"Not a portion of the Galaxy must be denied him": Isaac Asimov's early foundation stories and the future of social liberalism

Presented as part of the Academic Track at the www.worldcon76.org/">76th World Science Fiction Convention, San José, August 16th – 20th, 2018.

Fixed up in the early 1950s into a series of three novels, the Foundation stories represent what is perhaps Isaac Asimov’s most sustained engagement with social liberalism, a political ideology which formed the basis of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and which explicitly seeks to balance the freedom of the individual against the interests and welfare of the larger community to which that individual belongs. Ultimately, as this paper argues, the Foundation’s commitment to this ideology is only partial, as their commitment is sorely tested by the arrival of the Mule, a mutant whose unexpected conquest of the Galaxy rests on psychic abilities which grant him a form of absolute and unpredictable freedom which far exceeds that of any other individual. Faced with the Mule’s irrepressible liberty, that part of the Foundation which secretly controls the rest eventually decides that the freedom of the individual must be at least partly subsumed to the larger project of ensuring the welfare of society as a whole. In this sense, it is safeguarding the present and future wellbeing of the galactic community that is the real objective of Asimov’s Foundation, and not social liberalism’s nearly impossible goal of attempting to balance perfectly the freedom of individuals and their social welfare.