Futures Volume 5 issue 4 1973 [doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2873%2990008-6] I.F. Clarke -- 7. Turgot's philosophical review, or the idea of progress.pdf

8/11/2019 Futures Volume 5 issue 4 1973 [doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2873%2990008-6] I.F. Clarke -- 7. Turgot's philosophi

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Prophet s nd Predictor s 4 7

Prophets and

A series of articles that expose the

Predictors

theme that utopian and social fiction

has always responded to the society

of its day and its needs.

7. TURGOTS PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

or the idea of progress

I. F. Clarke

ON the 2 May 1961 President

Kennedy made a special address to

Congress. He began with the case for

a great new enterprise, and he ended

by proposing that Congress should

commit the nation to the task, before

this decade is out, of landing a man on

the moon and returning him safely to

earth. Within twenty-four hours the

news of the American space project

had reached most of the inhabitants of

our planet, together with the com-

mentaries of the special correspondents

who enlarged on the political motives

they discerned in the Presidents plan.

But very few of the commentators

found time to ponder the deeper im-

plications of the Apollo Programme;

and yet it was a convincing demonstra-

tion of the effectiveness of technological

forecasting, for the American political

decision depended on the elaborate

calculations NASA had supplied to the

Defence Secretary, Robert S. Mc-

Namara. At the same time it was an

even more remarkable indication of

the way in which the citizens of the

technological nations see themselves

and their world.

The last great voyage of terrestrial

exploration began on 13 April 1769,

when Captain Cook rounded the north

point of Tahiti and dropped anchor in

Matavai Bay-exactly two hundred

years and three months before Neil

Professor I. F. Clarke is Head of English

Studies Department University of Strathclyde

Glasgow UK

FUTURES August 873

Armstrong stepped out from the lunar

module to start on the first journey of

extra-terrestrial exploration. Armstrong

was able to explore the Sea of Tran-

quillity and Cook discovered Australia

because the technological capacities of

their two societies provided the neces-

sary means: an accurate chronometer

and a Whitby collier for the English-

man, and all the resources of the new

space

industries for the American

astronaut. Although, in a literal sense,

there may seem to be a world of

difference between the achievements

of the two men, they have the same

relationship with their societies. The

discovery of the last great continent on

earth and the landing of the lunar

module on the moon mark the peaks of

technological inventiveness in their

time. Again, they mark distinct stages

in the continuing Baconian dream of

the effecting of all things possible,

stages not only in the never-ending work

of exploring the human environment

but also in the steady advance from the

old wind-power technologies to nuclear

energy and rocket motors.

When President Kennedy spoke

about

space achievements which in

many ways may hold the key to our

future on earth,

he was thinking in

dominant images that first began to

take effect in the eighteenth century.

That period saw the rapid development

of many new technologies and of a

series of new ideas about history which

encouraged men to discover a principle

of progress at work in human society.


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408 Prophets and Predictors

This immensely powerful idea, which

became sacred doctrine in the last

century,

taught that mankind has

advanced, is advancing, and should be

encouraged to advance still further.

And in a singularly appropriate way

the world heard the first major formu-

lation of this theory on 11 December

1750 from a young man of 23, a

theological student at that time, who

read a paper before the Sorbonne

which he described as

A Philoso hical

Review of the Successive Advances of the

Human Mind.

The author was the

celebrated Turgot, founding father in

the philosophy of progress, who ended

his days as Minister of Marine and

Controller General of Finance. Turgot

addressed his audience of clerics with

all the conviction of a man who had the

year before graduated Bachelor of

Theology; and in the name of Christi-

anity he insinuated a new doctrine of

human

perfectibility: The whole

human race, through alternate periods

of rest and unrest, of weal and woe,

goes on advancing, although at a slow

pace, towards greater perfection.

The aim of Turgots paper was to

indicate the main lines of the progress

of the human mind. The method was

to prove from historical evidence that a

universal process of improvement was

at work. Turgot started from the

psychological theories of the English

philosopher, John Locke, a dominant

influence throughout eighteenth cen-

tury Europe; and he assumed that his

audience would accept as self-evident

the Lockean proposition : The senses

constitute the unique source of our

ideas; the whole power of our mental

faculties is restricted to combining the

ideas which they have received from

the senses. It followed, therefore,

since all human beings belong to the

same species,

and they all inhabit

the same world, that all men have

elaborated the same ideas out of their

common needs and inclinations-but

the rate of development varies. That

point is an indication of Turgots

originality. He had noted that every

advance speeds up the general move-

ment towards improvement, and he had

seen that the sciences can never halt,

can never know any final solution:

Woe betide those nations, then, in

which the sciences, as the result of a

blind zeal for them, are confined within

the limits of existing knowledge in an

attempt to stabilise them. It is for this

reason that the nations which were the

first to become enlightened are not

those where the sciences have made the

greatest progress.

Wherever he looked in history, Tur-

got found abundant evidence that man

and nature work eternally together,

and that all organised communities

have struggled upwards from bar-

barism into the full light of civilisation.

In all times and in all places, from

Ancient Egypt to Renaissance Italy, the

same factors have their effect on the

steady evolution of human society-

passion, intellect, climate, geography.

And in sweeping general statements

that tolerate no qualification, Turgot

cites his carefully selected examples of

the ebb-and-flow of progress. The

Chinese demonstrate how the sciences

can be retarded, because the very care

which the Emperors took to regulate

research and to tie up the sciences with

the political constitution, held them

back forever in mediocrity. The

Phoenicians, however, are an example

of the relationship between enterprise

and environment; for they became a

great maritime power, because they

were originally the inhabitants of a

barren coast. So, they mark a stage in

the evolution of the Mediterranean

peoples :

Their ships, spread out over

the whole Mediterranean, began to

reveal nation to nation. Astronomy,

navigation, and geography were per-

fected, one by means of the other. The

coasts of Greece and Asia Minor came

to be filled with Phoenician colonies.

Colonies are like fruits which cling to

the tree only until they have reached

their maturity: once they had become

FUTURES August 973


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Projjhets arid Predictors

409

Flying man complete with folded wings

At the time of Napoleons intended invasion of England, pro1

ganda and prediction combined for the first time. One wide

distributed print showed what was supposed to be an invasi

vessel

An even more famous fantasy, Restif de la

Bretonnes Dkooverte au -a/e, begins with an

aerial elopement


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41

Pro/bets and Predictors

The condition of industry before the coming of steam power

In the eighteenth century writers of imaginary voyages developed a taste for speculative fantasy.

An air battle between flying men in Robert Paltocks Peter Wilkins 1750


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Prophets and Predictors

411

self-sufficient, they did what Carthage

was to do later, and what America

will one day do.

The assured manner is not a trick of

style. Turgot writes with the total

confidence of a man who knows that

he has discovered the secret of the

universe; and he is so certain of the

processes he believes to be at work that

he forecasts the break he expects will

take place between the United Kingdom

and loyal colonies across the At antic.

As Turgot flashes across the centuries

like a time-traveller on the move from

past to future, he compresses the whole

of history into the assertion that the

human race, considered over the period

since its origin, appears to the eye of a

philosopher as one vast whole, which

itself, like each individual, has its

infancy and its advancement. Pro-

nouncements of this kind have the ring

of true belief. As the precursor of a

long succession of millenary thinkers-

from Condorcet to Fourier to Hegel and

Marx-Turgot handed down the idea of

progress as the all-pervasive and all-

powerful motive force in history. As the

Newton of a new social philosophy, he

reduced the immense variety of human

beings and concentrated the entirety of

human history into the unique law of

his socio-dynamics: We see the estab-

lishment of societies, and the formation

of nations which in turn dominate

other nations or become subject to

them. Empires rise and fall; laws and

forms of government succeed one

another; the arts and the sciences are in

turn discovered and perfected, in turn

retarded and accelerated in

their

progress.

After Turgot came the deluge.

Within 30 years of the original dis-

course at the Sorbonne a new literature

about the idea of progress had flooded

across Europe. It was a time when

almost every writer felt the call to

produce a theory of human history.

The Germans, in particular, distin-

guished themselves by pursuing the

idea of progress with extraordinary

tenacity

and dedicated efficiency:

Lessing, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling,

Goethe. All of them speculated about

the lessons of history; in 1784 Herder

brought out the first of his monumental

four volumes on the Ideen zur Philosophic

der Menschengeschichte;

and in that same

year Kant, who had disagreed with

Herder, contributed a piece about his

own Idea of a Universal History to the

Berliner Monatsschrift. Throughout

Europe philosophers and writers of

fiction were turning out books about the

lessons of history, or the idea of pro-

gress, or the shape of things to come. It

was the first great age of prophecy and

prediction; and as the philosophers

anatomised history in their search for

ultimate causes, a spirit of prediction

came over Europe. A new form of

fiction began to develop, of a kind

never seen before, which took on the

entirely new task of describing the

probable course of future events. The

Germans called the new fiction the

zukunftsroman and for the French it was

the

Roman danticipation,

descriptive

terms that are unmistakeable signs of a

new attitude to life on our planet.

One of the first of the new tales of the

future was LAn deux mille quatre cent

quarante,

a forecast of the future which

the French writer and dramatist,

Sebastien Mercier, brought out anony-

mously in 1770. For Mercier the future

is a dream come true. All the most

desirable changes have taken place by

the year 2440-slavery abolished, war

ended forever between England and

France, education for all, and social

justice for all. In this tale of the future

the idea of progress finds imaginative

realisation in scenarios of a better

world in time-to-come; and the insi-

dious suggestion is that the human race

can have what it wants. Two hundred

years later, we are not quite so certain

that we know what humanity wants.

Indeed, if Sebastien Mercier had the

first word in the new fiction, the most

recent report on the future can be left

to Aldous Huxley. As the Arch-Vicar

FUTURES AuQust 973


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412

rophetsnd redictors/l?ooks

of Belial observed in Ape and Essence

there is progress and there is progress.

It all depends on what you mean:

From the very beginning of the

industrial revolution He foresaw that

men would be made so overwhelmingly

bumptious by the miracles of their own

technology that they would soon lose

all sense of reality. And thats precisely

what happened. These wretched slaves

of wheels and ledgers began to con-

gratulate themselves on being the

Conquerors of Nature. Conquerors of

Nature, indeed

BOOKS

Misunderstanding the things that are

dam Roberts

THINGS TO COME:

THINKING ABOUT THE

70s AND 80s

by Herman Kahn and B.

Bruce-Briggs

262 pages, New York, Macmillan, 1972

Herman Kahn used to write curi-

ously complicated-almost baroque-

books on the comparatively simple

subject of nuclear deterrence. He now

writes curiously simple books on the

extraordinarily complicated subject of

the future. There is of course some

justification for treating the future

summarily: the subject is so huge, and

the ifs so numerous, that if it is to be

presented at all it has to be presented

in somewhat rough and ready fashion.

In any case, the book under review is

presented very much as an hors doeuvre

for the main course which is to follow.

As the introduction puts it, Things to

Coone is a working document of our

continuing study of the future, reflect-

ing partial and tentative conclusions.

The book

is

a small part of what is

described, with a noticeable lack of

modesty, as

a unique study of the

future of man~nd being conducted at

the Hudson Institute.

Adam Roberts is lecturer in International Re-

iations The London School of Economics and

Political Science

As an hors doeuvre, this book suffers

from the fact that it contains a lot of

yesterdays Ieft-overs. There is a good

deal of drawing on The Year 2000, and

on

The Emerging Japanese Sq rstate, as

well as some internal repetition. What

is methodologically more serious, how-

ever, is that the defence of the macro-

historical approach to the study of the

future is distinctly weak. The authors

refer to

technical and professional

criticisms

of macro-historians, neatly

side-stepping the objections which can-

not be dismissed as either technical or

professional in character. Marx, Speng-

ler, and Toynbee have all in turn been

criticised for misunderstanding the

nature of certain historical trends, for

drawing false analogies, and also for

ignoring certain key aspects of world

history. Kahn, who ignores this line of

criticism of their work, may be even

more vulnerable to the same charges.

Kahn has not been noted, after all,

for the subtlety of his political percep-

tions. In the preface to his major work,

On The~onu~~ea~ War, he used the

term the free world without any

qualification-a habit which still per-

sists in the current work. He also

alleged in that preface, published more

than a decade ago, that in the United

States and Western Europe poverty as

a general economic problem has in the

FUTURES August is73

Futures Volume 5 issue 4 1973 [doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2873%2990008-6] I.F. Clarke -- 7. Turgot's philosophical review, or the idea of progress.pdf

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