A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century by Jacques Attali Read Free Book Online

keeping a watchful eye on the latter.
    In private life, the freedom of each member of the new elite is henceforth limited only to what he owns. In public life, it is determined by the majority decisionof the others. All are convinced that these simultaneous decisions lead to their maximum collective satisfaction.
    Freedom, mercantile and political, is more than ever the driving force of history.
From One Core to Another
    Unlike the two previous orders — in which at any moment on earth a thousand tribes, kingdoms, and empires coexisted, revering a thousand leaders, worshiping a thousand gods, speaking a thousand languages, ignorant of one another or else engaging in bloody combat, the mercantile order speaks a single language, that of money. It constantly reinvents itself in a unique shape, around a single center, a single core, which attracts an innovative class (shipbuilders, manufacturers, traders, technicians, and financiers) marked by its taste for the new and its passion for discovery. Until a crisis, or a war, leads to replacement of one core by another.
    This springs from the very nature of the new order. Markets and democracy are founded on the organization of competition, resulting in insistence on the new and in the selection of an elite. Moreover, in the very long term, accumulation of capital cannot be pursued in a firm or a family, both of which are fragile units. It is pursued in a city, a core that becomes the organizing center of capitalism. Finally, competition implies battle, and there will therefore be a continuum between market, democracy, and violence.
    All cores must necessarily have a vast hinterland for the development of agriculture, and a big port toexport their produce. All these cores respond to a lack that otherwise would destroy them; all develop direction from the top in order to gain the upper hand over competition. Emulation, rigor, force, state control, protectionism, and mastery of the exchange rates are their weapons. A city becomes a core if its innovative class is in a better position than anyone else to transform a service into an industrial product. To achieve this, it must master capital, fix prices, gather in the profits, hold wages in check, deploy an army, bankroll explorers, and nurture the ideology that guarantees its power.
    Now each core seizes control at home and abroad of the most efficient energy sources and the swiftest means of communication. Bankers, artists, intellectuals, and innovators move in, bringing their money, building palaces and tombs, painting the portraits of the world’s new masters, commanding their armies.
    Girdling this core is a median zone made up of old and future rivals, either in decline or expanding. I shall call this zone the environs. The kingdoms and empires of the rest of the world, partially governed by the earlier orders, form the outer rim, or what I call the periphery, selling its raw materials and labor force (usually slaves) to the core and environs.
    A mercantile form lasts for as long as the core can amass enough wealth to master both the environs and the periphery. It loses momentum and collapses when the core has to devote too many resources to maintaining internal peace or to protecting itself against one or several enemies.
    Form by form, each core (bankrupted by itsexpenditures) yields its place to a rival. In general, this rival is not one of its attackers. It is another power, concerning itself during the core’s battles with inaugurating another culture and another growth dynamic, centered around another innovative class, a new freedom, a new source of surpluses, around new energy and information technology, and replacement of an old service by a new mass-produced object.
    Form by form, the production of agricultural and later man-made goods is industrialized. Form by form, slaves disappear and paid labor takes their place. Form by form, production of energy and information becomes automated. Form by form, engineers, merchants,