In response to his defeat by Napoleon, Prussian King Frederick William I, pushed by his ministers, initiated a series of reforms intended to modernize property relationships and the administration of the state. This edict abolished serfdom.
Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was a salesman for a cloth merchant in Lyons who conceived of a different form of social organization, called a "phalanx," that was part garden city and part agricultural commune. All jobs would rotate and a network of…
