Neil McWilliam

Champagne socialism: Luxury in Fourier's utopia

Fouriers vision of material gratification in works such as Le Nouveau Monde amoureux comprehensively overturns a suspicion of the destabilising effects of luxury inherent to classical European political theory. This article explores the basis upon which Fourier was able to achieve this revolution. It focuses on his theories of human psychology, his insistence on the positive effects of material inequality in a harmoniously regulated society, and his abolition of the social division between mental and physical labour on which earlier critiques of luxury had been based. Set against an investigation of attitudes towards luxury in early modern and Enlightenment political thought, it argues that Fouriers utopia is ultimately framed by the all-encompassing gaze of a thinker who eliminates potential tensions between individual gratification and social harmony through blunt assertion rather than theoretical engagement with his antecedents.

Commemoration and the Politics of Iconoclasm: The Battle over “Les Statues Dreyfusardes”, 1908–1910

In this lecture a series of iconoclastic attacks on monuments erected to defenders of Dreyfus (Zola, Trarieux, Scheurer-Kestner, Bernard-Lazare), carried out by royalist supporters of Action francaise during 1908–1910, is examined and the political significance of the phenomenon explored. The attitudes of Charles Maurras and Leon Daudet towards republican memorialisation is also analysed.