Robert L. Heilbroner
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 103rd anniversary of the birth of Robert L. Heilbroner (24 March 1919–04 January 2005), who was born on this date in 1919.
Heilbroner is best known for his book The Worldly Philosophers, about the work of great economists. By identifying economists as “worldly philosophers” he gave the dismal science an unaccustomed twist that put economics in an unexpected context. About twelve minutes into the 1999 interview (linked below), he tells the story about trying to find the perfect title for the book, and that his publisher suggested “worldly,” and that he paid for lunch to return the favor.
Henri Pirenne gave a definition of history — the development of human societies in space and time — that does not explicitly invoke the past; among definitions of history (upon which there is no consensus among historians or philosophers of history), that is unusual, and it represents a higher level of abstraction and generality than is usually the case among historians. It also offers an opportunity to justify the extension of historical methods to include the totality of time — past, present, and future — within the proper scope of history, as defined by at least one prominent historian.
This is where Heilbroner enters the picture. In addition to his books on economics, Heilbroner also wrote a couple of books that take an historical view of the future, The Future as History (1959) and Visions of the Future (1995). Heilbroner also wrote a review of a work of futurism, “Futurology” (published in the NYT on 26 September 1964), which reviews Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (1967), which was assembled by the Commission on the Year 2000. Well, 2000 has since come and gone and now likes more than twenty years in the past, but something can be learned from Heilbroner’s critique of this effort.
Futurism is a term that could be used for the extension of the methods of history to the future, but it comes with a mixed legacy and the tendency of self-identified futurists who are more like grafters than historians or philosophers, always out to sell a vision of the future, whether that vision be a gee-whiz wonder, or a satisfyingly bleak apocalypse. The same two ideas — wonder and apocalypse — are also expressed by the ideas of utopianism and dystopianism. At the end of The Future as History Heilbroner touches on the problem of false hope and false despair, which is another way to draw attention to the problems of utopianism and dystopianism.
In The Future as History Heilbroner introduces the idea of the “historic future,” which is the future understood in historical terms:
“…the very notion of an ‘historic’ future is one which most Americans are apt to find uncomfortable. Our national temperament inclines us in quite another direction. We are naturally sympathetic to ideas that stress the plasticity and promise, the openness of the future, and impatient with views that emphasize the ‘fated’ aspects of human affairs.”
The idea of the “historic future” appears several times throughout the book, including the very last section of the book. Heilbroner develops the concept of the historic future particularly with an interest in elucidating American optimism and the belief in progress, which tend to cloud and distort our vision:
“If by ‘progress’ we mean a fundamental elevation in the human estate, a noticeable movement of society in the direction of the ideals of Western humanism, a qualitative as well as a quantitative betterment of the condition of man, it is plain that we must put away our ideas of progress over the foreseeable vista of the historic future. For whereas there is no question but that the forces of our time are bringing about momentous and profound changes, it is only optimistic self-deception to anticipate, or even to wish for, the near advent of a perceptibly ‘better’ world as a result. Taking into account the human condition as it now exists, the laggard slowness with which improvement in institutions are followed by improvements in ‘life,’ the blurred and ambiguous fashion in which history passes from problem to problem, it is certain enough that the tenor of world history will remain much as it is for a long while to come.”
In Visions of the Future Heilbroner discusses how our conception of the future has changed over historic time:
“Today’s vision of the future is certainly not that of the Distant Past, for if there was ever a time in which the shape of things to come was seen as dominated by impersonal forces, it is ours. Science, economics, mass political movements — the three most powerful carriers of those future-shaping influences — are the stuff of everyday headlines. What differentiates them from those of Yesterday is that they now appear as potentially or even actively malign, as well as benign; both as threatening and supportive, ominous as well as reassuring even in the most favored nations — that is, the most fully capitalist, science-oriented, and politically democratic. Indeed, it is precisely in those nations that the vision of the future has been most perceptibly altered.
Heilbroner ended Visions of the Future with the implication that an understanding of the deep past may help us to comprehend and indeed to cope with the deep future, and, one might even say, the deep historic future:
“For countless millennia humanity found the courage to persist, the inspiration to produce extraordinary works of art, the will to create remarkable civilizations, the strength to endure miseries, and the appetite to savor triumphs, all without the support of a vision of a living future that would be superior to the past. There is no reason why the same resilience should not support humankind if it now sets its sights on the Distant Tomorrow of our imagination.”
Heilbroner’s work points to the need for an historiography of the future, situating the future as part of history and as a legitimate object of knowledge for the philosophy of history. Heilbroner begins this process of historicizing the future, and others have contributed to the same process in various ways, but the bulk of the work still remains to be done.
It could be argued that speculative philosophies of history (also called substantive and material philosophies of history) have always thematized the future, but the way in which speculative philosophy of history has been widely repudiated implies that there are no analytical or formal problems in thematizing the future as a part of history, or, one could say, philosophically thematizing the historical future (of the deep historic future). Here, little or no work has been done, and the field is wide open to those who will claim it for their own.
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Heilbroner
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Heilbroner%2C+Robert+L%22
https://archive.org/details/futureashistory0000unse
https://archive.org/details/visionsoffutured0000heil_e8c1
https://archive.org/details/towardyear2000wo0000unse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a0RGTwU5us
