The Signal of Asimov: Foundation and the Engineering of Hegemony

Introduction

Having tracked the speculative euphoria of Fitzgerald’s 1920s and the dust-choked economic freefall of Steinbeck’s 1930s, the overarching trajectory of The Book Tapestry demands that we examine the next turning of the wheel. In this blog, I focused on how a civilization attempts to engineer its way out of ruin.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation offers a fascinating lens for this transition. Born in 1920, Asimov belonged squarely to what Strauss and Howe define as the Hero Generation (the G.I. cohort). Raised amid the Great Depression and coming of age during the industrial mobilization of World War II, this cohort earned a reputation as the disciplined “good kids.” They grew up to monitor child labor, repair civic fractures, build massive federal infrastructure, and drive an unprecedented surge of scientific invention.¹

When Asimov began publishing the stories that would become Foundation in 1942, the United States had just entered World War II. Rather than focusing on moral allegories of individual suffering, as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath did, Asimov looked toward civilizational macro-mechanics. Deeply immersed in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Asimov stepped back to view the world as an evolving chessboard.

Reading Foundation today reveals an author living through an era when his own nation ceased being a wounded, isolationist republic and began assembling an unprecedented global empire.