Prophets and Predictors 317

activity and leisure for many people does not play the same psychological role.

This rather lengthy example of the use of ‘limitations’, it is hoped, clarifies to some extent the potential and nature of that methodological device. It is akin to literary trend extrapolation in that it draws patterns from present events and extends them to the future but dissimilar in that it takes predicted future states as starting points. It then tests these states against given limita- tions in various areas. It is hoped that the methodological device will have interesting applications in reviewing other topics but perhaps a prerequisite is that consideration should be given to a clearer development of the limit- ations that are relevant. Some obvious limitations have been discussed in this essay but there are additional limitations and clearly all need a greater elabora- tion as well as applications to specific events and predicted future states.

References

1. Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, New York, Knopf, 1964

2. The existence of innate. aeneticallv-deter- mined behaviour patterns ii again becoming accepted as scholars have turned from the supposed paramount influence of conditioned reflexes and environmental factors. An interesting review in this regard is Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, New York. Dell. 1966

3. For ‘an elaboration of this approach, see Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, New York, Random House, 1970. John Maynard Keynes explored the notion of future shock some 40 years ago as follows: “I think with dread of the readiustments of the habits and instincts of the ordinate man. bred into him for countless generations ’ which he may be asked to discard within a few decades. . . . Must we not expect a general ‘nervous breakdown’?” J. M. Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, 1930; reprinted in Essays in Persuasion, 1933

4. Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century, New York, Harper and Row, 1964 -

5. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capital- ism. Harcourt Brace Co. Inc. 1926

6. The need for such defer& is theoretically detailed in a most readable manner in Karen Horney, sl’eurosis and Human Growth, New York, Norton, 1950

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.

6. HARRINGTON’S OCEANA:

or, the long arm of Utopia

I. F. Clarke

AT the end of the Republic, just before way of life in the ideal state. He hoped the concluding remarks about the that his blueprint of justice for all nature of art and the immortality of might be “laid up in heaven as a the soul, Plato says farewell to his pattern for him who wills to see, and scheme for a just society with the seeing, to found a city in himself. lament that “there is no spot on earth Whether it exists anywhere or ever will where it exists”. He had seen, but had exist, is no matter. His conduct will be not looked into, the abyss between an expression of the laws of that city individual behaviour and the better alone, and of no other”.

Professor I. F. Clarke is Head of the English Studies Department, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.

Plato, as the prime mover in the long utopian tradition, could not have foreseen how schemes for ideal common-

FUTURES June lW3

Another version of the same idea appeared in Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’aufTe monde of 1657

The other side of fantasy was in the realistic detail and elaborate narrative of terrestrial utopias. The army forms for battle in the Hisfoire ~~r~a~~~es by Denis

The Sevarambian plan for an ~,-.~rr\>rori

320 Pro+ts and Predictors

wealths, because they are social engines of great power, would go on endlessly generating ideas and actions, often in societies and peoples far beyond the most extravagant dreams of their first begetters. Twenty-one centuries after Plato had discussed the idea of justice in the shadow of the Acropolis, the Greek influence made itself feIt with extraordinary effect in the theories of Rousseau. What Rousseau gained from his reading of the Republic was an understanding of men as citizens-that the community is the source and goal of moral effort; and out of this discovery he developed his theory about the close bonds of feeling and regard that should exist between the citizens of the just state. So, the Greek ideal of citizenship was reshaped in the second half of the eighteenth century in time to provide a base for uncritical and self-regarding nationalistic feelings; and these proved themselves admirably adapted to supply the necessary psycho- logical motivation for the evolving technological states of Europe. From Rousseau this idealised view of the collective will and of the community of all citizens passed on to the German philosopher, Hegel, who developed his own variation on the doctrine of the state. For him the state was an end in itself: “The state is the divine will as a present spirit, which unfolds itself in the actual shape of an organised world”. And a century later this theory of the state emerged again with lamentable effect in the second-hand Hegelian notions of Mussolini : “Every- thing for the state; nothing against the state; nothing outside the state”.

There is, therefore, a connection between the principles of Plato and the practice of Mussolini that reveals how the sequence of ideal states represents a real continuum of ideas. At one end there is the initial theorising-Plato, More, Bacon, Condorcet, Fourier-and at intervals in the course of social thought there are the subsequent applications and developments in

writers as different as Rousseau, Marx, Saint-Simon, H. G. Wells, and all the other hopeful world-changers. The ideal states dominate the landscape of political history like a chain of ancient volcanoes, seemingly extinct but capable of erupting into furious activity at any time ; for the sudden lava flow of old ideas rediscovered can spread in the most unexpected directions. Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Social Contract are indications of the ceaseless activities that go on below the surface of society; for ideas about the right ordering of human relations have a habit of surging up from the cellarage to effect immense changes in the social order. For the fact is that the classic utopias are revolutionary documents and are of their nature directed towards the future. Their radical critiques of con- temporary social arrangements are a powerful call for changes still to be realised; and in the course of time many of these proposed changes are actually realised, often in the most surprising ways. Indeed, the American Declara- tion of Independence, the Declaration of Rights by the Constituent Assembly on 26 August 1789, and the NapoIeonic Constitution of 1800 have this in common: that some of their central ideas derive from an allegorical utopia first published by permission of Oliver Cromwell in 1656.

That utopia was the Oceana and the author was James Harrington, a gentle- man of good family and considerable political experience, who devoted 15 years of his life to elaborating yet one more final answer to all political problems. The grand design is revealed rather than hidden by the rudimentary fiction of the narrative; for the Oceana is an unrelieved series of constitutional propositions that make Harrington the writer most likely to win the dry-as-dust prize in utopian fiction. And yet the allegorical pattern has a special interest, since there are clear predictive elements in the story that anticipate the first large-scale development of forecasts

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Prophets and Predictors 321

and futuristic utopias in the eighteenth century. In a crude way there is a double timescale at work: the story is about far-reaching changes in the imaginary land of Oceana, and this everyone knows is Cromwell’s England; the hero is obviously the Lord Protec- tor, without warts and barely disguised under the name of Olphaus ;Megaletor; and the action describes a series of constitutional developments that lead to the establishment of the happiest and most prosperous republic in the whole world. All this takes place in the future-relative of the basic allegory; and the expectation is that honest endeavour and the application of the right principles will bring about all these desirable changes in the real future of the English people. And then, as the citizens of Oceana settle down for an eternity of happiness, the scenario ends with the retirement of the great reformer, an early and benign ancestor of Big Brother, who dies at the advanced age of 116.

The novelty of the allegory in the Oceana goes with an originality of approach that marks the beginning of new methods in political analysis; and Harrington was undoubtedly right to compare his work to the discovery of the circulation of the blood. Like “the famous Hervy”, he sought to apply the deductive methods of the new science to his explication of the laws that decide the conduct of human society. He applied himself to a prolonged study of the facts-an investigation of political practices in the Old Testa- ment, the Roman Republic, the Vene- tian Oligarchy-and these findings he compared with the conclusions to be drawn from a study of English history. This analytical technique was an extension and development of the way in which Machiavelli had isolated political matters from all ethical or philosophical considerations in the Prince, and of the way in which the Dutch jurist, Grotius, had worked from practice and precedent to esta-

blish a rational foundation for his theory of international relations in his

celebrated De jure belli ac pacis of 1625. This method of rationalisation proved a powerful instrument in the hands of Harrington. He shone the light of the new learning into the dark corners of long-lived ideas about the nature of government, and he revealed a real want of any rational basis for contem- porary assertions about the rights of the people and the even more divine right of the king.

Harrington’s first discovery was the folly of applying biblical parallels (from the kingship of Saul, for example) to the debate then raging between the Rings-men and the Puritans. For Harrington the study of the history of the Israelites was the revelation of a system of evolving tribal practices and of the workings of important agrarian laws. And as Harrington followed the light of his own reason, he found that custom and usage pointed to two political principles of capital impor- tance: that the well-being of the state depends on the preservation of the Balance of Property and on the Rotation of Government. Any talk of property meant, in those days, the use of land; and the central issue in all the theorising about Government was the need to harmonise the different in- terests in the state. So, Harrington finally came to see that the answer to all his questions was both material and psychological : “To go my own way, and yet to follow the ancients, the principles of government are twofold: internal, or the goods of the mind; and external, or the goods of fortune. The goods of the mind are natural or ac- quired virtues, as wisdom, prudence and courage. The goods offortune are riches”.

These conclusions mark a major advance in social theory. They show the vigour and originality of Harring- ton’s mind; for he was the only writer of his time to see how social and eco- nomic factors decide the nature and direction of government. Again, with

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322 BOOkS

even greater originality and effect, he transformed the old-style typification of government into his new classifica- tions of the absolute monarchy, the mixed monarchy, and the common- wealth-each of them deriving their forms of government from different systems of landownership. How, then, shall the best state be organised? According to the natural principles of human society is the Harringtonian answer; and these principles require that political and economic power must work together for the common good. The first step, so Harrington maintains, is to arrange for the ownership of land to be spread as widely as possible, and to see that political power is in the hands of all who “live of their own” and are not servants or wage-earners. On this stable base Harrington con- structs a political structure that has since grown familiar. The officers of state are to hold office for short terms; a secret ballot is the means of electing men to political office; and there is to be a separation between the powers of

the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.

The applications of Harrington’s political scheme followed rapidly. First, in the constitution of the new colony of Carolina in 1669 which gave the franchise to the land-owners, made the judicial power a matter of eIection, and divided the legislative power between a grand council and a parliament. Second, Harrington’s influence revealed itself in the Fundamental Constitutions of New Jersey where William Penn’s reading of the ~ce~~~ led to the most complete of the Harringtonian con- stitutions in the American colonies. There were similar applications in France; for the constitutional ideas of the Abbe Sieyes, presented at the end of 1789, supplied the essential scheme for the reorganisation of government which Napoleon eventually took over in 1800-and that displayed clearly recognisable Oceanic features. Napoleon couId not have remembered Harrington when he complained that “England is a nation of shopkeepers”.

BOOKS Quantifying the American future

Dennis Gabor

ON THE FUTURE STATE OF THE UNION by Olaf Helmer ~~~~~ Park, ~~~~~~~~a, Institute for the Future, May 1972, Report R-27

This report, though it runs to 124 pages, is itself a condensation. Olaf Helmer, with three staff collaborators and 13 consultants has attempted to trace the outlines of the immense probability space, into which more than 200 million people of a rich mixture might expand in the next lo-30 years. Professor Dennis Gabor is at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.

Though Olaf Helmer figures on the title page as the author, I think I am justified in referring to the authors in the plural, and referring to Helmer as the principal author. He has put his mark clearly on the report : Quantify as much as possible, do not be afraid of guesses, but know your limits. The result is a report with many ideas and even more problems.

It starts with a list of 30 major current issues, almost all of them nagging worries, such as the unsatis- factory economy, the Vietnam war, race relations, institutional decay, wide- spread anomy. Now comes a step characteristic of numerate people who

FUTURES June 1573