Albert Brisbane was born in 1809 in Batavia in northwestern New York state, a community founded in 1789 by his wealthy father, James Brisbane, chief land agent for the Holland Land Purchase Company. Brisbane grew up in the wilderness where he understood and appreciated the rugged individualism and resourcefulness of his fellow settlers. However, Brisbane also had available to him the resources of his father's wealth.
In 1824 James Brisbane sent Albert to school in New York City where he soon began to study with Jean Manesca, a Frenchman from Haiti. Educated in the enlightenment tradition of late eighteenth-century France, Manesca imbued Albert with a strong interest and respect for European scholarship. It was with Manesca that Albert began to raise questions and concerns about the Destiny of Man. And finally in 1828 at the age of nineteen, this precocious young manwho had grown up with Indians, hunting and riding in the wilderness, convinced his father that the only way he could hope to find out the answer to these important questions was to go and study in Europe, the source of all important ideas. In this paper I am going to discuss Brisbane's six year sojourn in Europe, how he came upon the ideas of Comte Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier and then why he became so committed to these theories that he returned to the United States and devoted the rest of his life to establishing Fourierist ideas and programs. During his European stay Brisbane kept a journal - of which two volumes from 1831-1832 remain and which have not been published. In my presentation I will focus primarily on these documents and what we learn from them about Brisbane's thinking.
Brisbane was an important intellectual bridge figure. He "took in" European ideas and impressions but placed them in the context of his American understanding and experience. Later, to the extent he was successful with Fourierist programs in the United States (and he was the most successful of all of the Fourierist disciples anywhere) he was successful because he had transposed these programs into an American idiom. These extant diaries are of particular importance because they provide insight into Albert's thinking and particularly into his process of merging European ideas into an American context. In concluding, I hope to be able to illuminate something about how one American took European "snapshots" for his album back home.
* Redilia Brisbane, "Albert Brisbane, A Mental Biography" Boston, Arena Publishng Company, p. 63.
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