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 that retains mild pejorative overtones. Never tested in practice at any scale in Fourier's lifetime, Fourierism enjoyed a brief boom in the United States of America during the mid-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 mid-1850s by Victor Considerant (1808–1893), a French disciple of Fourier's who unsuccessfully attempted to relaunch the model in Texas in the 1850s. Doctrine Passional attraction In contrast to the thoroughly secular communitarianism of his contemporary Robert Owen (1771–1858), Charles Fourier's thinking starts from a presumption of the existence of God and a divine social order on Earth in accordance with the will of God. Fourier saw himself as a figure of world-historical importance akin to Isaac Newton for having identified the fundamental force driving social development, which he called "passional attraction" (). Fourier believed that the structure of the world—its economic, political, and social system—inhibited humanity from the pursuit of its God-given individual passions, thereby preventing it from achieving universal harmony. Rather than seeking to mold individuals to fit the existing form of economic, political, and social life, as had been the traditional goal of the educational and what we today call the socialization process, Fourier believed that instead the form of economic, political, and social life should itself be altered to fit the inherent passions of the individual, since these economic and social structures were manmade and not God-given. Through conscious understanding of this process, which Fourier called "social science", new economic and social formations called "Associations" could be created, structured so as to allow individuals to follow their passions and in this way advance toward universal harmony. Always one to list and to systematize, Fourier declared there were 12 basic passions of humanity grouped around three branches of a "passional tree": "luxurious passions" of the senses; "affective passions" of love, friendship, and parenthood; and the