Abstract

Developed from two reports to seminars organized by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, in 1962 and 1963, The Art of Conjecture constitues a programmatic document for the work of Futuribles, a team of intellectuals collecting materials on the role of the social sciences. The intellectual fabric of this work are woven with a fine mixture of hard-nosed mathematical analysis, derived from demographic and economic forecast, and less accurate, more imaginative, modelings for short and long term social forecast. Much of the book is devoted to an analysis of common and special conceptions of the future. Here lies the greatest philosophical interest of this work. The method pivots around techniques of long term economic forecasting. The political and human aspects are ever present in the course of the study. Toward the end the author asks himself, and us, the question: should forecast be based on technological sources alone? The question has already been answered in such brilliant chapters as, "The Conditions of Political Foreseeability," "The Ecology of Social Ideas," "The Social Career of Ideas," "The Force of Moral Ideas," and "Empirical Relations between Ideas."—A. M.