Bertrand de Jouvenel

…1964 the French social scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel published L’Art de la conjecture (The Art of Conjecture), in which he offered a systematic philosophical rationale for the field. The following year the American Academy of Arts and Sciences formed its Commission on the Year 2000 “to anticipate social patterns, to…

De Jouvenel equated women with hedonism and hedonism with decadence. Europe, he wrote in 1938, had grown soft and feminine from pleasure seeking, becoming “like a woman who had just escaped a frightening accident. [She] needed light, warmth, music.” According to de Jouvenel, an atmosphere…

…ancient Rome as models, and Bertrand de Jouvenel praised the “brutal barons” of the Middle Ages and the original conquerors of Europe, the Franks. “Fascist man,” he wrote, was “a throwback to the warrior and property holder of yesteryear, to the type of man who was the head of a…