Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today

The modern visions of the future were based on the ideas of progress, utopia and revolutionary renewal. In western societies since the middle of the twentieth century, these visions gradually went into decline with the rise of a dominant vision based on prediction, forecasting and technocratic control. Although by no means hegemonic, it was an expression of belief in a western model of modernisation and the legacy of liberal notions of progress. State socialist societies had their own narratives of the future. Other visions that gradually emerged were inspired by imaginaries of an alternative future that could be realised through human agency, as in pragmatist philosophy or utilitarianism, but also in the various proponents of radical politics since the 1960s. These ideas of the future, which were all based on hope for a better world, lost their appeal from the end of the twentieth century. Pessimism about the future - with a shift from utopia to catastrophe and the end of the times - was an outcome of more critical assessments of the structural conditions of contemporary society and the capacity of the institutions of modernity to create the conditions for a better world. Yet, the idea of the future persisted in a variety of counter-hegemonic projects. These include cosmopolitics and climate politics. What an adequate theory of the future is, is far from clear. There are promising new developments in sociology and in related fields - for example anthropology and Science and Technology Studies - that emphasize possibility, the imagination, anticipation and expectation as modalities that have a constitutive role in shaping the future. In this book a key argument is that the future is not just a temporal condition, but is engrained in the nature of human consciousness and cognition since it concerns some of the fundamental elements of the human condition, such as the capacity for hope and the belief in the possibility of a better world, but also the capacity to bring it about. It is also existential and material. The idea of the future has also always been very much shaped by how the present has been understood. While I argue this is a key dimension of the future, the dominance of the past over the present - imagining the future in terms of past futures - needs to be challenged in order to give a new meaning to the idea of the future. Knowing the future should be more interesting than knowing the past; it is certainly more important, but the allure of the pa