Reconfiguring the Future? Politics and Time from the 1960s to the 1980s – Introduction

Seefried, Elke

doi:10.17104/1611-8944-2015-3-306

Cited by 21 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The practice of state planning of national economies had spread across the globe inspired both by the record of Soviet industrialization and the capitalist New Deal in the United States. Yet, after the two World Wars the future among intellectuals was a contested and problematic idea stimulating various reconfigurations and new approaches from positivist, to critical, explicitly normative and utopian (Andersson 2018: 2;Seefried 2015a;2015b). Absorbing new theories and scientific paradigms such as game theory, cybernetics, and systems theory, approaches to scientific anticipation based on non-linear and probabilistic thinking spread in the US and Western Europe and formed what came to be known as the eclectic field of "future(s) research" or "futurology".…”

Section: Future Research In Late Socialist Polandmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…How should anticipation be used to shape behaviour and political decisions in the present? These questions gained an unprecedented urgency around the middle of the twentieth century for various reasons, resulting in the emergence of future studies or "futurology", a transnational scholarly field revolving around the systematic study of the future in a long-term perspective (Andersson 2018;Seefried 2015a). This essay explores how, in the specific historical context of late socialist Poland of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, such scholarly activities shifted notions of the future by addressing it first as an object of knowledge, second of social engineering, and third of sociological imagination.…”

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Potentials and Risks of Futurology: Lessons from Late Socialist Poland

Becht

2022

Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises

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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.

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Section: Future Research In Late Socialist Polandmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Potentials and Risks of Futurology: Lessons from Late Socialist Poland

Becht

2022

Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises

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“…Historians are beginning to explore periods in which ideas of the future and planning play a more visible role in public life, particularly as they turn towards the study of time as a sociallyconstructed product (e.g., Andersson & Keizer, 2014;O'Hara, 2015;Seefried, 2015), though this work does not engage directly with futures research. Some researchers, however, have suggested that there is great deal of continuity between historical scholarship and futures studies.…”

Section: History and Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking with heritage: Past and present in lived futures

Sandford¹

2019

Futures

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Introduction – Activist times: temporality and political action in twentieth-century Europe

Paulin-Booth

Kerry

2021

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire

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The COVID-19 pandemic has motivated many reflections on crisis and temporality. 1 Lockdowns broke habitual rhythms of economic and social life, constituting a period of stasis and uncertainty for those shuttered at home and of frenetic, unrelenting activity for healthcare professionals grappling to save lives and governments scrabbling to implement policies to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. Multiple temporalities exist in the pandemic; lockdowns were 'a sudden halt' but also functioned as an 'accelerator' of existing social and economic change. 2 The broader horizons of past and future are being reconfigured along with our quotidian experiences of time: many analysts have reached for events such as the 1918 influenza pandemic-or even as far as the Black Death-in order to find meaningful historical precedents for our current predicament. 3 The future, on the other hand, has contracted rather drastically amidst intense uncertainty over what the next few weeks or months-let alone years-will bring. The collapse of the future as a gradual unfolding extension of the present provides an opportunity for imagining new futures, but also risks a pessimistic presentist nihilism. The pandemic has collided and coexists with other events which serves to underline

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Reconfiguring the Future? Politics and Time from the 1960s to the 1980s – Introduction

Cited by 21 publications

References 1 publication

Potentials and Risks of Futurology: Lessons from Late Socialist Poland

Potentials and Risks of Futurology: Lessons from Late Socialist Poland

Thinking with heritage: Past and present in lived futures

Introduction – Activist times: temporality and political action in twentieth-century Europe

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