Macrohistory and futures studies

Futures

Volumn 30, Issue 5, 1998, Pages 381-394

  Inayatullah, Sohail ^a  

^a QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0345355202     PISSN: 00163287     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/s0016-3287(98)00043-3     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. The macrohistorians used for this article include: Ssu-Ma Ch'ien, St. Augustine, Ibn Khaldun, Giambatista Vico, Adam Smith, G. W. F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Max Weber, Oswald Spengler, Teilhard de Chardin, Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, Rudolf Steiner, Fernand Braudel, Fred Polak, Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar, Elise Boulding, Riane Eisler and Gaia herself.
2. Sorokin devises his stages from empirical data and from asking the question of what is real. The answers are (1) matter is real, (2) mind is real, (3) both are real, (4) nothing is real, (5) one cannot know. Responses 4 and 5, even if true, cannot lead to a meaningful society. The other three can, creating the sensate, ideational and integrated society. Change occurs since human beings have a richer spectrum of needs than any particular social formation can satisfy. Once society reaches the sensate gutter, i.e. from ideational to integrated to sensate, then the desire for guidance, for the fulfilment of other needs pulls it upward again. Until the next swing.
3. Faj, A., Vico's basic law of history in Finnegans wake. In Vico and Joyce, ed. D. P. Verene. State University of New York Press, New York, 1987, pp. 22-23.
4. Sarkar believes history is the cyclical rotation of four collective psychologies - the worker, warrior, the intellectual and the merchant. Each era dialectically emerges from the previous one. In the final merchant phase, there is massive exploitation of the other psychologies, leading to a worker's revolution.
5. Eisler, R., Cultural shifts and technological phase changes: the patterns of history, the subtext of gender, and the choices for our future. Research paper, Center for Partnership Studies, PO Box 51936, Pacific Grove, California 93950, USA, 1995, p. 1.
6. A much revised version of this paper, appeared as: Eisler, R., Dominator and partnership shifts. In Macrohistory and Macrohistorians, eds J. Galtung and S. Inayatullah. Praeger, New York, 1997, pp. 141-151. According to Eisler, 'Cultural transformation theory proposes that history is neither linear, cyclical, nor purely random, but the outcome of the interaction of two types of movements. The first is the tendency of social systems to move from less to more complex forms of organization largely due to technological breakthroughs or phase changes. The second is the movement of cultural shifts between two basic models or "attractors" for social and ideological organization which I have called the dominator and partnership models - or more specifically, androcracy and gylany' (p. 1).
7. Etzioni, A. and Etzioni-Halevy, E. (eds), Social Change. Basic Books, New York, 1973, p. 4.
8. Social Change, Ibid., p. 5.
9. Inayatullah, S., Sarkar's spiritual-dialectics: an unconventional view of the future. Futures, 1988, 20(1), 54-65.
10. Inayatullah, S., Situating Sarkar. Gurukul Publications, Brisbane, 1998.
11. Spencer, H., Structure, Function and Evolution. Michael Joseph, London, 1971, p. 169.
12. Spencer, H., Structure, Function and Evolution. 1971, p. 169. Ibid.
13. Nelson, R., Why capitalism hasn't won yet. Forbes 25 November, 106 (1991).
14. In conversation with Elise Boulding, Brisbane, 9 July 1996.
15. Thompson, W. I., At the Edge of History. Harper and Row, New York, 1971, p. 78.
16. Nandy, A., The futures of dissent. Seminar, 1997, 460, 45.