Past and Future

Abstract

Although few practicing historians consider themselves futurists, the study of the future is in effect the history of the future, a continuation of the historian's effort to reconstruct the past by projecting what may come next. Postmodernist theory, however, suggests that just as historians cannot literally reconstruct the past, so futurists cannot literally predict the future. Rather, historians engage the evidence of the past by telling stories about it; futurists, by the same token, engage whatever evidence of the past may bear upon the future by writing scenarios of times to come. The future, like the past, will consist of all people everywhere doing all the things that people do. The article concludes with examples of how the author has sought to apply these perspectives in teaching futures studies courses since 1974 in the Department of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York.