The destiny of our age is rationalisation, intellectualisation and, above all, a disenchantment with the world. The success of science as a technique of forecasting has broken a spell; there is no longer a complete image of the world that can be revealed by rational knowledge. Scientific activity is no royal road to the gods, nor to the essence of the world, nor to the truth of nature lying hidden behind its outward appearances; the spell of mysterious powers to be discovered or invoked has died away with the multiplication and the success of objective, neutral, purely technical instruments for the mastery of natural phenomena. If science robs the world of enchantment, it is because it offers only instrumental answers to the questions we ask of it.

The uses of economics are many, as are also the methodologies by which its various purposes can be defended or elucidated. In this paper I shall confine my attention, however, to but one of its many aims—the predictive intent that constitutes a distinguishing characteristic of so much economic work. Lest I be accused of claiming that prediction is an integral part of all economics, let me explicitly point out that the discipline has taxonomic, structural, purely formal, normative, and still other aspects, none of which involves prediction, and all of which have their useful roles to play. Nonetheless, I do not think that most economists would disagree with my contention that a predictive purpose lies at the heart of much of economic science today, in particular when that science is used on behalf of policy.

For some years, much effort has been deployed in several countries to put at the disposition of the responsible authorities a presentation as explicit as possible of the costs and advantages which would proceed from the different courses of action among which they have to choose. In the United States this is called “Planning-Programming-Budgeting System” (or PPBS), in France “Rationalisation des Choix Budgétaires” (or RCB), in England “Output Budgeting”.

In Brave New World the ability of a woman to creep into bed with one man after another and to do so with enviable and breath-taking capacity, literally and figuratively, was regarded as an admirable and expected accomplishment. Unrestricted and uncritical promiscuity became the New Look in virtue. The only form of Original Sin—at least in the sphere of sex—was to enter into a relationship that expressed the classic sense of romance. This would have been a voluntary and protracted relationship in which a mutually satisfying, sexual relationship was criss-crossed with a chiaroscuro of shared values, sentiments, ideas and goals and, at the same time, was overlain with the mutual exploration, by both partners, of one another's fullness of being. Today, in Maslow's terminology, this kind of relationship between the sexes would be called B-Love, that is, Being-Love or the deep affection for the total qualities of the loved one and not solely her face and curvaceousness or his vigor and pocketbook. In Brave New World “love” consisted of sexual togetherness, that is, of free and frequent access to the opposite sex. Privacy, in this, the most intimate and potentially nurturant of human relationships, was taboo. A deep and focused affection—one capable of yielding a type of experience which can enable both men and women to transcend the limitations of their everyday being-in-the-world—was an aberration.

The imaginary is rightly called a power of contestation and of creation. Insofar as such a power wields images drawn from practical processes and dry abstraction, it is assumed from the first that we are able to evoke such images. This faculty, which can be compromised by certain developments and types of culture, must first of all be named. Let us call it, as Charles Fourier might have done: image-evocative power. By postulating its existence, we are acknowledging the fact that we notice it, and acknowledging the links that attach it to Nature. But we are also noticing the things that threaten it in an era of technology which tends towards analytical reduction and operational formalism.

Since the late middle ages man, in the “West,” has spent himself in one or both of two opposing activities. His life has been spun out either filling or killing time. The former we have come to call, commonly, work; the latter idleness. By whichever of these morally conflicting or complementary ways he has shaped his life, occidental man has made a single affirmation which unites both extremes: he has tacitly or explicitly affirmed that time is the framework of existence. The point of my paper is to attempt to show that this is no longer so. Evidence will be adduced to demonstrate that dimensions of existence, “categories,” more meaningful than time are now competing to displace it as the mould or form in which life is filled out with meaning. These currents of understanding, now increasingly evident, must necessarily be thought of as substitutionary and oppositional to that in which time was preeminent, because they place the emphasis on a perspective which greatly reduces the significance of time, indeed one which tends to eliminate it altogether, inasmuch as this is possible in a world still largely governed by sunrise and sunset, the process of aging, and so on. Time gained its ascendency in an epoch characterized by man's imperial conquest of nature, or his externalization, effected substantially, through reason and work. The shadow of time's eclipse can be made out where interiorization and assimilation of the objective world have become the predominant preoccupations. In three steps we shall attempt to look at 1) the characteristics of the epoch in which existence was circumscribed by time; 2) the revolt against time and its conditions as typified in the writings of J.-J. Rousseau; 3) some signs of the current growth of this trend in the West, or should I say more precisely, in the technical societies.

In the last fifteen years, biology has made such considerable progress that it arouses the highest hopes. But despite the importance of the discoveries, particularly in the field of molecular genetics, one must admit that much still remains to be done if life is to be appreciated as a whole, including superior organisms. However, research is facing the complexity of the problem with ever-increasing success, moving in a completely new direction, not simply on a cellular level, but on a molecular and atomic scale. It is this radical change in thinking methods that might perhaps enable the scientist of today to study hitherto out-of-the-way fields, albeit still from a highly speculative point of view, by giving him scope for new ways of thinking. This is particularly true of psychology which, it seems, has not as yet been the subject of reasoning on a molecular scale.