The Art of Conjecture

Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903 to 1987) was a French philosopher and political economist.⁸ L'Art de la conjecture was published in Monaco by Éditions du Rocher in 1964.³ Nikita Lary's English translation, The Art of Conjecture, came out in 1967 from Basic Books in New York, at 307 pages, and from Weidenfeld and Nicolson.¹² A reissue appeared in 2012 and is now published by Routledge.⁴

The book draws on the work of Futuribles, which began in 1960 at de Jouvenel's instigation with funding from the Ford Foundation.³ It started as an international committee of about a dozen intellectuals from several countries and disciplines, whose aim was to remedy the lack of rigorous thinking about the future inside and outside government.³ Between 1960 and 1965 the committee published some fifty essays in the bulletins of SEDEIS, a French society for economic, industrial and social studies, and held conferences in Geneva, Paris and New Haven.³ The word "futuribles" is de Jouvenel's coinage from futurs and possibles, possible futures, partly borrowed from the Latin of scholastic theology.⁶⁷

De Jouvenel held that there cannot be a science of the future, but that there are rigorous ways of thinking about it; the Futuribles project worked on the premise that "the future is not a given unknown but one of many possible futures".⁵ A 1970 article on futurology in the Dutch-language journal Streven puts his position this way.⁶ Even with scientific methods we cannot find out what the future will be; we can only probe and work with its possibilities.⁶ De Jouvenel treated that work as an art of conjecture, not a science, and objected to the word futurology.⁶ According to its publisher, the book sets out the logical and political problems of forecasting, the methods of economics, sociology and political science for studying the future, and the fallacies the "study of the future" is especially prone to.⁴ It argues that it is natural and necessary for people to have visions of the future, and that if the origins and meanings of forecasts stay obscure, "only the event could decide among the opinions".⁴

His answer was a standing "forecasting forum", proposed in a 1960 text reprinted in the book.³ It would be a permanent institution in which experts in many fields contribute specialist forecasts that are combined into general ones.³ In his words, "the point is not to form a definitive view of the future, but to discuss it continuously".³ Futuribles became an association in 1967, first chaired by de Jouvenel, and its 1973 conference in Paris saw the creation of the World Futures Studies Federation.³

For anyone running a model of a place, the book keeps the forecast apart from the claim to know: a model's runs are conjectures about possible futures, set out so that people can argue over them in the open.⁵⁶ The publisher sums up its aim as showing how conjecture could "inform prudential judgment and allow citizens and statesmen to detect troubles before they arise".⁴ The forecasting forum, a standing body that pools specialist forecasts and revises them as new situations arise, is an institutional design for what a shared model of a place can do.³