Albert Brisbane (August 22, 1809 – May 1, 1890) was an American utopian socialist and is remembered as the chief popularizer of the theories of Charles Fourier in the United States. Brisbane was the author of several books, notably Social Destiny of Man (1840), as well as the Fourierist periodical The Phalanx. He also founded the Fourierist Society in New York in 1839 and backed several other phalanx communes in the 1840s and 1850s. His son, Arthur Brisbane, became one of the best known American newspaper editors of the 20th century.

Albert Brisbane was born on August 22, 1809, in Batavia, New York He was the son of Mary Stevens (died 1889) and James Brisbane (1776–1851), a wealthy landowner. In 1798, James Brisbane, along with Joseph Ellicott (1760–1826) and three others, had traveled to Western New York to survey the 4,000,000 acres (1,600,000 ha) that had been purchased by the Holland Land Company from Robert Morris (1734–1806), one of the first Senators from Pennsylvania. They opened an office in Batavia to sell the land in parcels and establish settlements, which included the city that became Buffalo, New York.

Brisbane's mother, Mary, was of English descent and his father James, a Scot, had abandoned the Scottish Presbyterian Church in protest over its regimented rituals.

Brisbane developed an affection for knowledge at an early age and as an inquisitive youth he learned various mechanical skills in the small carpentry, blacksmith, and saddle shops of Batavia. Unsatisfied with the quality of education in Batavia and with visions of an illustrious future for his son, Brisbane's father sent him to a boarding school in Long Island, New York at the age of fifteen. He briefly stayed at the school before moving to New York City and studying with tutors, including Jean Manesca [Wikidata]. His New York schooling would ultimately be followed by six years of education abroad, with Brisbane studying philosophy in Paris and Berlin. He made the acquaintance of a number of prominent European intellectuals and political figures during the course of his studies.

In Berlin, Brisbane became interested in the ideas of socialism, becoming an advocate of the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon. Brisbane was very active with the promotion of Saint-Simon's ideas for a time, but became disaffected when the movement split between the followers of Barthélemy Enfantin and Amand Bazard and dropped out of the Saint-Simondian movement altogether. Brisbane would later dismiss Saint-Simon's doctrines as "artificial and in some respects false."

Searching for new ideas, Brisbane read a newly published short work by the philosopher Charles Fourier (1772–1837) entitled Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Association and was immediately converted to the writer's ideas. Fourier, a French philosopher and writer, spent the greater part of his life attempting to uncover universal laws which he believed governed society so that productive enterprise could be reorganized on a rational basis, production expanded, and human needs more readily fulfilled. Fourier believed in a fundamental harmony of the universe and a preordained series of periods through which societies needed to necessarily travel from their primitive to their advanced state, and he considered himself a scientific discoverer akin to Isaac Newton.

In 1832 Brisbane left for Paris, where he stayed two years studying Fourier's system, including obtaining direct tutelage from the 60-year-old theorist himself He made the acquaintance of other devotees of Fourier's ideas during this initial phase of the Fourierist movement. He returned to the United States a committed believer and proselytizer of Fourier's idea of association and began work on a book to expound Fourierist ideas. Brisbane's first and most famous book, Social Destiny of Man, was published in 1840.

Brisbane accepted Fourier's ideas as a matter of faith, believing that the "social destiny of man" was an immutable force of nature; once the laws of this development were identified and publicized, he believed, the regeneration and transformation of the world would be rapid and effective. On the heels of his first successful book, in 1843 Brisbane published another adaptation of Fourier to American conditions, a book entitled Association: Or, A Concise Exposition of the Practical Part of Fourier's Social Science.