Proposal for“The Impossibility of Psychohistory: Hayek, Asimov, and the Search for Utopia”

Final Project Proposal Presented 5/3/2021

Literary study gives the critic many lenses to examine texts through. What I hope to do in my writing project, currently titled “The Impossibility of Psychohistory: Hayek, Asimov, and the Search for Utopia” is to extend the lenses we have by introducing an economic frame on the world created by Isaac Asimov in his first Foundation Trilogy. Specifically, I argue against the possibility of Psychohistory in common parlance and use Hayek’s definition of the “Knowledge Problem” to show that the impossibility was internalized in the text of the books.

This lens is an extension not just of the Marxist literary theory I first leaned in Professor Dayton’s course, but also suggested by similar examinations by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro in their Cents and Sensibility where they used an economic frame to examine 19th century realist texts. Seeing those authors present on their work was a direct inspiration for this project.

Asimov’s Psychohistory is a blending of fields of study from history to sociology to psychology, creating a new science that can predict the future. I will examine Psychohistory on its own terms as we learn about it as the text unfolds. To do so I will engage with a couple of others who have tried to do the similar things.

J. Joseph Miller argues that Asimov’s larger project is a utilitarian one. For Miller, the successive…