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This book reconsiders the power of the idea of the future. Bringing together perspectives from cultural history, environmental history, political history and the history of science, it investigates how the future became a specific field of action in liberal democratic, state socialist and post-colonial regimes after the Second World War. It highlights the emergence of new forms of predictive scientific expertise in this period, and shows how such forms of expertise interacted with political systems of the Cold War world order, as the future became the prism for dealing with post-industrialisation, technoscientific progress, changing social values, Cold War tensions and an emerging Third World. A forgotten problem of cultural history, the future re-emerges in this volume as a fundamentally contested field in which forms of control and central forms of resistance met, as different actors set out to colonise and control and others to liberate. The individual studies of this book show how the West European, African, Romanian and Czechoslovak "long term" was constructed through forms of expertise, computer simulations and models, and they reveal how such constructions both opened up new realities but also imposed limits on possible futures.
List of contents
Foreword
Michael D. Gordin Introduction: Toward a New History of the Future
Jenny Andersson and Egl¿ Rindzevi¿i¿t¿ 1. Midwives of the Future: Futurism, Futures Studies and the Shaping of the Global Imagination
Jenny Andersson 2. Expertise for the Future: The Emergence of Environmental Prediction c.1920-1970
Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin 3. Energy Futures from the Social Market Economy to the Energiewende: The Politicization of West German Energy Debates, 1950-1990
Stefan Cihan Aykut 4. Technoscientific Cornucopian Futures versus Doomsday Futures: The World Models and
The Limits to Growth Elodie Vieille-Blanchard 5. Towards a Joint Future Beyond the Iron Curtain: East-West Politics of Global Modelling
Egl¿ Rindzevi¿i¿t¿ 6. Forecasting the Post-Socialist Future:
Prognostika in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1970-1989
Vít¿zslav Sommer 7. Official and Unofficial Futures of the Communism System: Romanian Futures Studies Between Control and Dissidence
Ana-Maria C¿t¿nü 8. Virtually Nigeria: USAID, Simulated Futures, and the Politics of Postcolonial Expertise, 1964-1980
Kevin Baker 9. Pan-Africanism, Socialism and the Future: Development Planning in Ghana, 1951-1966
Jeff Grischow and Holger Weiss
About the author
Jenny Andersson is CNRS research professor at the Center for European Studies of Sciences po, Paris.
Egle Rindzevičiūte is a researcher at the Center for European Studies of Sciences po, Paris, and Associate Professor in Culture Studies at Linköping University, Sweden.
Summary
This book goes beyond the cultural histories of dystopia and utopia and into the problem of how societal futures are produced. Through a unique collection of national and transnational cases, it covers the struggle around future visions and prediction in the global Cold War era.
