Psychohistory and Enlightenment

When I first read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy as a teenager, I was mightily impressed. Many years later I was glad to see him pick up the Foundation saga’s threads again. I eagerly followed his mature reflections on the early and late life of his greatest character, Hari Seldon. But I’m not ready to adopt either Asimov or Seldon as the patron saint of psychohistory. Asimov did not originate either the word “psychohistory” or the concepts it now usually describes. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1934 usage of the word, and I suspect there were earlier ones. Freud and others were already enthusiastically practicing psychohistory before Asimov’s first Foundation story saw print in 1942. Moses and Monotheism (1939), for example, is clearly psychohistory as we now know it, though it was so speculative that Freud initially called it a “historical novel.”