Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Principal events in Fourier's life
- A brief note on further reading (in English)
- Translator's introduction
- The Theory of the Four Movements and of the General Destinies
- 1808 Introduction
- Preliminary discourse
- Plan
- First part: Exposition of some branches of the general destinies
- Second part: Description of the various branches of the private or domestic destinies
- Third part: Confirmation derived from the inadequacy of the inexact sciences to deal with all the problems that the civilised mechanism presents
- Omitted chapter
- Note A
- Advice to the civilised
- 1818 Introduction
- Index
- Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
1808 Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Principal events in Fourier's life
- A brief note on further reading (in English)
- Translator's introduction
- The Theory of the Four Movements and of the General Destinies
- 1808 Introduction
- Preliminary discourse
- Plan
- First part: Exposition of some branches of the general destinies
- Second part: Description of the various branches of the private or domestic destinies
- Third part: Confirmation derived from the inadequacy of the inexact sciences to deal with all the problems that the civilised mechanism presents
- Omitted chapter
- Note A
- Advice to the civilised
- 1818 Introduction
- Index
- Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Summary
At the outset of this work, as well as at its conclusion, I want to call attention to a truth quite new to civilised man: namely that the Theory of the Four Movements – social, animal organic and material – is the only subject of study that reason should sanction. It is the study of the General System of Nature, a problem God gives all Globes to resolve; and their inhabitants can only achieve happiness after they have resolved it.
Hitherto you have neither solved this problem nor even studied it; you have reached no further than the fourth, and lowest, branch of the theory, the one that deals with material movement, whose laws have been unveiled by Newton and Leibniz. I shall have occasion more than once to criticise this slow development of human intelligence.
In advance of the publication of my theory (as advertised) the present volume provides a slight glimpse of it, to which I have added some extended remarks on the political ignorance of Civilised Man, the two main examples of this ignorance being drawn:
In the 2nd part, from the vices of the conjugal system;
In the 3rd part, from the vices of the commercial system;
and from the stupidity of the philosophers, who have done nothing to seek any better arrangement for the union of the sexes and the exchange of industrial products.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fourier: 'The Theory of the Four Movements' , pp. 3 - 4Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996