Cultural Future Matters

Abstract

This article argues that human futurity is central to cultural being in general and contemporary social life in particular. It suggests that the social sciences have difficulty engaging with this important subject matter; that it poses problems at the level of theory and methodology. In his methodological writings, Max Weber addressed social futurity implicitly through the concepts of rationality and progress, ethics and values, purposes and motives, options and choices, calculation and the means-end schema, responsibility and vocation. This article uses Max Weber's methodological writings to focus discussion on some of the central tensions and difficulties that arise when sociologists seek explicitly to encompass in their work the temporal domain of the `not yet'. The overall aim of the article is to open up futurity and contemporary social extension into the long-term future as issues for social science consideration and debate.