The phalanx men are associationists; but it follows from Fourier’s theory of the passions that they have private interests as well as public ones; and these private interests are permitted to flourish as long as they do not interfere with social solidarity. Thus they avoid the waste inherent in private housekeeping by having public kitchens, where, incidentally, the children are trained from an early age at cooking, as they are today in one or two experimental schools: nevertheless it is possible to dine in solitude as well as in company. By the same token, every member of the phalanx is guaranteed a minimum of food, clothing, lodging, and even amusements without respect to work; at the same time, private property is sanctioned, and each member extracts from the common store a dividend in proportion to the amount of stock he holds in the association. This dividend, it must be qualified, is considerably reduced by the fact that a system of profit sharing replaces the pure wage system. There is thus a sort of balance between private self-seeking and the maintenance of the public good. In order to manufacture goods economically, large scale production is introduced wherever possible, and the division of labor is forced to its ultimate limits. Fourier takes account of the resulting monotony, however, and suggests that the monotony be corrected by having recourse to changing tasks and occupations from time to time. In commercial exchange, the phalanx acts as a unit; it constitutes a great self-governing body which traffics in surplus goods with similar associations, without any middleman, in something of the manner, perhaps, that the Co-operative Wholesale Societies do today. By abolishing the individual household, the phalanx gives a new freedom to women; and Fourier does not see how it is possible to maintain the system of monogamic proprietorship once women have a free choice of mates. So the women of the phalanx are not intellectual nonentities; and since they no longer preside over the individual home, they help run the whole community. Is it necessary to add the common nurseries, the common schools, the informal education of the children, and the number of other things which follow from this emancipation? Perhaps one of the most remarkable characteristics of this utopia is its utilization of a moral equivalent for war, long before Professor William James invented the phrase. One of the great functions of the phalanx is the assemblage of productive armies even as “civilization” assembles destructive ones. There is a fine passage in which Fourier pictures an industrial army of golden youths and maidens, “instead of devastating thirty provinces in a campaign, these armies will have spanned thirty rivers with bridges, re-wooded thirty barren mountains, dug thirty trenches for irrigation, and drained thirty marshes.” It is for lack of such industrial armies, says Fourier, that civilization is unable to produce anything great. 4