Preface

Summary

The two great wars of this century have generated much despair, but after each there was an efflorescence of reformist zeal throughout the world, on a scale hitherto unknown.

Now, as world recession places severe limits on material ambitions, it seems the great enthusiasm for planned development of the 1950s and 1960s is burning itself out. Planning continues, but more grimly than before, and with fewer assurances of success. Idealists are mistrusted, and the study and practice of development is more concerned with technical refinements than with grand schemes for human progress. Increasingly, we are confronted with decay and the threat of what might well be the last great war – matters very much more urgent than dreams of wealth and welfare.

Nevertheless, this book proceeds from an assumption that we need, more urgently than ever before, to take stock of our collective future. If we choose not to rely on luck, or on divine intervention, or on ‘scientific’ teleology, we must recognise that redemption will tax to the utmost our imaginative and organisational capacities. Every intellectual resource, including anthropology, must be pressed into service. But the only effective way of coming to grips with the future is to understand, and work upon, the world as it is and has been. We need sufficient realism to acknowledge that people are not angels, and the states which they inhabit are not, and are unlikely to become, an earthly paradise.