The following essay by the French writer Charles Fourier (1772-1837) is reprinted in Terence Ball and Richard Dagger, Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader, (New York: Harper-Collins, 1991), 177-179.  The excerpt, a critique of the social consequences of market-driven economies, effectively demolishes one of the most enduring American myths—the idea that there exists a single “national interest,” the pursuit of which benefits everyone.

Industry offers a subversion far more striking; this is the opposition of the two kinds of interest, collective and individual.  Every person engaged in an industry is at war with the mass, and malevolent toward it from personal interest.  A physician wishes his fellow-citizens good, genuine cases of fevers, and an attorney good lawsuits in every family.  An architect has need for a good conflagration which should reduce a quarter of the city to ashes, and a glazier desires a good hail-storm which should break all the panes of glass.  A tailor, a shoemaker, wishes the public to use only poorly-dyed stuffs and shoes made of bad leather, so that a triple amount may be consumed—for the benefit of trade; that is their refrain.  A court of justice regards it opportune that France continues to commit a hundred and twenty thousand crimes and actionable offenses, that number being necessary to maintain the criminal courts.  It is thus that in civilised society every individual is in intentional war against the mass; necessary result of anti-associative industry or an inverted world. . . . This vicious circle of industry has been so clearly recognised, that people on all sides are beginning to suspect it, and feel astonished that, in civilisation, poverty should be the result of abundance.