François Fourier was born in Besançon, France, in 1772, and while yet a child he mastered Latin and Greek, as was the custom in the educational system of those days. His father was a middle-class merchant who was frugal, if not too honest, and who was able to gather a small fortune of two hundred thousand francs of which François inherited one-half at his father’s death. In 1793 he lost his inheritance in an insurrection of the village against the French Convention then in power in France. In the same year he was forced into the army by a decree of the National Assembly, which provided that every man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five should be conscripted for service. In 1797 he quit the army and returned to Lyon to enter business as a clerk. While making a living clerking in the store, he amused himself by writing. He published an article in a magazine in Lyon in 1803, another article in 1804; finally in 1808 his first important work, _Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies_, came from the press. This work was met by indifference and disdain everywhere; even Fourier’s mother tried to persuade him to discontinue his work and make amends for that already published. However, he persisted. During the winter of 1815 and 1816 he left Lyon and retired to Talissier, where he prepared his second great work, _Le traité de L’association domestique agricole ou attraction industrielle_. It was after the production of these works that Just Muiron, one of his most faithful disciples, came to him. During these years and immediately thereafter, Fourier thought out and planned an elaborate system of socialism, or economic policy, which the world today has rejected as a fantastic Utopia incapable of realization.[2] Fourier’s idea was one of mass production and systematic co-operation which was to be accomplished by minute organization, the unit of which was to be a phalange or phalanx. People were to be impelled into this system, rather than compelled, as is the method of many Utopian schemes. No force or compulsion was to be used. The whole process of evolving such a society was to be so natural and logical that people would accept the scheme without any persuasion. Happiness and prosperity would be obtained by a minute co-ordination of the various duties of the members of the phalanx, and that without any community of property. The phalanx would, in order to be successful, contain approximately two thousand members, all living in the same huge buildings known as phalansteries, which would contain the workshops as well as living quarters. This settlement was to be surrounded with a few leagues of land which the members worked when desire prompted them to do so.[3]