Between Harmony and E-Harmony: Sexual Minima and Utopian Matching in Fourier’s "Calculus of Passions"

In his manuscript of 1818 entitled “System of radical sympathies and antipathies,” Charles Fourier claimed to have devised “the art...of finding all those persons with whom one is in complete sympathy, and of surrounding oneself with them instantly and constantly.” Unfolding across 117 pages the “algebraic formulas” that would allow for this “matching [assortiment] of characters,” Fourier argued that a “calculus of passions” was key to the management of relations in his phalanstères -- communities dubbed simply “Harmony” by Fourier, and envisioned as a socialist solution to the woes of capitalist “civilization.” Whereas, in “civilization,” persons “often spend years in a city without encountering sympathetic partners in love,” in “Harmony,” “no one would be left out or miss out on an appropriate match.” This paper unpacks the political stakes, informational processes, and mathematical techniques of Fourier’s “calculus of passions,” to argue that so-called “utopian” socialism in part pioneered the discourses and practices of “matching” behind contemporary data-driven approaches to finding “matches.” As a self-styled Newton of the social world, Fourier championed the need to discover laws of “passionate attraction” analogous to universal gravitation. As an early critic of industrial capitalism, Fourier proposed that “free love” required scientific management, lest it degenerate into an unequal free market of love. Technologies of matching, in this sense, went hand-in-hand with his problematic demand for the right to a “sexual minimum” alongside universal basic income, and his faith that this minimum, through proper practices of information collection and analysis, was an achievable reality.