MARCUS RASKIN
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it to evoke an updated version of the principles of positivism and the
Enlightenment.
According
to
Flechtheim, the futurological approach was an
attempt to discuss the evolution of man and his society in the future
tense, which he maintained had been forbidden until our time. "I held
that by marshalling the ever-growing resources of science and scholar–
ship," he recalled, "we could do more than employ retrospective
analysis and hypothetical deduction. We would try to establish a degree
of credibility and probability of forecast. " Flechtheim's presupposi–
tions and goals are now shared by both state socialists and American
pragmatists. But each of these groups interprets futurology in its
own way.
In a capitalist state, futurology is predicated on a strain of
deformed Hegelianism. The assumption of this pseudo-Hegelianism is
that antagonistic classes exist-each with its own consciousness-but
that they are welded together, and finally mediated, by bureaucratic
rationalizing and a state decision-making structure. Government
officials, mandarin advisors and universities have a supremely impor–
tant role in the rationalizing process: it is up to them
to
find a way to
ameliorate class tensions by defining a unifying purpose which can be
internalized by all the classes.
Along these lines, Daniel Bell and his colleagues on the Commis–
sion 2000 assumed that their ideology and spirit would become the
ruling consciousness of American society and that their mandarin
technocratic class would share power with the capitalists and military.
The Commission on the Year 2000 hoped to spread the goods and
services enjoyed by the upper classes throughout the entire society.
This was to be accomplished without class struggle or economic
redistribution.
It
was to "come about" through technological magic
practiced at the universities and implemented through the corporate
industrial automation process. Bell 's viewpoint was the intellectual
culmination of assumptions embodied in the corporate and welfare
state initiated during the New Deal.
Intellectuals whose task has been to develop the "music" for great
institutions and great crusades have accompanied their deformed
Hegelianism with a reliance on unconnected empirical facts. Hunting–
ton Cairns, for example, a philosopher who was an advisor to the
Mellon family, maintained in an article entitled "Sociology and the
Social Sciences" that "Sociology has been, and is today, a descriptive
science. That is to say, it is nonexplanatory and its propositions are of
equal rank logically, and do not serve as bases for one another.
It
is a
science based directly on detached facts untied by universal hypothesis
