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Inventing the future in spite of futurology
Futures Essay
precisely those affluent nations chiefly responsible for world pollution and the plunder of the resources of the world as a whole. China dissociated herself from the final declaration of the conference because it was not the expression of a consensus, failed to mention the political causes of environmental pollution, failed to denounce imperialist wars and war crimes (as in Vietnam), and failed to demand the prohibition and destruction of biochemical and nuclear weapons and the renunciation of their use. A key aspect of her point of view was pithily expressed in the maxim quoted by China’s chief delegate Tang Ke, “We must not give up eating for fear of choking”. The balanced character of her socialist development works towards the most economic use of all materials; waste, a prime cause of pollution, is reduced to a minimum. And, in Tang Ke’s words, “our government is now beginning to work in a planned way to prevent and eliminate industrial pollution”. In
China such a policy, like any other, involves the education and mobilisation of the whole people with an effectiveness inconceivable in the ‘advanced’ industrial societies of the West and Japan where profit is the mainspring. It should also be noted that the widely quoted sentence from the English version of Tang Ke’s speech, “The possibility of man’s exploitation and utilisation of natural resources is inis a seriously misleading exhaustible”, rendering of the original Chinese which, literally translated, reads : “Mankind’s opening up and utilisation of natural extending”. resources is constantly The phrase ‘constantly extending’ does not connote ‘inexhaustible’, and ‘opening up’ is far from ‘exploitation’. It is capitalism and imperialism that ‘exploit’ natural resources, as they exploit people, wherever they can. The Chinese believe that sooner or later all peoples will protect their environment in the only secure way, by overthrowing the system that plunders and pollutes it.
A section of the journal in which ideas and topics that indicate potential considerations for futures research are discussed.
Futures Essay
INVENTING THE FUTURE IN SPITE OF FUTUROLOGY Krishan Kumar SOMEyears back
Dennis Gabor set a lot of minds going by the publication of his stimulating little book Inventing the Future. In the very title of that he invited us to think of the future as in some crucial sense discontinuous with the present and the past. We seemed, Mr Kumar is currently the BBC, London, UK.
FUTURES
a radio producer with
December 1972
in the industrial societies at least, through our technological development and enhanced powers of social organisation, capable of discovering patterns of living and forms of social institutions that would mark a clear break with earlier social evolution, akin to a mutation in biological evolution. Here was the opportunity to shake off the dead hand of the past. It was a call in
369
370
Futures Essay
the spirit of the utopian thought of the early socialists as when Marx contemplated, in the passage to the future communist society, the transition from man’s pre-history to his history, from social determinism to free determination. There was a challenge here, and some responded to it. Most noticeably it came in the various discussions of the alternative society and the postscarcity society. Earlier utopian speculation had, seemingly irresistibly, harked back to pre-industrial, even preurban, modes of life. What distinguished the new utopianism was its full acceptance of the technology of advanced industrial society. Indeed the complaint was that the liberating potentialities of modern technology were being stunted and confined through a wasteful social organisationkept going on behalf of particular political, bureaucratic and economic interests. Such a perspective brought together strange allies such as Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Buckminster Fuller and Donald Schon, a new left thinker, an a-political design technologist and a management consultant. If their schemes were sometimes unconvincing, they at least had the merit of contemplating a future that was a genuine transcendance of the present and not a mere capitulation to particular current trends. It is a striking and depressing fact that those most systematically involved in the study of the future seem incapable of exhibiting a like imagination. I am referring here to sociologists such as Daniel Bell, Herman Kahn, Z. K. Brzezinski and their many all of whom have been followers, involved in the elaboration of the idea of the post-industrial society, and this tendency seems to characterise a good deal of ‘futurology’. It is remarkable that sociology, which should be the discipline that most illuminates future possibilities, should so resolutely face
backwards, towards its own origins an earlier period of social change. Sociology society
explaining
in
evolving
The idea of the post-industrial society represents a curious re-commencement, a re-habilitation in a new guise, of the dominant idea of the founding fathers of sociology: the idea of the industrial society. Saint-Simon, Comte and Spencer, de Tocqueville and Marx, Weber and Durkheim all wrote and theorised under the overwhelming impression that “a terrible beauty” was born. A new society, the industrial society, was in the making, fraught equally with hope and despair. Whether they were struck most by the process of industrialisation, or democratisation, or rationalisation, and whether inspired with more hope or more gloom, the nineteenth century sociologists conceived their task as the description and explanation of the great transformation taking place before their eyes. To accomplish this task they had to do two things. They had to give an account both of the mechanisms of change and of the directions of change. In other words, they had to situate the industrial society in a sequence connecting past, present, and future. Given the intellectual currents of the time it was not surprising that this schema resorted to evolutionism. This, was not of the Daremphatically, winian sort. In using an evolutionary framework for the analysis of largescale social change, the early sociologists were having recourse to a tradition of thinking as old as recorded Western thought itself. The evolutionary, or more precisely put, the developmental concept, has exerted an apparently irresistible fascination to social theorists ever since the Greek historians used it to ‘recover’ the past ages of mankind’s history, in the absence of historical records. Basically the device consists in think-
FUTURES
December 1972
Futures Essay
ing of society as an organism. Societies, like organisms, grow, mature, differentiate. They have, in other words, a natural history. Once we know the species-specific pattern of development of the organism society, we are exempted from having to study the particular developments of all the individual members of that species-just as our knowledge of the general sequence caterpillar-pupa-butterfly allows us to predict with a good deal of certainty the line of development of any one caterpillar. And in this organic conception, change is due essentially to forces intrinsic to the thing changing. Change is constant, cumulative, and coherent. It takes the form of evolution by stages, each stage arising out of the preceding one and in its turn being pregnant with the next, and each expressing a higher, more developed and more complicated state of the system. Thankfully, not many of the founding fathers allowed themselves to be committed to all the implications of this view of social change. In particular, although they were often quite prepared to give all the finely-graded stages of social evolution, they were interested in only a relatively small number of those stages and especially those that seemed to have been the recent antecedents of their own novel stage. Hence nineteenth century social theory was dominated by a series of variously expressed dichotomies of social change: from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, status to contract, folk to urban, militant to industrial society. In this way the new industrial type of society was situated in historical perspective, which was itself schematised by the evolutionary stages. As to the general directions of the early sociologists were change, impressively of one mind. In passing over into industrialism it seemed to them that Western Europe had simply been the first area to make the transition to the newest and as yet highest
FUTURES
December 1872
stage of social evolution. Other societies on the globe could be ranked by the criteria of how near they approached this latest stage. But one thing was clear. Whether through diffusion and impact or through independent evolution all societies were converging towards one basic type, the industrial society. Even where it was felt that the new order had not yet reached its final stable form it was still considered that the destiny of all societies was to tread the path mapped out by the industrial nations and to incorporate their institutions and culture as a necessary stage in their evolution. As Marx put it in the preface to the first edition of Capital: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”. Of the major sociologists only Marx, in fact, speculated to any extent on the future of the industrial society; and even he in later life came to frown upon a too great curiosity over this aspect as utopian and unscientific. Given this central orientation towards social change in the heroic period of sociology, it seemed likely that before long sociologists would begin to examine more closely the directions of change in the new industrial society once its basic institutions and culture were established. Indications of this were already being given in the early twentieth century, in Weber’s studies of bureaucracy and Michels’ analysis of the mass political parties. What happened, however, was that just about this time social change ceased to be the chief preoccupation of social theory.
Sociology explaining social As a topic social into cold storage. are complex, but was provided by lectual rejection
order
change simply went The reasons for this a central element the vigorous intelof evolutionism in
371
372
Futures Essay
its social form. Historians and anthropologists attacked the natural history of evolutionist accounts as nothing more than bad history, armchair conjectures. At the same time evolutionists were castigated for giving no adequate logical, historical or sociological explanation of the movement from one state or stage of society to another. The weaknesses of evolutionary thought were traced by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown to an insufficient concern for how, at any given time, a society actually worked and maintained itself in being. As Radcliffe-Brown put it: “We cannot successfully embark on the study of how culture changes until we have made at least some progress in determining what culture really is and how it works”. As a result sociology was for the first fifty years of this century dominated by a concern for the explanation of social order. Its best known and most influential approach was that of functionalism, which purported to explain the workings of social institutions in terms of the functions they performed in maintaining the health and equilibrium of the social system. During this period no serious revision was made of the classic evolutionist conception of social change. Even functionalism did not supersede, it merely suspended evolutionary speculation. Functionalism was in fact a sort of frozen evolutionism : the movingstaircase that represented the evolutionary sequence was simply stopped for a bit so that sociologists could have a closer look at the works. Functionalists like Talcott Parsons happily reverted almost without modification to nineteenth century evolutionism when they were forced to turn their attention to the problems of large-scale social change. Meanwhile the systematic study of social change was left to the philosophers of history to the Spenglers, Sorokins, and Toynbees. Their approaches, for good or bad, did not impinge much on the
sociological consciousness. It is an instructive fact, for instance, that when in 1943 Ossip Flechtheim coined the term ‘futurology’ he had no immediate sociological tradition to which he could link his projected enterprise for large-scale social forecasting and had to rely instead on discussions of Toynbee et al. The sociology
of development
As with infants, so with sociologists. They were dragged kicking and screaming back into the study of social change. After the Second World War the anti-colonial movement brought into being a host of new states. The problem of the future development of these societies became too pressing even for sociologists to ignore them. How did they respond ? Here the half-century neglect of social change called for its payment. Since no new thinking had gone into devising a new approach to social change, sociology was forced to fall back on its evolutionary past. The sociology of development, as it grew from the early ‘fifties, did represent a return to some of the characteristic concerns of the founding fathers. And that, I hold, is something to be welcomed. But the sons imitated their fathers in ways far too automatic and uncritical for the attempts to be reof assuring. There was the invoking the old notion of stages of evolution, with the assumption that each undeveloped society was an enclosed, self-contained entity, propelled upwards through the various stages of growth by some entelechy called the will to be modern. The stages of the earlier evolutionists were bundled together into the two polar types, traditional and modern (or undeveloped and developed), and the process of development or modernisation conceived as the movement from the first to the second. Furthermore, there was little doubt where the model for the ideal-typical modern society came
FUTURES
December 1972
Futures Essay
from. It was the industrialised, democratised, bureaucratised and rationalised society seen by the earlier sociologists as the ideal-typical industrial and now almost naturally society, identified with Anglo-American society of the nineteen-fifties. In both its form and content, then, sociology’s idea of the modern was almost Byzantine in its clinging to the once-for-all, authoritatively-promulgated model of the past. This response in relation to the nonindustrial societies can in retrospect be seen as a kind of dummy run for the later response to the question of how the industrial societies were changing. For the time being this resurgence of interest in social change did not, interestingly enough, extend to the societies of the industrial world. Quite the contrary. There seemed, in the social science view of those societies, the belief that all important structural change had come to an end there. These, the ‘fifties, were the halcyon days of the end of ideology thesis. Industrial society appeared to have come of age, to have matured with remarkable fidelity along the main lines outlined by the nineteenth century sociologists. Even the spectre of the unpleasant shuffle at the end, predicted by Marx in the form of the socialist revolution, had ceased its haunting. The conflicts bred of inequality had largely been resolved and without the need of recourse to revolution. The industrial societies of both East and West had evolved into rational, managed societies, and in doing so had ‘got over the hump’. No further institutional changes should be required in the process of applying the fruits of steady economic growth and a rapidly expanding technology to clear up the marginal pockets of poverty. Futurology change
explaining
social
Views of this sort are still seriously held, of course. But enough happened
FUTURES
December 1872
in the ‘sixties in all industrial societies to shake the firm belief in the view that the industrial societies had resolved all their outstanding problems. The result was a renewal of interest in the future of industrial society: the project known as futurology. As with development theory, it marks a welcome return to the chief preoccupation of early sociology. And like developit is markedly interment theory, disciplinary in character as well as being global in its tendency. But the most significant parallel lies in the fact that it has picked up the nineteenth century theory of social change in its almost pristine form. Like development theory, futurology was stimulated into existence by pressing developments in the real world. Like development theory, futurology, in casting around for a suitable conceptualisation of large scale societal change, found only the evolutionary schemes of the past to hand and adopted these for its own purposes. The nineteenth century gave us the convergence thesis: the view that all societies, under the impact of industralism, were converging upon one basic form. The futurologists offer us what we might call the re-convergence thesis. They accept that the nineteenth century scheme in its strict formulation will no longer do. Industrial society as it has been known hitherto cannot be taken as the fulfilment and final end of social evolution. But all one has to do is to add another stage to the sequence. The old story is given a new chapter and so a new ending, rather as Marx had tried to do (via the proletarian revolution) and after him James Burnham (via the managerial revolution). But formally the pattern remains the same. The present is once more seen as transitional, as metamorphosis: not now from feudal agrarianism to industrialism but from the industrial society to the postindustrial society. fiovelty, indeed uniqueness, is claimed for this latest
373
374
stage of social evolution; but it is remarkable how closely it follows the structural pattern of the nineteenth century construct. Henri de SaintSimon, the great prophet of the industrial society, would find little to surprise him in the sort of society that, for instance, Daniel Bell proclaims is on the way. True, the ‘new class’ is not constituted by the industrialists but by the scientists, engineers and mathematicians of the new intellectual technology. The institutional base is no longer the factory but the university. But fundamentally the post-industrial society accepts the Saint-Simonian view that the society is structured by its technology and run by the men who are the practitioners of that technology. What has brought about the transformation is precisely the dynamic of technological development: technology, “that great, growling engine of change” as Alvin Toffler calls it. Instead of the power loom, the steam engine and the railway, we have computers and the electronic media of communication. These are the agencies, now as always, that lift the society, smoothly and inevitably, up to the next step of the evolutionary ladder. What place is there in this for mere human purposes ? Francis Bacon said that nothing that has not yet been done can be done
except by means that have not yet been tried. To know what should be done has, of course, traditionally been the province of moral and political theory. But for over a century it has been recognised that the purposes we conceive as well as our ability to achieve them are decisively shaped by the context of the society in which they occur: that is, there are sociological determinants. That is why the sociological accounts of the emerging future are so important. If Bell and his followers are right, all we can say is that the call to invent the future is empty rhetoric, since the future seems to promise no more than the past writ large, and it would be idle to attempt new designs in a context so bound in the traditional mould. At its most distinctive the post-industrial society does no more than offer its SaintSimonian administrators greater facilities for social control than were ever possible in the industrial society. I have said enough, I hope, to suggest that the sociological approach to the future may tell us more about the history of sociology than of society. That approach seems to remain the prisoner of its own tradition and its own history. And if the dead hand of the past is heavy here, might we not suppose that society can still invent its future in despite of futurology?
NEWS From the Hudson Institute Progress in studies on the corporate and-prospects for mankind Since the initiation of Hudson Institute’s study on The Corporate Environment 1975-85, described in Futures in June 1970, the European Division, under its director based in Paris Edmund Stillman, has moved into a phase of expansion involving a number of promising new projects.
environment
The Corporate Study itself is now beginning its third and final stage and draws to a close next year. This programme has generated a wide range of written material, produced by the Institute and has drawn too on work contributed by executives of the member corporations and by con-
FUTURES
December 1272
precisely those affluent nations chiefly responsible for world pollution and the plunder of the resources of the world as a whole. China dissociated herself from the final declaration of the conference because it was not the expression of a consensus, failed to mention the political causes of environmental pollution, failed to denounce imperialist wars and war crimes (as in Vietnam), and failed to demand the prohibition and destruction of biochemical and nuclear weapons and the renunciation of their use. A key aspect of her point of view was pithily expressed in the maxim quoted by China’s chief delegate Tang Ke, “We must not give up eating for fear of choking”. The balanced character of her socialist development works towards the most economic use of all materials; waste, a prime cause of pollution, is reduced to a minimum. And, in Tang Ke’s words, “our government is now beginning to work in a planned way to prevent and eliminate industrial pollution”. In
China such a policy, like any other, involves the education and mobilisation of the whole people with an effectiveness inconceivable in the ‘advanced’ industrial societies of the West and Japan where profit is the mainspring. It should also be noted that the widely quoted sentence from the English version of Tang Ke’s speech, “The possibility of man’s exploitation and utilisation of natural resources is inis a seriously misleading exhaustible”, rendering of the original Chinese which, literally translated, reads : “Mankind’s opening up and utilisation of natural extending”. resources is constantly The phrase ‘constantly extending’ does not connote ‘inexhaustible’, and ‘opening up’ is far from ‘exploitation’. It is capitalism and imperialism that ‘exploit’ natural resources, as they exploit people, wherever they can. The Chinese believe that sooner or later all peoples will protect their environment in the only secure way, by overthrowing the system that plunders and pollutes it.
A section of the journal in which ideas and topics that indicate potential considerations for futures research are discussed.
Futures Essay
INVENTING THE FUTURE IN SPITE OF FUTUROLOGY Krishan Kumar SOMEyears back
Dennis Gabor set a lot of minds going by the publication of his stimulating little book Inventing the Future. In the very title of that he invited us to think of the future as in some crucial sense discontinuous with the present and the past. We seemed, Mr Kumar is currently the BBC, London, UK.
FUTURES
a radio producer with
December 1972
in the industrial societies at least, through our technological development and enhanced powers of social organisation, capable of discovering patterns of living and forms of social institutions that would mark a clear break with earlier social evolution, akin to a mutation in biological evolution. Here was the opportunity to shake off the dead hand of the past. It was a call in
369
370
Futures Essay
the spirit of the utopian thought of the early socialists as when Marx contemplated, in the passage to the future communist society, the transition from man’s pre-history to his history, from social determinism to free determination. There was a challenge here, and some responded to it. Most noticeably it came in the various discussions of the alternative society and the postscarcity society. Earlier utopian speculation had, seemingly irresistibly, harked back to pre-industrial, even preurban, modes of life. What distinguished the new utopianism was its full acceptance of the technology of advanced industrial society. Indeed the complaint was that the liberating potentialities of modern technology were being stunted and confined through a wasteful social organisationkept going on behalf of particular political, bureaucratic and economic interests. Such a perspective brought together strange allies such as Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Buckminster Fuller and Donald Schon, a new left thinker, an a-political design technologist and a management consultant. If their schemes were sometimes unconvincing, they at least had the merit of contemplating a future that was a genuine transcendance of the present and not a mere capitulation to particular current trends. It is a striking and depressing fact that those most systematically involved in the study of the future seem incapable of exhibiting a like imagination. I am referring here to sociologists such as Daniel Bell, Herman Kahn, Z. K. Brzezinski and their many all of whom have been followers, involved in the elaboration of the idea of the post-industrial society, and this tendency seems to characterise a good deal of ‘futurology’. It is remarkable that sociology, which should be the discipline that most illuminates future possibilities, should so resolutely face
backwards, towards its own origins an earlier period of social change. Sociology society
explaining
in
evolving
The idea of the post-industrial society represents a curious re-commencement, a re-habilitation in a new guise, of the dominant idea of the founding fathers of sociology: the idea of the industrial society. Saint-Simon, Comte and Spencer, de Tocqueville and Marx, Weber and Durkheim all wrote and theorised under the overwhelming impression that “a terrible beauty” was born. A new society, the industrial society, was in the making, fraught equally with hope and despair. Whether they were struck most by the process of industrialisation, or democratisation, or rationalisation, and whether inspired with more hope or more gloom, the nineteenth century sociologists conceived their task as the description and explanation of the great transformation taking place before their eyes. To accomplish this task they had to do two things. They had to give an account both of the mechanisms of change and of the directions of change. In other words, they had to situate the industrial society in a sequence connecting past, present, and future. Given the intellectual currents of the time it was not surprising that this schema resorted to evolutionism. This, was not of the Daremphatically, winian sort. In using an evolutionary framework for the analysis of largescale social change, the early sociologists were having recourse to a tradition of thinking as old as recorded Western thought itself. The evolutionary, or more precisely put, the developmental concept, has exerted an apparently irresistible fascination to social theorists ever since the Greek historians used it to ‘recover’ the past ages of mankind’s history, in the absence of historical records. Basically the device consists in think-
FUTURES
December 1972
Futures Essay
ing of society as an organism. Societies, like organisms, grow, mature, differentiate. They have, in other words, a natural history. Once we know the species-specific pattern of development of the organism society, we are exempted from having to study the particular developments of all the individual members of that species-just as our knowledge of the general sequence caterpillar-pupa-butterfly allows us to predict with a good deal of certainty the line of development of any one caterpillar. And in this organic conception, change is due essentially to forces intrinsic to the thing changing. Change is constant, cumulative, and coherent. It takes the form of evolution by stages, each stage arising out of the preceding one and in its turn being pregnant with the next, and each expressing a higher, more developed and more complicated state of the system. Thankfully, not many of the founding fathers allowed themselves to be committed to all the implications of this view of social change. In particular, although they were often quite prepared to give all the finely-graded stages of social evolution, they were interested in only a relatively small number of those stages and especially those that seemed to have been the recent antecedents of their own novel stage. Hence nineteenth century social theory was dominated by a series of variously expressed dichotomies of social change: from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, status to contract, folk to urban, militant to industrial society. In this way the new industrial type of society was situated in historical perspective, which was itself schematised by the evolutionary stages. As to the general directions of the early sociologists were change, impressively of one mind. In passing over into industrialism it seemed to them that Western Europe had simply been the first area to make the transition to the newest and as yet highest
FUTURES
December 1872
stage of social evolution. Other societies on the globe could be ranked by the criteria of how near they approached this latest stage. But one thing was clear. Whether through diffusion and impact or through independent evolution all societies were converging towards one basic type, the industrial society. Even where it was felt that the new order had not yet reached its final stable form it was still considered that the destiny of all societies was to tread the path mapped out by the industrial nations and to incorporate their institutions and culture as a necessary stage in their evolution. As Marx put it in the preface to the first edition of Capital: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”. Of the major sociologists only Marx, in fact, speculated to any extent on the future of the industrial society; and even he in later life came to frown upon a too great curiosity over this aspect as utopian and unscientific. Given this central orientation towards social change in the heroic period of sociology, it seemed likely that before long sociologists would begin to examine more closely the directions of change in the new industrial society once its basic institutions and culture were established. Indications of this were already being given in the early twentieth century, in Weber’s studies of bureaucracy and Michels’ analysis of the mass political parties. What happened, however, was that just about this time social change ceased to be the chief preoccupation of social theory.
Sociology explaining social As a topic social into cold storage. are complex, but was provided by lectual rejection
order
change simply went The reasons for this a central element the vigorous intelof evolutionism in
371
372
Futures Essay
its social form. Historians and anthropologists attacked the natural history of evolutionist accounts as nothing more than bad history, armchair conjectures. At the same time evolutionists were castigated for giving no adequate logical, historical or sociological explanation of the movement from one state or stage of society to another. The weaknesses of evolutionary thought were traced by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown to an insufficient concern for how, at any given time, a society actually worked and maintained itself in being. As Radcliffe-Brown put it: “We cannot successfully embark on the study of how culture changes until we have made at least some progress in determining what culture really is and how it works”. As a result sociology was for the first fifty years of this century dominated by a concern for the explanation of social order. Its best known and most influential approach was that of functionalism, which purported to explain the workings of social institutions in terms of the functions they performed in maintaining the health and equilibrium of the social system. During this period no serious revision was made of the classic evolutionist conception of social change. Even functionalism did not supersede, it merely suspended evolutionary speculation. Functionalism was in fact a sort of frozen evolutionism : the movingstaircase that represented the evolutionary sequence was simply stopped for a bit so that sociologists could have a closer look at the works. Functionalists like Talcott Parsons happily reverted almost without modification to nineteenth century evolutionism when they were forced to turn their attention to the problems of large-scale social change. Meanwhile the systematic study of social change was left to the philosophers of history to the Spenglers, Sorokins, and Toynbees. Their approaches, for good or bad, did not impinge much on the
sociological consciousness. It is an instructive fact, for instance, that when in 1943 Ossip Flechtheim coined the term ‘futurology’ he had no immediate sociological tradition to which he could link his projected enterprise for large-scale social forecasting and had to rely instead on discussions of Toynbee et al. The sociology
of development
As with infants, so with sociologists. They were dragged kicking and screaming back into the study of social change. After the Second World War the anti-colonial movement brought into being a host of new states. The problem of the future development of these societies became too pressing even for sociologists to ignore them. How did they respond ? Here the half-century neglect of social change called for its payment. Since no new thinking had gone into devising a new approach to social change, sociology was forced to fall back on its evolutionary past. The sociology of development, as it grew from the early ‘fifties, did represent a return to some of the characteristic concerns of the founding fathers. And that, I hold, is something to be welcomed. But the sons imitated their fathers in ways far too automatic and uncritical for the attempts to be reof assuring. There was the invoking the old notion of stages of evolution, with the assumption that each undeveloped society was an enclosed, self-contained entity, propelled upwards through the various stages of growth by some entelechy called the will to be modern. The stages of the earlier evolutionists were bundled together into the two polar types, traditional and modern (or undeveloped and developed), and the process of development or modernisation conceived as the movement from the first to the second. Furthermore, there was little doubt where the model for the ideal-typical modern society came
FUTURES
December 1972
Futures Essay
from. It was the industrialised, democratised, bureaucratised and rationalised society seen by the earlier sociologists as the ideal-typical industrial and now almost naturally society, identified with Anglo-American society of the nineteen-fifties. In both its form and content, then, sociology’s idea of the modern was almost Byzantine in its clinging to the once-for-all, authoritatively-promulgated model of the past. This response in relation to the nonindustrial societies can in retrospect be seen as a kind of dummy run for the later response to the question of how the industrial societies were changing. For the time being this resurgence of interest in social change did not, interestingly enough, extend to the societies of the industrial world. Quite the contrary. There seemed, in the social science view of those societies, the belief that all important structural change had come to an end there. These, the ‘fifties, were the halcyon days of the end of ideology thesis. Industrial society appeared to have come of age, to have matured with remarkable fidelity along the main lines outlined by the nineteenth century sociologists. Even the spectre of the unpleasant shuffle at the end, predicted by Marx in the form of the socialist revolution, had ceased its haunting. The conflicts bred of inequality had largely been resolved and without the need of recourse to revolution. The industrial societies of both East and West had evolved into rational, managed societies, and in doing so had ‘got over the hump’. No further institutional changes should be required in the process of applying the fruits of steady economic growth and a rapidly expanding technology to clear up the marginal pockets of poverty. Futurology change
explaining
social
Views of this sort are still seriously held, of course. But enough happened
FUTURES
December 1872
in the ‘sixties in all industrial societies to shake the firm belief in the view that the industrial societies had resolved all their outstanding problems. The result was a renewal of interest in the future of industrial society: the project known as futurology. As with development theory, it marks a welcome return to the chief preoccupation of early sociology. And like developit is markedly interment theory, disciplinary in character as well as being global in its tendency. But the most significant parallel lies in the fact that it has picked up the nineteenth century theory of social change in its almost pristine form. Like development theory, futurology was stimulated into existence by pressing developments in the real world. Like development theory, futurology, in casting around for a suitable conceptualisation of large scale societal change, found only the evolutionary schemes of the past to hand and adopted these for its own purposes. The nineteenth century gave us the convergence thesis: the view that all societies, under the impact of industralism, were converging upon one basic form. The futurologists offer us what we might call the re-convergence thesis. They accept that the nineteenth century scheme in its strict formulation will no longer do. Industrial society as it has been known hitherto cannot be taken as the fulfilment and final end of social evolution. But all one has to do is to add another stage to the sequence. The old story is given a new chapter and so a new ending, rather as Marx had tried to do (via the proletarian revolution) and after him James Burnham (via the managerial revolution). But formally the pattern remains the same. The present is once more seen as transitional, as metamorphosis: not now from feudal agrarianism to industrialism but from the industrial society to the postindustrial society. fiovelty, indeed uniqueness, is claimed for this latest
373
374
stage of social evolution; but it is remarkable how closely it follows the structural pattern of the nineteenth century construct. Henri de SaintSimon, the great prophet of the industrial society, would find little to surprise him in the sort of society that, for instance, Daniel Bell proclaims is on the way. True, the ‘new class’ is not constituted by the industrialists but by the scientists, engineers and mathematicians of the new intellectual technology. The institutional base is no longer the factory but the university. But fundamentally the post-industrial society accepts the Saint-Simonian view that the society is structured by its technology and run by the men who are the practitioners of that technology. What has brought about the transformation is precisely the dynamic of technological development: technology, “that great, growling engine of change” as Alvin Toffler calls it. Instead of the power loom, the steam engine and the railway, we have computers and the electronic media of communication. These are the agencies, now as always, that lift the society, smoothly and inevitably, up to the next step of the evolutionary ladder. What place is there in this for mere human purposes ? Francis Bacon said that nothing that has not yet been done can be done
except by means that have not yet been tried. To know what should be done has, of course, traditionally been the province of moral and political theory. But for over a century it has been recognised that the purposes we conceive as well as our ability to achieve them are decisively shaped by the context of the society in which they occur: that is, there are sociological determinants. That is why the sociological accounts of the emerging future are so important. If Bell and his followers are right, all we can say is that the call to invent the future is empty rhetoric, since the future seems to promise no more than the past writ large, and it would be idle to attempt new designs in a context so bound in the traditional mould. At its most distinctive the post-industrial society does no more than offer its SaintSimonian administrators greater facilities for social control than were ever possible in the industrial society. I have said enough, I hope, to suggest that the sociological approach to the future may tell us more about the history of sociology than of society. That approach seems to remain the prisoner of its own tradition and its own history. And if the dead hand of the past is heavy here, might we not suppose that society can still invent its future in despite of futurology?
NEWS From the Hudson Institute Progress in studies on the corporate and-prospects for mankind Since the initiation of Hudson Institute’s study on The Corporate Environment 1975-85, described in Futures in June 1970, the European Division, under its director based in Paris Edmund Stillman, has moved into a phase of expansion involving a number of promising new projects.
environment
The Corporate Study itself is now beginning its third and final stage and draws to a close next year. This programme has generated a wide range of written material, produced by the Institute and has drawn too on work contributed by executives of the member corporations and by con-
FUTURES
December 1272