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 which retains mild pejorative overtones.