The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fourierism \Fou"ri*er*ism\, n. The co["o]perative socialistic system of Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, who recommended the reorganization of society into small communities, living in common.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1841, in reference to ideas of French socialist François-Marie-Charles Fourier (1772-1837), whose plan also was called phalansterianism. Related: Fourierist. In scientific use, Fourier refers to French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830).
Wikipedia
Fourierism is the systematic set of economic, political, and social beliefs first espoused by French intellectual Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Based upon a belief in the inevitability of communal associations of people who worked and lived together as part of the human future, Fourier's committed supporters referred to his doctrines as Associationism. Political contemporaries and subsequent scholarship has identified Fourier's set of ideas as a form of utopian socialism – a phrase which retains mild pejorative overtones.
Never tested in practice on any scale in Fourier's lifetime, the Fourierist movement enjoyed a brief boom in the United States of America during the middle of the 1840s owing largely to the efforts of his American popularizer, Albert Brisbane (1809–1890) and the American Union of Associationists, but ultimately failed as a social and economic model. The system was briefly revived in the middle 1850s by Victor Considerant (1808–1893), a French disciple of Fourier's who unsuccessfully attempted to relaunch the model in the American state of Texas in the 1850s.
Usage examples of "fourierism".
Numerous lectures, dealing not only with Fourierism, various Utopias and communism, but also with the problems of serfdom, judicial and military reforms, constitutionalist or revolutionary methods, enabled Dostoyevsky, who was quick to understand systems through partisan exposition, to acquire a fairly complete political education.
Wishing to prove that Petrashevsky could not possibly have done any harm, he proceeds to discuss Fourierism in general for the benefit of the Commission.
Dostoevsky insists that the idea of applying Fourierism in Russia is simply comic, not to be taken seriously, and he assures the Commission that Petrashevsky is too intelligent a man ever to have had any such ridiculous whimsy.