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revolutionary transformation of both life and thought brought about
by the rapid and triumphant development of the natural sciences, in
particular by technological invention and the consequent rise of large–
scale industry; the rise of new states and classes and rulers in search of
pedigrees; the disintegration of age-old religious and social institu–
tions, at once the cause and the consequence of the Renaissance and of
the rise of secularism and the Reformation; all this riveted attention
upon the phenomena of historical change and novelty. The fillip given
to historical, and, indeed, to all genetic studies, was incalculably great.
There was a new sense of continuous advance, or at any rate of
movement and change in the life of human society.
It
is not, therefore,
surprising that major thinkers in this period set themselves to discover
the laws which governed social change.
It
seemed reasonable
to
suppose that the new methods of the natural sciences, which proved
capable of explaining the nature and the laws of the external world,
could perform this service for the human world also.
If
such laws could
be discovered at all, they must hold for the future as well as for the past.
Prediction of the human future must be rescued from mystical
prophets and interpreters of the apocalyptic books of the Bible, from
the astrologers and dabblers in the occult, and become an organised
province of scientific knowledge.
This hope spurred the new philosophies of history, and brought
into being an entire new field of social studies. The new prophets
tended to claim scientific validity for their statements about both the
past and the future. Although much of what some of them wrote was
the fruit of luxuriant and unbridled and sometimes egomaniacal
imaginations, or at any rate highly speculative, the general record is a
good deal more respectable than is commonly supposed. Condorcet
may have been too optimistic in prophesying the development of a
comprehensive and systematic natural science of man, and with it the
end of crime and folly and misery in human affairs, due to indolence
and ignorance and irrationality. In the darkness of his prison in 1794
he drew a glowing picture of a new, virtuous and happy world,
organised by the application of scientific method to social organisation
by intellectually and morally liberated men, leading to a harmonious
society of nations, unbroken progress in the arts and sciences and
perpetual peace. This was plainly oversanguine, yet the fruitfulness of
applying mathematical, and in particular statistical, techniques to
social problems was a prophecy at once original and important.
Saint-Simon was a man of genius who, as everyone knows,
predicted the inevitable triumph of a technocratic order. He spoke of
