Struggle for the Long Term in Transnational Science and Politics

"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"-- "By bringing together authors from different historical perspectives around a set of studies on the multifaceted history of prediction, forecasting and futures studies, this book calls for the need to reconsider the power of the idea of the future in historical writing. The authors of this volume share an interest in the ambiguous role played by the future, both for consolidating post war regimes of power and control, and for mobilizing crucial forms of dissent and visions of change. It is, therefore, the ambivalent and fundamentally powered role of the future that is at the center of this volume. Specifically, the chapters in this volume are held together by their interest in how post war understandings of the future were constituted by particular forms of prediction and future expertise, and in the role played by these in exercising power over time. Drawing from insights in cultural, social, political, environmental and science history, our book thus aims to rethink the future as a historical category, and set the search light on the emergence of particular forms of future knowledge that set the future as a distinct temporal field in the post war period"--