![fuckyeahhistorycrushes:
Albert Brisbane (1809-1890), the man Walt Whitman once described as “somehow or other [always looking] as if he were attempting to think out some problem a little too hard for him.” But come on, Walt, he *was* trying to figure out how to solve *all* the evils of the industrializing world.
While he was trying to work it all out, Brisbane witnessed the 1830 revolution in France, travelled Europe during the revolutions of 1848, and was present when Napoleon III established the Second Empire in France in 1852. He also met some pretty cool cats along the way: G.W.F. Hegel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx.
Starting in 1840, America’s first socialist popularized the ideas of Charles Fourier. The French reformer believed he had discovered the laws of human nature, that twelve “passions” dictated human behaviour, that the combinations of passions produced 801 possible personality types, and that if 1602 people lived communally and did only the work to which they were most attracted, everything would work out right. Poverty, misery, and exploitation would all be gone. Under the new system, evolution would grant humans great height, we would grow tails, and the ocean would transform into “a not unpleasant lemonade.” Sounds like an ideology you can get behind, right?](http://24.media.tumblr.com/579485c26d7481b5830e2eacac021d12/tumblr_ml0q8vcIRl1qeu6ilo1_400.jpg)
Albert Brisbane (1809-1890), the man Walt Whitman once described as “somehow or other [always looking] as if he were attempting to think out some problem a little too hard for him.” But come on, Walt, he *was* trying to figure out how to solve *all* the evils of the industrializing world.
While he was trying to work it all out, Brisbane witnessed the 1830 revolution in France, travelled Europe during the revolutions of 1848, and was present when Napoleon III established the Second Empire in France in 1852. He also met some pretty cool cats along the way: G.W.F. Hegel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx.
Starting in 1840, America’s first socialist popularized the ideas of Charles Fourier. The French reformer believed he had discovered the laws of human nature, that twelve “passions” dictated human behaviour, that the combinations of passions produced 801 possible personality types, and that if 1602 people lived communally and did only the work to which they were most attracted, everything would work out right. Poverty, misery, and exploitation would all be gone. Under the new system, evolution would grant humans great height, we would grow tails, and the ocean would transform into “a not unpleasant lemonade.” Sounds like an ideology you can get behind, right?
