Between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, the institutions that spoke for the Western establishment—presidential commissions, the great foundations, the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, the OECD, the development banks—produced an extraordinary density of reports on the condition and the future of the industrial democracies. These were not marginal documents. They were written by the people who staffed cabinets and central banks and university presidencies, and they were read as the considered self-understanding of a civilization taking stock. They are most illuminating now not as forecasts—most of them forecast badly—but as a record of a climate of thinking at a moment we can see was a world-historical hinge.
This essay proceeds in two passes. It first reads the corpus across time, to recover the shape of the genre as it evolved—its periodicity, which is itself one of its most revealing features. It then works through seven cross-cutting questions in turn: each report’s theory of economic growth, including the role it assigns government in shaping global markets, finance, and trade; its theory of the state, including the prospects it sees for democratic governance and the extension of freedom and the rule of law; its view of North–South relations; its prescriptions for institutional reform; the part it expects technological change to play; whether it casts government as the director of change or as the lowerer of barriers to creative change; and which countries it expects to provide leadership. Throughout, I attend to the place of the United States, which is the corpus’s great absent protagonist—the power whose relative decline is the unstated premise of nearly every document, and whose actual trajectory would falsify the genre’s expectations more completely than any other.
The argument, in brief, is that the corpus is the photographic negative of the transition that followed. Where the reports prescribed restraint, the 1980s and 1990s delivered release; where they prescribed direction, the decisive moves came from the lowering of barriers; where they expected decline, the West—and above all the United States—revived; and where they read democracy’s vitality as a threat, that vitality proved the source of its recovery. To say so is not to mock them. It is to take seriously how reasonable the opposite reading appeared in 1975, which is the only way to recover the climate honestly.
