Robert Hooke, Joseph Priestley & many more were the Forbears of Transhumanists!

Life Enhancement Products Presents: NeoFiles
R.U. Sirius interviews James Hughes, whose book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future will be published by Westview Press in October.

Hughes says,

the market has always co-evolved with governance, laws, courts and political power. And most of our transhumanist forebears, from Robert Hooke to Condorcet to JBS Haldane, thought that human institutions like the market and the state could be improved on through the application of human reason.

Also:

the ideas of human self-liberation through reason have been politically radical from their very origins. From Priestley, Condorcet, Godwin, and Paine through Wells, Haldane, Bernal and FM-2030, the advocates of a radical technological future were also inescapably political revolutionaries, each in their own time and with their own political limitations.

Cyborgs have such an interesting sense of history. I'm looking forward to the book.