Questions for the Second Essay -- Spring 2008 Answer one of the questions below 1) “Will all nations one day attain that state of civilization which the most enlightened, the freest, and the least burdened by prejudices, such as the French and the Anglo-Americans, have attained already?” -- Condorcet For Condorcet the answer to this question was clearly “yes.” But for many writers of the late 19 th and 20 th centuries this was far from obvious. Discuss the ways that three or four of the factors below caused many later thinkers to bring very different assumptions and values to their considerations of the future.
Be sure 1) to produce a general thesis that serves as a focus for your entire essay, 2) to contrast the values and assumption of Condorcet with those of the later authors, and 3) to support your positions with clear and explicit references to a broad range of evidence. or 2) Some of the visions of the future that we have considered earlier in the course foregrounded science and technology and believed that advances in these areas would by themselves solve human problems. But many of the approaches to the future that we have considered since the last exam have focused on other areas. Write an essay in which you compare futures that focused on three or four of the areas below. In each case 1) discuss how foregrounding this particular element affected some visions of the future; 2) how the resulting futures differed from those based entirely on science and technology; 3) what assumptions tended to be made by those who focused on each factor; 4) what values generally accompanied each area.
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