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The Foundation by Asimov Review: Materialist vs Great Man Theories of History
My History with this Book
Every summer my philosophy book group reads one to three novels, both to connect with themes that are more difficult to convey through rhetoric, and to give ourselves a small break while people are traveling, working additional jobs, or trying to recover from the school year. We first read Blood Meridian in June and July, which I did not enjoy but managed to get a lot out of philosophically. By popular vote, the second book, to be discussed in August, was determined to be Foundation, the first book in the American science fiction great’s imaginatively named Foundation trilogy. I was a little skeptical of this book before it was even put forward as an option. I had last read it when I was fourteen [1], and I found my friend Bella’s pitch for reading the book, which was concerned with free will versus determinism, to be rather uninteresting [2].
However, the people spoke and we did end up reading this book. Much to my surprise it ended up being the perfect thematic counterpart to Blood Meridian’s focus on the power of violence, and brought up an interesting debate about different theories of history [3], despite being of relatively poor literary quality on the level of prose, plot, or characters.
Short Plot Summary
The Galactic Empire is entering a period of decadence, which will, within a few short decades, transform into a decline, and then finally into a fall within three centuries. Of course, this being the height of the Empire’s power and influence, no one believes this is likely to happen at all, except for Peter Turchin, sorry I mean Hari Seldon, who has used advanced statistics and sociology to predict that the capitol, Trantor, will fall into anarchy within three hundred years. According to Seldon and his philosophical/scientific movement of psychohistory, there’s nothing that can be done about it at this point, but if the Empire plays its cards right and provides resources for a scientific station called the Foundation at the edge of the galaxy, the coming dark ages can be shortened significantly.
Of course, suggesting that the Empire could possibly fall or that there could be anything wrong with the current clearly corrupt and ineffective ruling structure of the galactic government is high treason. Seldon is put on trial, and his project is discredited, although the government does provision the outer rim world of Terminus for the project of constructing a galactic encyclopedia.
Seldon foresaw that the galactic government would be completely unwilling to take his project seriously, and so both his trial and the founding of a scientific colony on Terminus are exactly according to his plan. This colony, known as the Foundation, is slowly guided through a series of crises by various Hari Seldon clones [4]. These individuals use the power of religion and economics to first assert the independence of the Foundation, and then to dominate its local interstellar neighborhood by the end of the book.
Non-violence as a Sustainable Way to Establish Political Power
In contrast to Blood Meridian, and perhaps surprisingly given the premise of galactic (re)conquest, Foundation is an almost completely non-violent book. This is certainly deliberate: one of the early Hari Seldon clones (Salvador Hardin) actually states the following when asked to sanction a bloody war with the Foundation’s neighbors:
All three of the major crises in this book are overcome through non-violent and rather clever means, which reeks a little bit of a revenge of the nerds fantasy, although it still makes a certain amount of sense.
Wars are generally very costly because the capital expended to run them successfully is often completely destroyed, meaning that war is usually not even a zero-sum game, but actually a negative sum game. Even if you win, the resources and lives lost by both sides cannot be recovered, meaning war is an incredibly short-sighted way of winning and maintaining political power, especially if you want to rule over the entire galaxy. Those lives and resources will be needed to help you win influence later in the process!
Blood Meridian in its own way actually supports this thesis on violence too. All the destruction caused by Glanton’s gang doesn’t actually lead them anywhere, and every single one of them ends up hanging from some kind of rope (literal or metaphorical) by the end of the book.
That said, war is sometimes inevitable, as “the last argument of kings,” and I believe in the later entries of this series, it is given its proper place as a political tool.
Structural-Demographic or Great Man Theories of History?
The most interesting part of the book for me was the academic discipline of psychohistory, which Seldon and his trainees used to make large-scale predictions about the future of galactic civilization. These methods are implied to be largely statistical: they cannot predict with certainty that certain events will or will not occur, but they can provide confidence intervals and probabilities for such occurrences. While this might seem like science fiction technology on the level of the fusion drive, it’s actually something that we can more or less do now. Human behavior becomes more, not less, predictable as the number of individuals under consideration increases, making it relatively simple to predict certain facts about the future. For instance, because of declining birth rates across the whole world, we know that there will be a reckoning with the current pension system sometime this century, just as certainly as we know that the sun will cook all life to a crisp on Earth in around a billion years. Marx, perhaps the first psychohistorian, and later scientists like Peter Turchin and Joseph Tainter have formalized this study as an academic discipline. Turchin’s work, which he dubs structural-demographic theory of history, I find to be particularly interesting.
In the book, Seldon recognizes that the Galactic Empire is almost certainly going to collapse within three centuries. The probability of this is so high in his calculations that it’s not worth it to even bother trying anything to avert it. He does however see a possibility of reducing the amount of time between the fall of this empire and the rise of the next through the creation of the eponymous Foundation. Because he is predicting so far in the future, this seemingly small action actually can have a very profound effect, as in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder where treading on the wing of a butterfly in the Cretaceous completely changes human society [5].
The novel, probably because it is a novel and not a hypothetical research paper, has to rely on another theory of history to drive its plot forward. While Seldon is able to predict with broad strokes the various crises that the Foundation faces, the polity relies on the genius of various great men to get them out of these crises. I wrote an essay a long time ago in support of this theory of history and I still stand by a lot of what I said, but with many more caveats.
In the pre-modern world where populations and material throughput were comparatively much smaller, statistical prediction was much less effective at plotting the course of history. A single battle or a single bad harvest can make or break a nation: that’s how you see Alexander triumph over the Persians in the 4th century BC and Canada today speaking French and English rather than Norwegian.
Of course, material factors are still important. Rome underwent a similar demographic decline to us, which locked in the empire’s fate at a certain point, and the increase of salt concentrations in the soil of the Fertile Crescent due to poor irrigation practices also doomed that region to relative irrelevance in the modern era.
In modern times, great men are still important, but more as a vehicle for what Hegel calls “Die Weltseele” [6] or the world-soul in English. Large movements like the French Revolution, the various communist revolutions, and the rise of fascism were all inevitable from a statistical understanding of history. The leaders of these movements did not necessarily bring them into being, but rather channeled the underlying forces that already existed in the population.
Maybe this latter concept is what Asimov intended his characters in Foundation to portray, but it didn’t really come through that way to me. The various Hari Seldon clones seemed to be acting against the forces of common wisdom in society, which seems much more like classic Great Man Theory to me, and in turn makes the book significantly weaker by undercutting the power of psychohistory.
Bad Writing
Despite the interesting themes of the work, I didn’t find Foundation to be a very good book. Most of this was due to the piss-poor character work done by Asimov. Despite being decades, if not centuries, apart, all the principal protagonists speak and act exactly like Hari Seldon. The villains that these glorified clones have to face, both within the government of the Foundation and in local star systems, also think and act shockingly alike. These dynamics mean that the character work that is there is both repetitive and one-dimensional.
The plot, despite being easy to follow, was similarly uninteresting. Because the central premise of the series is that Seldon’s predictions do have actual value, we know, at least in this entry, that the Foundation is going to succeed. This robs the plot of any kind of dramatic tension and leaves us only with the question of how the puzzle will be solved, not its eventual outcome.
Asimov’s galactic spirit religion was also quite difficult for me to believe in. While there have always been cynical atheist types in every society and indeed in every religious hierarchy, I have a hard time believing that something this obviously top-down and fake could actually inspire people without also converting the leadership into believers eventually. While you might be able to argue that Mormon founder Joseph Smith was a cynical con-man who just wanted a justification to sleep with his neighbors’ wives, subsequent generations of Mormon leadership clearly believed (and still believe) in the Book of Mormon. I just don’t see a way for the separation between the religious leadership on Terminus and the gullible provincials to be maintained for as long as it is in this book.
No it doesn't. The entire point of the Foundation premise is that the "great men" are just responding to the inexorable forces of history, and if it wasn't the characters we see, it would be someone else who stepped up. Asimov does invoke the great man theory of history, but it doesn't happen until the sixth story (in the second book). In the first book it's all historical forces, all the time.
Not how it'a portrayed in the book dude. The various people who overcome the problems the foundation have to face are visionaries who go against the popular consensus.
I am now wondering what book you read. In my recollection nearly every story has a moment where the assorted characters go to visit Seldon's Time Vault, where a pre-recorded holographic message by Seldon appears and tells everyone "my psychohistory predicted all of what transpired, at least in broad strokes, despite that it appeared like unexpected action by individuals acting on their free will."
Yes they do this, but the narrative frames each of Sheldon's successors (Salvador Hardin, Hobor Mallow) in the first book as very much going against the grain of the times. Hardin has to coup the encylopedists to gain power, and then is nearly voted out of office before he pulls his spin move on Anacreon. Mallow is put on trial and nearly sentenced to death for failing to save a missionary. Both only survive and fulfill Seldon's prophecy because of their exceptional wit and character. Asimov can try and claim that this is all according to his predictions, but it's not very believable to me, which the central crux of my problem with the story.
The whole conceit of the "seldon crises" is that there's only one way out of them. Do you need a great man for that?
Well there's always another way out: failure.
Sure, but you don't need a great man to see or execute the path to success. Seldon did not foresee Hardin and Hardin's untimely demise would not have mattered.
Sure, Asimov says that you don't, but from my memory of the events of the book, the level of wisdom/guts/foresight required to execute the specific plans that Hardin/Mallow pull off is pretty exceptional. Probably because it has to be to make the book interesting. You can say that someone else would have stepped up to the plate, but it's not believable based on what has to happen in the text.
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