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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Our capacity to foresee the lengthy life and the prospective techniques which are available to us has not essentially altered in the last 25 years, at a time when the field of possibles has been considerably widened by the exponential growth of our material and intellectual out-puts. Furthermore, as scientific revolutions, in the sense in which T. Kuhn intends this term, are becoming increasingly frequent and are affecting very different areas, one has leave to count upon the continuation of this widening process in the field of possibles, despite the constraint imposed by the finite quantity of identified and identifiable resources, at least on the scale of our planet. In other words, we do not think that this accelerated destruction of the environment (which is the main feature of our industrial civilisation) is beyond control, and that one should consequently preach—as various Jeremiah prophets are doing—a planetary Neo-Malthusianism extending to all the resources and expressed by the thinly veiled rejection of the right to industrialise for those countries still waiting to join the ‘rich man's club.’ But suddenly our ascendancy over the ever more diversified future grows slighter and slighter, because the prospective is stamping its feet; and this is a paradoxical and troubling consequence of the acceleration of the history in which we have to live. The widening of the field of possibles implies, moreover, an increase of choices. These choices are being made constantly, sometimes explicitly, but mostly implicitly: large options are sliced up by decisions of a minor order, and this obscures but does not lessen their significance.
1 T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1962.
2 See, for example, the symptomatic essay by Paul R. Ehrlich, called "Famine 1975: Fact or Fallacy?," which appeared in The Environmental Crisis, ed. by H. W. Helfrich Jr., New Haven, 1970.
3 Robert L. Heilbroner, "On the Limits of Economic Prediction," Diogenes, No. 70, Summer 1970.
4 A. Schonfield, "Thinking about the Future," Dialogue, Vol. II, 1969, No. 4.
5 Here we are simply adopting the extremely relevant suggestions formulated by the Polish sociologist Julian Hochfeld in his book Studia o Marksowskiej Teorii Spoleczenstwa [Studies on the Marxist Theory of Society], Warsaw 1963.
6 See, especially, L. von Bertalanffy, General System Theory, New York 1963 and A. Rapoport, Mathematical Aspects of General Systems Analysis in the Social Sciences Problems and Orientations, UNESCO 1968.
7 O. Lange, Calosc i Roxwoj w Swietle Cybernetyki [The Whole and Devel opment in the Light of Cybernetics], Warsaw. (There is an English translation of this work.)
8 See, for example, J.-P. Sartre, Questions de Méthode, Paris 1960.
9 With regard to this, it is worth stressing the new works of the United Nations Institute for Social Development in Geneva.
10 With regard to the synthesis imposed between the structure and the genesis, see J. Piaget, Le Structuralisme, Paris 1968. One could reach the same conclusions by starting from an "open" Marxism, as one could with the attainments of the structural method.
11 Lecture given at the Warsaw University on April 23rd, 1967, and published in Polish in Historyka, Studia Metodologiczne, Warsaw 1969.
12 See the article by F. Braudel on the book by M. Harris, "Town and Country in Brazil," in F. Braudel, Ecrits sur l'Histoire, Paris 1969, pp. 239-254.
13 W. Kula, Teoria Ekonomiczna Ustrojn Feudalnego [Economic Theory of the Feudal System], Warsaw 1962; French transl., Paris 1970.
14 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc, Paris 1969.
15 We refer to chap. 2 of the work by E. Hobsbawm, called Industry and Empire (Vol. 3 of the Pelican Economic History of Britain, London 1969).
16 C. M. Cipolla, "Clocks and Culture," an essay published in the volume, European Culture and Overseas Expansion, London 1970.
17 C. Furtado, Formaçao Económica do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 5th Edition, 1963.
18 See, especially, Caio Prado Jr., Historia Económica do Brasil, Sao Paulo 1954.
19 S. Ishikawa, Economic Development in Asian Perspective, Tokyo 1967.
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