Bertrand de Jouvenel

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, and foresight and anticipation takes the word futuribles from him. The Handbook of Anticipation includes him in its historical overview of earlier thinkers, and Foundations of Futures Studies takes up his question of whether futures studies is an art or a science.³