La Phalange: Revue de la Science Sociale

La Phalange: Revue de la science sociale (The Phalanx: Revue of Social Science). Year XV, 1st Series, Book 3. (June 1846) Bureaux de la Phalange: Paris. Softcover octavo, 127 pp.
 

La Phalange was the flagship mouthpiece of Fourierist socialism in France, and this representative issue shows how thoroughly integrated Fourierism was in the complex network of overlapping radical cultural and political communities of the time. Part of each issue was taken up with the gradual,sequential publication of Fourier's many unpublished manuscripts and notes, which filled out the already highly complicated system he presented in The Theory of the Four movements; the passages reprinted here include the continuation of a document (begun in the previous issue) on the Four Distributive Passions, and an article on the taxonomy of the Subversive Programme. Also in this issue are two examples of Fourierist poetry by the influential avant-garde poet Leconte de Lisle, a regular contributor who would go on to play a major role in the Parnasse Contemporain network; a fascinating early example of socialist art theory and criticism by Gabriel-Désire Laverdant, who contributes an in-depth Fourierist review of the Salon of 1846 beginning with a commentary on Fourierist art theory and a statistical breakdown of what kinds of subjects were associated with positive versus negative emotional affects in this salon as compared to previous years, and an assertion of the value of heterogeneity, lack of dogma, and personal experimentation in a Fourierist worldview (a position that highlights Fourierism's strong proto-anarchist tendencies); a review of Messianism and the Official Church, by the Polish mystic revolutionary Miisckievicz; an article comparing the emergence of socialist "Social Science" out of capitalist "Political Economy" to the emergence of Astronomy out of the pseudoscience of Astrology; part 2 of a series investigating the history of the idea of property; and an article on the notion of the Word in relation to the Christian trinity.