Potentials and Risks of Futurology: Lessons from Late Socialist Poland

Abstract

In the decades after 1945, the future gained unprecedented prominence as an object of scientific anticipation and state planning in both capitalist and socialist countries of the Cold War world. In Poland, future studies or futurology emerged in the course of the 1960s in reaction to Western intellectual trends, the post-stalinist political Thaw, as well as the domestic socio-economic situation. The Polish futurology turned out to be one of the most productive, institutionally and personally stable research collectives when compared to other socialist countries. This research community generated various approaches to the problem of how to anticipate the unknown future. This chapter examines three of them: making the future an object of knowledge; subjecting it to conscious (political) control; imagining alternatives to the status quo. Re-examining these historical examples of anticipatory knowledge provides a mirror to discuss our current efforts at predicting and controlling the future.