I HOPE THE reader will forgive any hint of narcissism with which I begin, but my autobiography does, I think, help to explain why I hold the views I develop in this chapter.

In 1985, when I was working at the ill-fated Technical Change Centre (funded jointly by Britain's Science Research Council and the Social Science Research Council), I organized a conference at Farnham Castle on technical change and citizenship. I wrote for it a discussion paper (since apparently lost even from the SSRC archives) a main theme of which was what I called the ‘Sixty-Forty Society’. I meant that British society of that time could roughly be characterized as a society in which 60 per cent of the population had steady jobs, skills to market in a labour market with more job offers than job-seekers, a car, a family, and prospects of a steadily, if slowly rising income, while forty per cent were people in more precarious and low-paid employment, and a labour market in which job-seekers were increasingly outnumbering job offers.

It predicted the gradual dwindling of that 60 per cent, primarily as a result of technical change replacing labour with capital-intensive techniques.

It was a theme which had fascinated me since 1947, when as a post-graduate student, awaiting a visa to do post-graduate research in Japan (a three-year wait) I set about trying to educate myself by smuggling myself into lectures at the LSE. One lecture course that greatly impressed me was that of Morris Ginsberg on ‘The idea of Progress’. A scholarly, rabbinical caricature of the absent-minded professor, Ginsberg took us through the optimism of Kant and Durkheim and Herbert Spencer to the disillusionment of the 1930s and the Holocaust, all in an objective, unemotional spirit of dissection of the human animal such as one might write about monkeys or elephants.

That taught me that what one can analyse objectively and unemotionally is ‘social change’ and that to call social change ‘progress’ usually:

• 1. Introduces subjective personal judgements ‘change for the better’

• 2. Implies some assumption of historical continuity and unidirectionality of the change, and either

• (a) some theory as to the mechanisms inbuilt into human beings which explain this.

• OR

• (b) some theory or theology of the universe which explains it in teleological terms