The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress [Hardcover]

Virginia Postrel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 1998

Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history - the fruits of human ingenuity, curiosity, and perseverance. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians loudly laments our condition. Technology, they say, enslaves us. Economic change makes us insecure. Popular culture coarsens and brutalizes us. Consumerism despoils the environment. The future, they say, is dangerously out of control, and unless we rein in these forces of change and guide them closely, we risk disaster. In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes these myths, embarking on a bold exploration of how progress really occurs. In areas of endeavor ranging from fashion to fisheries, from movies to medicine, from contact lenses to computers, she shows how and why unplanned, open-ended trial and error - not conformity to one central vision - is the key to human betterment. Thus, the true enemies of humanity's future are those who insist on prescribing outcomes in advance, circumventing the process of competition and experiment in favor of their own preconceptions and prejudices.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Virginia Postrel smashes conventional political boundaries in this libertarian manifesto. World-views should be defined not by how they view the present, she says, but the future. Do they aim to control it, as many conservative reactionaries and liberal planners want to do? Or do they embrace it, even though they can't know what lies ahead? Postrel (editor of Reason magazine) firmly places herself in this latter category--the dynamists, she calls her happy tribe--and urges the rest of us to sign up. The future of economic prosperity, technological progress, and cultural innovation depends upon embracing principles of choice and competition. The downside of this philosophy, Postrel readily notes, is that it doesn't allow us to manage tomorrow by acting today. And that's exactly the point: we shouldn't want to. A future constructed by an infinite number of individual decisions, made privately, is one she believes we should encourage. The Future and Its Enemies is at once intellectually sweeping and reader-friendly; it has the potential to join a pantheon of books about freedom that includes works by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. --John J. Miller

From Library Journal

Postrel, editor of Reason magazine, believes that conflict between stasists (who urge control and favor the status quo) and dynamists will shape the future. In her opinion, the greatest threats to the future are efforts to shape it in advance. She believes in minimal controls, those necessary to create a framework for cooperation in which private property is respected. The topics she covers include technology, the environment, and urban planning. Postrel criticizes those who strive to re-create a simpler past or to thwart competition; specifically, she opposes William Greider (One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, LJ 1/97), who sees footloose capitalism as a danger. Her defense of the right to experiment is convincing, but it goes too far: Postrel seems to believe the status quo should yield to any proposal for change, ignoring the rights of people to enjoy the results of their own successful experiments. Nevertheless, her book is recommended as a thought-provoking look at an important subject.?A.J. Sobczak, formerly with California State Univ., Northridge
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First Printing edition (December 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684827603
• ISBN-13: 978-0684827605
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (83 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,422,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's a future not about Republicans vs. Democrats..., June 10, 1999

By 

Dick Bjornseth - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (Hardcover)

...not even about Liberal vs. Conservative. Everyone seems to want change. Postrel make the convincing argument that the battle is really between those who demand central control and a pre-planned future vs. those who are willing to let the future evolve in a many time unexpected way. Essentially it's an age old debate - almighty wisdom vs. evolution.... It's authority (whether it be religion or the state) versus freedom of choice (whether it be the markets or experimentation). Postrel delineates the battle ground with a variety of examples...both contemporary and historic.

The book offers insights into the potential of creativity breaking out from the traditional command and control mentality. As a former urban planner, I was particularly enlightened by her examples as they relate to a changing urban scape.

Overall, this is a ground breaking book that links a number of guru management ideas, politics, science and economic thought....the kind of cross-disciplinary analysis that opens up new ways to more objectively view the world. The Future and Its Enemies is a worthwhile read that will help the reader understand the real underlying dichotomy and debate ("the paradigm" which is a term that Postrel gratfully doesn't use) that defines how politicians and others react to a wide variety of contentious debates. Now the reader can understand the underlying personalities and sets of beliefs and predict how the future balttle lines will be drawn..and what side to be on.

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Heroine for the 21st Century, February 8, 2000

By 

Tcaalaw "Tcaalaw" (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (Paperback)

I was familiar with Virginia Postrel's work in Reason magazine before I bought this book, so I was already looking forward to it with great expectations. However, Ms. Postrel actually managed to exceed them! So often even the best journalists cannot make the transition to writing full-length texts, but Ms. Postrel has done so with ease. Some reviewers have complained that the book lacks depth and it is true that Ms. Postrel could have added more case studies or psychological and philosophical analysis. But I have never thought that every book must achieve the scope of _Human Action_ to be useful. Indeed, something can definitely be said for making a book accessible to the public-at-large rather than catering to the converted.

I found Ms. Postrel's arguments very compelling, especially when taken with the writings of previous authors. F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Frederic Bastiat of course did not use the terms dynamist and stasist in their works, but the same thread is clearly evident. Hayek, Rand, and Bastiat (along with many others) long ago identified the alliances between the far-left and far-right for the purpose of destroying progress. Yet Postrel's book brings that analysis to its logical conclusion by finally obliterating the falsity of the left-right dichotomy which many 19th and 20th Century writers still implicitly accepted even when they identified the parallels between stasist groups.

That said, Postrel's book, although certainly capable of being read on its own, would be best read as part of a body of literature. I would recommend also reading Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_, Rand's _Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal_, and Bastiat's _Economic Sophisms_ for readers previously unfamiliar with the subject. Those texts are readily available and are as accessible as Postrel's for the novice reader.

Finally, I must say that with this book, Ms. Postrel joins Wendy McElroy as a heroine for the 21st Century, carrying on the work of such great liberal (in the proper sense of that word) women such as Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, and Isabel Paterson.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Postrel applied on a semi-socialist state, January 12, 2003

By 

Fredrik Grubb (Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (Hardcover)

As a citizen of Sweden Postrels book gets a special meaning. As a liberal politician in Sweden even more so.

Sweden can be classified as a semi-socialist state. On one hand Sweden is modern and liberal when it comes to all the standard human rights issues. On another there is a very deeply rooted, and dominant, culture of social engineering and socialization. Virtually everything, and I really mean everything, is in some manner under direct political influence. As everything in this country is politics, everything is also subject to thorough planning, scheduling and political debate. From my point of view, Sweden is a "stasist" state with very little room for any kind of dynamist influenses. This book has given me, beeing an anti-socialist in a semi-socialist society, new hope. Maybe there are other ways to break the stale mate in our country, when it comes to analyzing politics. I'll apply the dynamist-stasist dimension here, and see what happens.