the twentieth.  Etienne Cabet was one of those interesting Frenchmen whose fertile minds and instinct for rapid action made France during the nineteenth century kaleidoscopic with social and political events.  Though educated for the bar, Cabet devoted himself to social and political reform.  As a young man he was a director in that powerful secret order, the Carbonari, and was elected to the French chamber of deputies, but his violent attitude toward the Government was such that in 1834 he was obliged to flee to London to escape imprisonment.  Here, unmolested, he devoted himself for five years to social and historical research.  He returned to France in 1839 and in the following year published his Voyage en Icarie, a book that at once took its place by the side of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia.  Cabet pictured in his volume an ideal society where plenty should be a substitute for poverty and equality a remedy for class egoism.  So great was the cogency of his writing that Icaria became more than a mere vision to hundreds of thousands in those years of social ferment and democratic aspirations.  From a hundred sources the demand arose to translate the book into action.  Cabet thereupon framed a constitution and sought the means of founding a real Icaria.  After consulting Robert Owen, he unfortunately fell into the clutches of some Cincinnati land speculators and chose a site for his colony in the northeastern part of Texas.  When the announcement was made in his paper, Le Populaire, the responses were so numerous that Cabet believed that “more than a million cooeperators” were eager for the experiment.