A Brief History of the Future
by Jacques Attali
Arcade Publishing HK$200
Arthur Wing Pinero famously said that the future was only 'the past again, entered through another gate'. Jacques Attali, author and former adviser to French president Francois Mitterrand, is hoping to prove the truth of this maxim. In his latest offering, A Brief History of the Future (a best-seller in France), he seeks to predict the course of the 21st century armed only with a 19th-century Marxist philosophy.
Attali believes human history is charting a 'single, stubborn' path towards a final destination. No prizes for guessing that the endpoint is global and benevolent communist government. Unlike other Marxists, however, Attali is not afraid of putting a date on the collapse of capitalism: in about 2035, he says, not only will the American empire begin to collapse, so too will all nation states.
Attali first surveys 800 years of capitalism to uncover the 'iron-clad' laws of history that condemn it to this future collapse. Global capitalism has evolved through nine successive stages, each with its own capital city and distinct technology. But whether it is dealing with Bruges in the 13th century, or contemporary Los Angeles, Attali's account is largely the same.
Typical of this is his highly misleading analysis of the Golden Age of Dutch capitalism in the 17th and 18th centuries. He describes Amsterdam during this period as a city where the working classes feel alienated and 'public life is sumptuous'. In fact, Dutch public life then was informed by strict Calvinism, which condemned ostentation. The Netherlands also had a system of social support that was the envy of the rest of Europe.