---
id: people/bertrand-de-jouvenel
about:
  label: Bertrand de Jouvenel
  description: >-
    French philosopher and political economist (1903 to 1987) who started
    Futuribles and argued in The Art of Conjecture that the future can be
    conjectured but not known.
  tags:
    - futuribles
    - futures studies
    - conjecture
person:
  affiliation: Futuribles
  role: philosopher and political economist
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Bertrand de Jouvenel - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_de_Jouvenel'
    - title: History - Futuribles
      url: >-
        https://www.futuribles.com/en/qui-sommes-nous/presentation-generale/histoire/
    - title: Handbook of Anticipation | Springer
      url: 'https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-319-91554-8'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Bertrand de Jouvenel was born on 31 October 1903 and died on 1 March 1987.[^1] He taught at universities in Britain, the United States and France, including Oxford, Yale, Berkeley and Paris 1.[^1] In the 1930s he moved through right-wing and fascist circles, joining Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire français and editing its journal until 1938; he stayed in occupied Paris after 1940, supported the resistance from 1942 and fled to Switzerland in 1943.[^1] There he wrote On Power, published in 1945, and in 1947 he was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society.[^1] Later in life his views moved back to the left.[^1]

Futuribles began in 1960 at his instigation, with funding from the Ford Foundation, as an international committee of about a dozen intellectuals who wanted to remedy the lack of rigorous thinking about the future inside and outside government.[^2] In a 1960 text, reprinted in L'Art de la conjecture in 1964, he called for a standing "forecasting forum" in which experts would pool specialist forecasts into general ones.[^2] "The point is not to form a definitive view of the future," he wrote, "but to discuss it continuously."[^2] The Association Internationale Futuribles was created in 1967 under his chairmanship, and its 1973 conference in Paris saw the creation of the World Futures Studies Federation.[^2]

He is the author of [The Art of Conjecture](/media/the-art-of-conjecture/), and [foresight and anticipation](/terms/foresight-and-anticipation/) takes the word futuribles from him. The [Handbook of Anticipation](/media/handbook-of-anticipation/) includes him in its historical overview of earlier thinkers, and [Foundations of Futures Studies](/media/foundations-of-futures-studies/) takes up his question of whether futures studies is an art or a science.[^3]