Similar ideas were propounded by the lawyer and journalist Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), a man of humble origins who had taken part in the 1830 Revolution and served as an oppositional deputy in the early 1830s. More determinedly egalitarian than Fourier, he envisaged in his famous Voyage to Icaria (1840) a community where everyone worked equally and received the same rewards, everyone would have the vote, and all property would be held in common. This was ‘communism’, a word he invented. The downside of his Utopian prescription was that everyone would have to obey the community’s laws, and there
...more
