Did people during the 1700s ever try to imagine life in the year 1800s?

Hi there! Sorry it took me a few days to answer you. I needed to dig up a bunch of old notes to refresh my memory.

So yes, 18th century social theorists had a strong sense of futurism. In a broad sense an intellectual concern with the future had existed since the Renaissance rediscovery of Europe’s Classical heritage, which provided the West with a new sense of time’s passage that inevitably looked to the future as well as the past. Coupled with the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, by the time the 18th century came around there was an understanding that time was not only changing, but malleable, and that humans could influence events and make their future better.

This really comes across in Enlightenment intellectual discourse, which emphasizes science, reason, toleration, and education as the means by which to establish a better future. During the 18th century there is a very self-conscious movement amongst social elites (noble or otherwise) to put these ideas into practice in order to become more culturally “enlightened” than their neighbours. It’s from this that we get the phenomenon of enlightened despotism. For example, King Fredrick II of Prussia and the Russian Empress Catherine II both conducted extended personal correspondences with the French thinker Voltaire, taking input from him in how to govern their countries in a way that aligned with humanists ideals.

While the effectiveness of their policies are a subject of debate, there’s no question that this sort of intellectual and political atmosphere led to plenty of speculation about what the future held. What follows are couple key people from the century whose work dealt implicitly with questions of the future. I’m afraid I’m not a real expert on any of these individuals but you can certainly take a quick look at what they contributed to discussions of the future and possibly read more into those that interest you!

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744): Here’s a man who this subreddit owes a lot to. He argued that the study of history was just as important as the study of human nature, as any account of human achievement is necessarily a historical account. Context is key to the understanding of history as human values and concerns are always evolving. He paved the way for Hegel and Marx to argue for the close interrelationship of all aspects of society, with politics, economics, and art all depending on one another as history moves forward.

Montesquieu (1689-1755): Applied the scientific idea of causation to history. A good quote that puts this in perspective is: “If a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.” His Spirit of Laws published in 1748 was a monumental attempt to compare different human societies and institutions, it was a sort of political anthropology that can be seen as the predecessor of modern cultural and social anthropology. He categorized different government types and analyzed government functions, concluding with a strong argument for the need of checks and balances for future governments.

Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794): Set out to describe human history in terms of the progress of science, explicitly relating it to progress in areas such as human rights by suggesting a Newtonian law of causality between science and humanism. The growth of knowledge in the natural and social sciences would lead to justice, freedom, prosperity, and moral improvement and history is patterned upon the progressive development of human capabilities. Social evils arise from ignorance and error, not from human nature. Condorcet was extremely influential and helped to make the idea of “progress” a central concern of European civilization throughout the 19th century.

Lousi Sebastian Mercier (1740-1814): This might be a little more what you were thinking of in when you originally asked this question, as he published a book called The Year 2440 which described a utopian Paris. He intended for the book to be both a scathing criticism of Revolutionary Paris and simultaneously a “guide book for the future”.

Jonathan swift (1667-1745): Another writer who used ideas of exploring strange lands and distant futures to satirize European society. One of his utopian depictions described a society of researchers governed by reason, which is pretty much the goal of promoters of the enlightenment like Voltaire.

[Mary Wollstonecraft] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft) (1759-1797): Wollstonecraft was an early feminist who published the incredible Vindication on the Rights of Women in 1792 that was deeply concerned with the place of women in society and the need to alter social norms in order to conform to Enlightenment ideals of education and reason.

Something that I’m sure you’ve noticed about all of these examples is that thinking about the future was serious business by 18th century intellectual standards, and there is a lack of the more frivolous futurism seen in the science fiction genre that started with Jules Verne in the 19th century. I’d suggest this is the result of two things:

Firstly the very direct application of contemporary intellectualism to governance. Obviously this constantly happens within many societies indirectly, but during this period everyone saw a very blatent connection between social philosophy and governmental policy that led to a number of large-scale changes and helped to ferment the French Revolution, as well as establish modern political discourse.
Secondly, there is long history of utopianism within European literature and philosophy stretching back to ancient Greece that often evoked the future to criticize the present and advocate particular courses of action to ensure this utopian ideal. For a really good collection that contains a great cross-section of Utopian short stories from throughout history I strongly recommend Gregory Claeys The Utopian Reader. Looking over some of the texts in there will really help you understand where these 18th century thinkers were coming from.