Introduction: Social theory and the idea of the future

Abstract

There is a new sensibility to the concept of the future in recent writings in the human and social sciences. The modern idea of the future is undergoing a tremendous rupture today such that older or taken-for-granted assumptions about it can no longer be left unscrutinized. While much of the new interest in the future is about events yet to come – and the spectre of catastrophe looms large in such thinking – the challenge for social theory is to understand how the future should be conceptualized today and how it relates to other concepts, such as space, hope, possibility and utopia. Some of the major controverses about how the future should be conceptualized can be summed up around the following debates, which are explored in this introductory article: the question of the temporality of the future, the extent to which the future is open, whether utopia has been superseded by dystopia and the implications of posthumanism especially in the context of the emergence of new technologies that have far-reaching implications for the human condition.

This special issue is primarily concerned with explorations of the idea of the future in social theory and more generally in the social and human sciences. While the future potentially covers almost everything that concerns social inquiry, the focus here is on the idea of the future rather than specific future concerns. The future is foremost an idea and as such it presents itself as an orientation for the present. Our concern in this issue is therefore less with what is going to happen in the future than with the very conceptualization of the future. The issue is a response to the general neglect of the idea of the future in the sociology and philosophy of time. With the re-emergence of the concept of the future in the human and social sciences today, there is an urgent need for conceptual clarification.

While historical and sociological approaches to time have overall focussed on the social construction and organization of time, philosophical approaches have been concerned with different questions that arose mostly with developments in physics. Major works by Henri Bergson and G. H. Mead, for example, attempted to mediate the two traditions. Heidegger in Being and Time provided a major theory of the future based on the anticipation of death. The concern with the future is implicit in the critical theory tradition of the Frankfurt School from Adorno to Habermas with its concern with the sources of transcendence and future possibility. As Macdonald shows, the possibility of things being different was central to Adorno’s thinking (Macdonald, 2019). Yet, lacking in all the great writings on time by sociologists and historians – for example, Norbert Elias (1992 [1984]), George Gurvitch (1964) and Landes (1983) – is a theory of the future, which remained under-theorised in relation to past and present. Exemplary exceptions were inspiring writings by H. G. Wells (1913), Walter Benjamin (1970 [1942]), Reinhart Koselleck (2004 [1967]) and Bertrand de Jouvenel (2017 [1964/1967]). Within sociology, in the 1970s, Niklas Luhmann (1976) wrote a classic work and Wendell Bell and James Mau sought to develop a sociology of the future (Bell and Mau, 1971). Barbara Adam (1990) and Helga Nowotny (1994 [1989]) brought time into social theory in two major works in the early 1990s, but a theory of the future remained undeveloped in social theory. To an extent, the future has been relegated to the domain of futurology and marginalized in mainstream social theory.

In the field of modern literature, the future was more fully embraced, often with a concern about dystopia, a theme that had resonances in sociological critical thinking on the future, as for example, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (Davis, 1990/2018). The destruction of indigenous forms of life towards the end of the last century arguably also led to visions of societal dystopia as the reality of the world for many indigenous people. Such trends, however understood, were nonetheless compatible with a ‘presentist’ approach to time as having emptied itself of the future, such that all that remains is an endless present (see Hartog, 2015 [2003]). If the future remains at all in such a perspective, it can be described by what Grafton Tanner (2023) has called ‘foreverism’, an empty space in which waste and trivia is preserved for ever and sustained by nostalgia for what has been irrecoverably lost, for there is no future for what is of value, except perhaps memory of a time when there was a future.

In recent times, there is a new interest in the theory of the future beyond the limits of theories of time. A major contribution to the field is Jenny Andersson’s reconstruction of the idea of the future in the Cold War period, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination (Andersson, 2018). A product of conceptual history, this work has helped considerably to re-open the theory of the future as a field or space of social action. The Special Issue opens with her reflections on how the future has become an object of knowledge for the human and social sciences. Other recent works that could be mentioned include What is the Future? (Urry, 2016), Future Matters (Adam & Grove, 2007) and Imagined Futures (Beckert, 2016). My book, Senses of the Present Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today, also contributes to this new literature with a critical reconstruction of the idea of the future and with a specific focus on contemporary thought (Delanty, 2024).

A general point of departure for our analysis of the idea of the future in this Special Issue is that the modern idea of the future is undergoing a tremendous rupture today such that older or taken-for-granted assumptions about it, as for example the chronological notion of time, can no longer be left unscrutinized. While much of the new interest in the future is about events yet to come – and the spectre of catastrophe looms large in such thinking – the challenge for social theory is to understand how the future should be conceptualized today and how it relates to other concepts, such as space, hope, possibility, utopia and the human condition. It is also clear that instability, uncertainty and indeterminacy are much more to the fore in any account of the future today.

While having premodern antecedents, the idea of the future took on a new significance with modernity in defining its shifting time consciousness from one centred on the past to one oriented to the future (Assmann, 2020 [2013]; Habermas, 1987 [1985]; Hölscher, 2016; Koselleck, 2004 [1967]; Maruyana & Harkins, 1978). The modern signalled both the now and the new, ideas that were signalled in the early modern period with the emergence of a new conception of the future (Brady & Butterworth, 2010). It defined the present time in terms of the priority of the future over the past, even to the extent of the past being reconceived through the prism of the future. In contrast to a view of the future that prevailed prior to the modern break through, which was predominantly based on destiny, fortune, the preordained order of the gods, modernity placed the future in the hands of human beings. It is true that Karl Jaspers found in the Axial Age the sources of transcendence with the emergence of universalistic ideas in the major civilizations of the world (Jaspers, 2021 [1953/1949]). While the consequences of the Axial Age were momentous, the idea of the future is nonetheless primarily a modern idea. The new ideas of the future were expressed in various genres and discourses, such as the idea of progress and utopia, to mention the two most influential ones, but there were others, such as secular prophecy with the romantic movement, from c 1790 to the 1840s. Since the Enlightenment, the dominant ideas of the future, including those of the political right and left, reflected a sense of the future as under the control of the present, either as a project to be realised or as something that could be mastered or controlled by the present. In a classic work, Ian Hacking has described this project as the mastery of chance, which seemed to be the object of control, but this inevitably led to the problem of determinism and thus the unresolved question of where the space of possibility might reside (Hacking, 1990). All the great political programmes and ideologies of the nineteenth century and those of the early twentieth century, including fascism and communism, were future oriented and reflected a strong belief that the future can be controlled. Where the past also figured in these movements, it was one shaped by the vision of the future, for when required history could be re-written to fit in with future projections. ¹

In the early twentieth-century darker visions of the future emerged, as in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West in 1918 (it was conceived as ‘a philosophy of the future’), Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Humanity in 1918, Freud’s late writings on the future of civilization in Civilizations and its Contents written in 1929 or Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944. Yet, despite these pessimistic trends in European thought, most of the rest of the world was captured by the vision of the future, which was the driving ideal both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. In 1941, after the self-destruction of Europe, it was possible for Stefan Zweig in Brazil Land of the Future to see Brazil as the promised land, even if a year later he committed suicide there after completing his memoir and final work, The World of Yesterday (Zweig, 1941, 2009 [1942]). The post-1945 period, despite fears of the annihilation of humanity by the atomic bomb, rapidly became an era of optimism for the future of modern society and the capacity of reason to prevail over possible destruction. This was undoubtedly because it was a period of relative stability and, at least for the western world, of prosperity and peace. Today that sense of optimism and certainty has vanished along with its presuppositions – the Cold War, US dominance, the unquestioned abundance of carbon fuel, political acquiescence and ideological control. The American Dream became a nightmare. The emergence of the Anthropocene as prism through which to view our historical present and future has added another dimension to the sense of crisis that pervades much of social life.

The notion that the future will be better than the present, just as the present triumphed over the past, and that with the aid of science it can be known had already faced a major critique with postmodernism, which was based on a more sceptical view of the promise of modernity to deliver a better world. Since Foucault, if emancipation was possible at all, it consisted only in the recognition of compliance with domination (Derrida’s project for sure was different and more future oriented). But today in the context of the Anthropocene and major crises, especially the climate crisis and the planetary scale of human activities, the premises of modernity are in question. Modernity saw the past as surviving as ruins, reminders of a former greatness that has been surpassed by a future oriented present, but today a view of modernity is gaining ground that sees modernity itself as ruins. The view of the future as a narrative of progress is no longer convincing and its sequel, the future as risk and sustainability, lacks critical force since it turned out to be a means of perpetuating the myth of progress minus a telos. Yet, despite these currents, the interesting development is that the postmodernist tendency to reject the future for a critique of history is no longer the dominant intellectual tendency. It was always ill-equipped to deal with the problem of responsibility since it did not believe in the possibility of collective action. In recent times, there is a new interest in critical thinking about the future and which in part reflects the revival of older and more marginal currents, such as the prophetic tradition. This turn is illustrated in several recent debates, which can be reconstructed around key themes.

Contested visions of the future

Some of the major controverses about how the future should be conceptualized can be summed up around the following four debates: the question of the temporality of the future, the extent to which the future is open, whether utopia has been superseded by dystopia and the implications of posthumanism especially in the context of the emergence of new technologies that have far-reaching implications for the human condition. These would appear to be the most important ones, or at least ways in which to frame other ones, and are well reflected in the contributions to this special issue. These contributions also reflect very different theoretical traditions, giving rise to a plurality of theories of the future. The range of perspectives represent positions as varied as critical theory, systems theory, phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, conceptual history and pragmatism.

The question of the temporality of the future

The idea of the future is foremost a temporal category, at least etymologically deriving as it does from the Latin futurus. It is defined by reference to the present as the present is defined by its relationship to the past. The temporality of the future has many dimensions to it, with the question of time spans perhaps the most basic. Until recently, the notion of the future was predominantly seen as very near to the present. The idea of the distant future rarely figured. In many cases, the future was not more than three decades beyond the present. As Jonathan White shows in his article in this issue, the technocratic tendencies in contemporary politics are often based on short-termism (see also White, 2024). While de Tocqueville believed democracies were tempted by short-termism, this has now become part of the functioning of technocratic forms of governance. White’s argument is that a ‘technocratic myopia’ pervades policymaking when it is insulated from democratic politics in the name of expertise. The point here is that attempts to deal with the future through control inevitably result in short-termism. When an outlook ceases to be myopic and become long-sighted is one of the major challenges for all democratic policymaking, which is inevitably about preparedness for the future (see also Innerarity, 2012 [2009]; Mackenzie, 2021; Mackenzie et al., 2023). Haud Guégen and Laurent Jeanpierre, in their contribution to this issue, see this problem as having emerged with the Enlightenment and the modern art of government, which was tied up in a knot of mathematical knowledge, the collection of population data, techniques of future anticipation, for modern government is about policies for anticipating and controlling the future. How should we understand the temporality of the future?

A classic statement of the social forecasting approach, Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting in 1973 looked to the end of the century as the time span for thinking about the future. Many of the theoretical ideas were set out in an influential essay in 1967 on ‘The Year 2000’ (Bell, 1967). As he noted in that essay, the year 2000 exerted a certain fascination, being sufficiently far but imaginable within the lifetime of people of Bell’s generation. Bell clearly had in mind the immediate future of post-industrial society, a term he coined, not the distant future that was the time horizon of the utopian imagination, as for example in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine in 1895. From a different perspective, and one sceptical of the assumption of historical progress, George Orwell, attuned as he was to the rise of totalitarianism, set Nineteen Eight-Four just 36 years from 1948 when he completed it. For social and political science, as for much of science fiction, the future was an extension of the present or at least not too distant from it. Although set in an imaginary post-Fordist future, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written in 1932, was a novel about present trends towards technological dystopia. Even the more critical historical visions of the future – by philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Hans Jonas and Bertrand Russell – in the post-1945 period saw the future with a new urgency due to the creation of the atomic bomb. The future was very much in the extended present. Science was generally seen as the saviour for the future. Wittgenstein was a dissenting voice with his unorthodox view that that the ‘darkness of the times’ was not the fact of the arrival of the atomic bomb itself, but the unquestioned triumph of science and technology, which was what ultimately made possible the prospect of the apocalyptical end of the world. In 1946, in a mood of apocalyptical anxiety, he welcomed the end of the illusion of scientific progress, despite that its demise might also mean the end of humanity (Monk, 1991, pp. 484–486).

Against this general background of a sense of the future as within the lifespan of most people currently alive is a new interest in the distant future. This can take extreme forms, as in a concern with future humans in hundreds of thousands of years from now. One such position is ‘longtermisn’, as advocated by William MacAskill (2022) in What We Owe to the Future and others such as Toby Ord (2020) and transhumanists such as Nick Bostrom. Moral philosophy has been the surprising source of new thinking about the very distant future of humanity. In this literature, which brings together moral philosophy, population ethics and existential risk analysis, the key concern is the long-term survival of humanity in the event of a major catastrophic event, be it a human caused one – most likely nuclear war – or a cataclysmic asteroid strike or some such occurrence that eradicates human life if not all of life. Longtermism is inspired by the pioneering moral philosophy of the enigmatic Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit who, in his seminal work, Reason and Persons, laid the philosophical foundations of what was to become population ethics with the controversial argument that our duties to future people, people not yet born, is as great as our duties to people far away; that they are not yet born is irrelevant to their moral worth: a future person is as valuable as one who now exists (Parfit, 1986). The argument for many is persuasive but runs into serious problems when it becomes the basis of a political philosophy that relativizes the moral worth of current suffering by positing a personal philosophy of altruism and one curiously allied to dubious futurist projects. Even if it were the case that it is as bad to harm a future person as it is to harm a living one, the political consequences are deeply problematical. There is, for instance, the basic problem of the unknowability of the future and thus of the uncertain consequences of plans made in the present for a very distant future reserved for the world’s elite who will guarantee the survival of humanity.

For this school of thought, the most important thing is that there will be for all time humans and that they should be happy, even if they will live in other terrestrial settlings. Not too surprisingly, longtermism has an attraction for proponents of space travel and venture capitalism beyond the earth, which Rubenstein has characterized as corporate ‘Astrotopia’ (see Rubenstein, 2021). It is ultimately limited by a concern with extreme scenarios about human extinction and leaves out a good deal else, such as the biodiversity (Schuster & Woods, 2021).

The allure of the deep future that is a concern of recent theorizing on the future is thus in danger of losing meaningful connection with our historical present or the past. A more adequate concern with the deep future would be one that connects with the deep past, as in notions of deep history. A conception of the deep future that is in proportion to the deep history of humanity offers a corrective to short-term thinking as well as to visions of humanity in other terrestrial locations beyond the earth (Chakrabarty, 2009; Ialenti, 2020). A concept of the future severed from the past effectively wipes the present of the legacies of the past, including traumatic memories. There cannot be any adequate sense of the future without a connection with historical experience. Krenak (2024), reflecting a perspective from indigenous history, argues that there can be no adequate sense of the future without an examination of historical roots. This perspective gives greater attention to the contribution of non-western conceptions of the future, as for example Afrofuturism which challenges the mainstream technocratic approach to the future (White, 2024, p. 190). Our view of the future is invariably influenced by how we see the past (see Simon & Deile, 2022; Simon & Tam, 2023). However, the past is not necessarily untouched by the future, since many of our ideas of the past are in fact the product of how we see the future. The first thing revolutionaries always did was to rewrite the past.

This perspective on deep history inevitably touches on future evolution, which is also a temporal category. Current humans are approximately 200,000 years old; the first settled societies emerged approximately 12,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene with the emergence of the current interglacial, the Holocene Epoch. It is perhaps not entirely fanciful to think to a future time when this phase in the deep history of the earth will end with the arrival of the next ice age, which has been conventionally predicted to be in 50,000 years from now, but due to human induced global warming it will probably be delayed – but only delayed for it will arrive – for an additional 50,000 years. In this timescale, it is also possible to imagine future human biological evolution, which according to Darwin is almost imperceptibly slow and for which a very long time-scale is needed (see Solomon, 2016). Over the past 50,000 or so years, human evolution has been primarily cultural with little if any biological evolution having occurred.

The temporal considerations discussed here suggest a model of multiple temporalities, including the short-term and the long-term and the fact that human temporalities are all bound up with the deep history of the planet. The ontological implications of this also suggest the need for a relational approach – that mediates between the human and natural worlds – and not just only an interpretative approach for a sociology of the future. Such a perspective on multiple temporalities would need to consider the interrelations and different trajectories of planetary history, biological history (both human and nonhuman) and the history of human society.

How open is the future?

Another debate on the idea of the future that is at the fore of current scholarship concerns the question of just how open the future is. This is very much a debate on the degree to which the future can be seen as a product of human agency. According to White, the idea of the open future came above all with modern democracy and sprang from the same impulse as the utopian imagination (White, 2024). But the open future was also challenged by the politics of closure, as in the tendency to calculate the future in order to master it or in the current trend towards emergency government and a world-wide shift towards authoritarianism.

Within sociology, the dominant trend is to see the future as relatively open: the future is in the hands of human beings. Even if circumstances are not of their making, people can fashion the future in their image and thus escape the tutelage of the past. These ideas have a foundation in Reinhart Koselleck’s influential theory of the future (Koselleck, 2004 [1967]). While this theory sees a rupture between experience, which is past based in that our experience derives from history and memory, with modernity the future is opened with expectations that go beyond existing experience. However, even in his analysis, which is confined to semantic shifts in the formation of modernity and the birth of the idea of progress, the expansion in the horizon of expectation still has a relation to the present in offering the promise of a better future. While the idea of progress cannot yet be written off, as Peter Wagner has argued, it has lost impetus, having been challenged by other ideas, such as the notion of the risk society (Wagner, 2016).

In recent years, there has been a flourishing within sociology of phenomenological approaches to the idea of the future, as is also well represented in this issue (e.g. Mische, 2007 and Tavory & Eliasophy, 2013). The future is seen as a product of social practices and imaginaries; it has a performative dimension, as Oomen et al. (2022) argue. The future is not located in a time yet to come and beyond the present; it is a product of the present; it is produced in performative acts and is embedded in the present. This influential approach is also reflected in Appadurai’s well known notion of the future as a ‘cultural fact’ (Appadurai, 2013). In this special issue, the articles by Soren Altstaedt and Natalia Cantó-Milà and Sven Seebach are good examples of this sociological approach to the future. Altstaedt argues for a perspective on ‘futuring practices’ that create the conditions of the future as a ‘social fact’. In an analysis from the standpoint of cultural sociology and the theory of social practices, future-culture refers to ‘a web of temporally forward-oriented, projective, symbolic orders and orders of knowledge, which is expressed through and embodied in futuring practices’. In a similar vein, Cantó-Milà and Sven Seebach discuss imaginaries of the future as a relational assemblage of images figures and forms that reciprocally articulate shared, taken-for-granted assumptions, expectations, anticipations, fears, plans and hopes regarding what the future may hold. They caution in an important qualification against making a ‘causal link between contemporary envisioning of the future and future outcomes. Instead, imaginaries of the future belong to the present moment and, furthermore, are a powerful way of interpreting this present as well as the past’.

Barbara Adam also makes a strong case for the importance of a social theory of the future that is relevant to our current times of crisis and attuned to the problem of the inaccessibility of the future as always residing in, what Ernst Bloch called, the ‘not yet’. She comments on the dual orientation to the future, which she detects in Weber’s methodological writings: the condition of ‘being oriented to the future and also guided by for action in the present’. While her analysis gives centrality to the action theoretic stance, as suggested by the notion of ‘tempering’, she also embraces a dimension of the future that evades the self-understanding of the social actor: ‘futures-in-the-making demand engagement with a not-yet that spans simultaneously nano-seconds and geological, even planetary period of time’.

The attraction of the notion of the open future is clear in that it shows how the future is not closed or determined; the future is not just an empty space that the present moves into, it can be shaped by the present. However, such conceptions of the future display exceptionally strong confidence in the capacity of social action to generate future possibilities and that these can be ‘expected’ or ‘anticipated’. This is perhaps because they operate with a relatively short time span, whereby the future is an extension of the present. From a different theoretical perspective, there is the problem of the unpredictability of the future. Where phenomenological approaches tend to assume a high degree of predictability, a systems theoretic perspective suggests greater emphasis on unpredictability and uncontrollability. This is where the epistemic dimension plays a more central role in thinking about the future. Creativity, innovation and novelty derive from social actors in the present and their capacity for imagining future possibilities, but it is also shaped by the fact of contingency and chance. The future is not entirely a social construction. As Elena Esposito notes in her contribution to this issue, the new is foremost unknown. It may also not be easily imagined. Now, this perspective does not jettison the openness of the future; if anything, it gives it even more scope due to its contingency. The older ideas of the certainty of the future have lost their salience because of self-generated uncertainty. In an important book on the idea of the future, Jens Beckert (2016) argued that in view of ever greater uncertainty today, future states can be imagined, as in scenario-planning and various ways risk can be managed through probability assessments, and so on. This argument, which goes so far in imagining possibilities that might occur if they were not imagined, does not quite encompass the radical uncertainty of the future. Esposito seeks to grasp a sense of the future that escapes the present and which cannot be imagined by social actors in the present.

Niklas Luhmann in a classic essay on the idea of the future distinguished between the future present and the present future, the latter being the sense of the future that exists in the present and the taken for granted view of the future (Luhmann, 1976). In contrast to this sense of the future as a category of interpretation, he was interested in the future present, the future that one day will become actualized as the present. This sense of the future is not easily captured by acts of interpretation in the present and nor can it easily be known. Luhmann, following Koselleck, made much of the metaphor of a horizon. A feature of a horizon is not only that it cannot be reached or surpassed, for it recedes as one approaches it, but also that it is in the present. This is the key point for Luhmann, who wanted to develop the phenomenological theory of time in the direction of a theory of ‘temporal modalities’ with an iterative use of modal forms for all possible modes of past and future temporalities. His essay made a further argument in claiming that time under conditions of high complexity is scarce, in the sense that the present future offers possibilities that cannot be easily fulfilled, except by technology, which is a way in which the future is actualized. Luhmann’s brilliant essay with its perspective on what he called ‘iterative modalizations’ (present future, future presents, future of past presents, etc.) broke new ground but ultimately did not answer the question of how we respond to the challenge of the future, ‘how to begin the future’. His somewhat unsatisfactory answer was that it cannot begin, and we are caught up in an unending present, since this is the locus from which the future is viewed.

While Esposito, following Luhmann, emphasizes the epistemic uncertainty of the future due to contingency, Piet Strydom brings the concept of necessity to bear on the topic. Both he and Esposito go beyond the limits of an analysis that remains on the level of the semantics of the future and the primacy of social action in the present, that is a concern with how the present imagines the future and with possibilities that can or might be realized. Strydom shows the relevance of the philosophy of modality to the theory of the future but does so through a different route than the one Luhmann took, which was largely epistemological (in the sense of knowing the future). In his contribution to this issue, drawing mainly from pragmatism, necessity along with possibility are two organizing principles that structure the future, with the former both limiting and enabling the latter. The notion of necessity, which is not to be conflated with determinism, refers to a higher level of formal principles and concepts that enable us to think of the future, including the very idea of the future. For the future to be conceivable at all, there must be modes of thought and reason available to enable its cognition. The possibility of the future thus ultimately resides in the space of necessity, in a transcendent or meta level of concepts, that is universalistic concepts and principles that while products of human evolution transcend specific cultural contexts. It is this meta level that allows the possibility of the openness of the future, but it also confers on it a structure that limits it even while enabling it. This approach, inspired by the work of C. S. Pierce, also draws attention to the fact that the future is also shaped by the deep history of humanity in so far as it is an outcome of evolutionary processes. His article is a reminder of the importance of necessity as a structuring force in history and that there is a wide spectrum of ways by which possibilities play out in relation to necessity. As in the Marxist notion of ‘historical necessity’ or Hegel’s ‘the cunning of reason’, historical outcomes are not reducible to chance or choice, but they are also not determined, as is also suggested by the aphorism, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

Possibility – however much constrained by necessity – remains an important way of theorizing the future, as Haud Guéguen and Laurent Jeanpierre show in their contribution to this issue (see also their book, Guéguen & Jeanpierre, 2022 and Strydom, 2023). They also ground their article on the concept of modality to explore the relationship between the category of the possible and the temporal horizon of the future. They show how, on the one hand, techniques of anticipation aimed at domesticating the indeterminacy of the future seek to reduce the field of possibilities, while on the other hand another logic plays out in the relationship between the modality of the possible and the temporal horizon of the future. Their analysis, inspired by the critical theory tradition, seeks to identify emancipatory possibilities – beyond the ‘denial of impossibility’ – in the present beyond technologies of control and those regimes of history that go fall into the category of ‘presentism,’ which reduce the possible to what is currently present, that is, what is actual. An important critical insight is that in the view of the ecological catastrophe, the very idea of an indefinitely open and ‘available’ future, which was central to Koselleck’s theory of the future, as well as most of mainstream modern theories, has now been rendered problematic.

This is also a perspective in Loren Goldman’s contribution to this issue in which he argues against the conception of future time in Koselleck’s work, which reflected the optimistic self-confidence of modernity. The future is not the unfolding of a single trajectory that is linear and irreversible, but non-linear, reversible and, importantly, plural with multiple even infinite trajectories. The question is not, he argues, ‘whether we can do away with thinking forward, but how we come to negotiate the myriad currents that flow, some continuously, some evanescently, some forcefully, some eddying, some dissipating, that batter the ever-changing present’. This perspective gives added weight to the thesis that the future is a necessary concept; it is not something that can be switched on/off; it is a necessary fact of the world and not in opposition to what is possible, but its foundation. The capacity for hope preserves the possibility of the future as an open horizon beyond the present.

The future as catastrophe

It is clear from a look across the spectrum of recent literature on the future that a major theme is catastrophe as an event to come or one that has already arrived. The theme of catastrophe as a trope for the future begins with the decline of utopianism as a way of thinking about the future both in literary and political writing, and it has been a powerful undercurrent in the imagination of modernity (Horn, 2018 [2014]). The trend towards dystopia as a depiction of the late modern world shorn of the possibility of utopia began in science fiction and futuristic literature, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1932 and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1946. This is perhaps now one of the dominant motifs of the present, with the suggestion that the future has already arrived or that there is no future other than the memory of a time that still believed in it. With the dominance of dystopia as a way of looking at our historical present, the older notion of utopia undergoes a fundamental metamorphosis with the idea that all utopias eventually become dystopias. If that is the case, the link with the idea of the future is severed.

Letting aside the notion that dystopian accounts of the world, whether set in the present or in the future, serve a critical function and as such are best understood as critical dystopias, there is a clear trend in contemporary thought towards catastrophism or ‘doomism’. This takes several different forms. One is the end of utopia, the argument of the exhaustion of the utopian impulse which is no longer able to sustain the vision of a desirable future. As Judith Shklar famously wrote: ‘Utopianism is dead, and without it no radical philosophy can exist’ (1957, p. 268). In a similar vein, Herbert Marcuse in a lecture in 1970, ‘The End of Utopia’, made a claim about the death of utopia, as did Jürgen Habermas in an address to the Spanish parliament in 1984 on the exhaustion of utopian energies today (Habermas, 1991).

In recent years, such notions have found new voices. Franco Berardi in After the Future claims the twentieth century was the century that believed in the future, which was tied to the idea of utopia, which in turn was linked to the idea of progress, to capitalism and speed (Berardi, 2011). It reached a high point in 1968 and declined from 1972 with the crisis of capitalism and the reversal of the progressive notion of progress following the influential Club of Rome’s book, The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). Its official end came in 1977 when the Punk movement declared ‘No Future’. In similar terms, Slavoj Zizek in Living in the End Times characterizes global capitalism as approaching ‘an apocalyptical zero point’, resulting from the ‘four riders of the Apocalypse’: the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenic revolution, imbalances within the capitalist system (for instance, the energy crisis), the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions (Zizek, 2011). Mark Fischer has characterised the current situation as 'the slow cancellation of the future' (Fischer 2012).

These interpretations of our historical present as devoid of a future all give rise to a debate whether the utopian imagination survives in different forms. Beradi himself clearly thinks so, for in a later book he discussed the idea of the future as one of possibility with the argument despite the despite the darkness of the times and the sense of political impotence that is widely felt, possibility remains immanent in the present: ‘I call possibility a content inscribed in the present constitution of the world (that is the immanence of the possible)’ (Berardi, 2017, p. 1). It is perhaps an integral feature of the utopian imagination to see only dystopia in the ruins of the present.

In whatever way one should understand the decline of the idea of utopia, it clearly has considerable resonance in much of contemporary thought, whether in ‘real utopias’ or the exploration of alternative futures, including alternative to capitalism (Featherstone, 2017; Harvey, 2000; Levitas, 2013; Wright, 2010). It is also a powerful influence in Green political thought, which is inspired by the idea of utopia and climate politics (Claeys, 2022; Thaler, 2022). This is also the concern of Mark Featherstone in his contribution. Despite the decline of the great historical utopias, we still need to explain the impulse that still drives utopian thinking for a place that is other than the present. His argument, which draws from Heideggerian phenomenology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, is that the striving for utopia – even if it can never be realized and is necessarily pervaded by disappointment – resides in the human condition itself and is essentially about a constant projecting forward and the desire to overcome what is lacking in the present. If history is about what has been lost, the utopian imagination is about overcoming what is lacking in the present; it is, as he claims, a tendency or an orientation towards some other time or place in the future. It therefore includes an ‘excess’, as a desire to go beyond the present to overcome what is lacking.

Another and more recent trend in contemporary culture can be seen as a revival of the prophetic tradition of the end times, a tradition that was influential in Europe with the romantic movement from c 1779 to 1840s (as in the spectre of the ‘Last Man’, the novel by Mary Shelley and the painting by John Martin). There is a pronounced trend towards post-apocalyptical visions of the world today, and some of these trends are discussed in Aldo Mascareno’s article in this issue. According to him, ‘contemporary visions of the next apocalypse mobilise social operations in the present’. Post-apocalyptical and dystopian fiction are not always just laments of the loss of an older utopian tradition and can be a way of viewing the world beyond the limits of the present, as in for example Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023). As Manjikian has argued, dystopian fiction is a way of talking about the present and the sense of catastrophic loss but also of future possibility (Manjikian, 2012; see also Lilley et al., 2012). It is also a powerful current in the environmental movement, as Cassegard and Thorn (2012) argue. This sense of loss was already expressed in Rachel Carston’s classic book, Silent Spring in 1962. However, many of these responses, as Mascarno argues, avoid complex explanations and are uncomfortable with open-ended futures. Many expressions of the post-apocalyptical imagination can exert a critical function, for others part of their prophetic magnetism is scepticism about science. Many dangers lurk in the de-differentiation of religion and science, which is a powerful development in the world today. Roughly one-third of the population of the United States, approximately 100 million, are evangelical Christians and believe that the ‘end times’ have come, and the apocalypse is imminent.

While one response to loss is a future oriented search for alternatives, the post-apocalyptical turn can take extreme positions, such as ‘antinatalism’, the belief that human life is a form of harm and should cease through zero births, as advocated by the South African philosopher David Benatar (2008). It may also express itself in a sense of chronic fear as is reflected in the relatively new phenomenon of eco-anxiety or climate anxiety, a chronic fear of environmental doom. A related trend is the idea of ‘deep adaptation’, an influential concept proposed by the British psychologist Jem Bendell. In view of the likelihood, he believes, of ‘a near time collapse in society’ and the apparent abandonment of any hope for the future, we must look elsewhere for meaning (Bendell, 2018, 2020). A ‘deep adaption’ to the external reality of climate tragedy, including the possible extinction of much of life in what can also be seen now as the Necrocene, our age of death and extinction, involves the transformation of personal grief into ‘climate grief’. In essence, the future is replaced by grieving for its loss and by sadness (Pettman & Thacher, 2024).

A posthumanist future?

Another and different trend in writings on the future is the debate around transhumanism and posthumanism. The vision of a posthumanist future is either one embraced by its proponents as the triumph of the quest for human perfectibility or regarded by its critics as a development that effectively reduces the future to technological dystopia. With the potential emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI), posthumanism is a serious prospect for the future of humanity. Such a development would go beyond transhumanism, which is arguably already a fact of the human condition today. Transhumanism was first used by Julian Huxley in 1957 in an essay ‘Transhumanism’. His vision of transhumanism was compatible with liberal and humanist conceptions of humanity in that it was a conception of human enhancement and the realization of new possibilities (Huxley, 1957). In more recent times, the notion of posthumanism represents a more extreme version of Huxley’s transhumanism. Where the transhumanist movement assumed that superintelligent humans will emerge as the next stage in human evolution through intelligence amplification or augmented intelligence, a posthuman future is one in which superintelligent technologies will become predominant.

While those sympathetic to posthumanism see it as a form of liberation from modernity and from the limitations of the human condition enabling a more radical kind of autonomy (Nayar, 2014), its critics see in it the arrival of a depoliticized conception of human perfectibility and is not compatible with the political project of autonomy. According to Dévédec, the Enlightenment notion of autonomy never saw the idea of human perfectibility as a purely technical matter (Dévédec, 2018). Transhumanists and posthumanists do not think that there is a human essence or a defining core to human nature, and consequently it is open to new definitions by science and technology, as in the writings of Ray Kurzweil (2005) on a new ‘singularity’ that is no longer subject to human agency. Dévédec sees such developments whether real or potential as a form of depoliticization in that humans are being forced to adapt to the demands of technology and a logic that is part of capitalist growth. Perhaps, Wittgenstein was right about the dangers of science severed from the sense of duty to humanity.

The celebration of technological supremacy lends itself to what may be called techno-optimism, as in the view that, for example, climate change can be controlled through geo-engineering. In her contribution to this special issue, Jenny Andersson discusses from a sceptical position some of the assumptions of the posthumanist movement as an adequate response to the future. Allowing for more critical voices within the transhumanist movement, the embracing of A1, space travel, genetic engineering and geo-engineering without human control are deeply problematical developments. She concurs with Loren Goldman in appealing to the necessity of hope and to a sense of the future ‘as a political sphere of hope’.

Despite these concerns about the future implications of AI leading to a dystopian future, greater focus is needed on the realistic dangers. So far, AGI does not exist; AI is confined to data-based learning, performing what is essentially either pattern recognition tasks or the computation of vast lakes of data; its capacity for creativity is limited.

Elements of a theory of the future

In view of the great diversity of views on the future, it would appear to be difficult to arrive at a commonly accepted conception. However, the fact that a concept is contested does not mean it is entirely open, and almost every concept in social science is contested. A basis for any conceptualization of the future must be that as a concept we cannot do without it. In that sense, the idea of the future is in philosophical terms a necessary concept, without which it is not possible to think of the present.

Since it seems that human beings, unlike other forms of life, have the unique endowment to be able to think in terms of the future, it is also embodied in the neurological and cognitive human make-up. The human brain is wired to think in terms of there being a future, be it a short or long term one. Heidegger in Being in Time demonstrated that the future is an existential fact of the human condition. For Heidegger, the temporality of human existence is based on forms of waiting, as expectation and anticipation, and ultimately the anticipation of death. Beckett’s celebrated 1953 play, Waiting for Godot, makes the condition of waiting central to the human condition. Despite the remorseless passage of time, in another sense nothing happens, and life is just waiting. Beckett’s suggestion is that there is always the promise of redemption and that this requires hope. A starting point, then, for a theory of the future is perhaps its existential nature.

Beyond the existential dimension, the idea of the future is also a mental or cognitive concept engrained in the structure of the human mind. Human beings are the only beings who have created transcendental structures, that is, structures or forms of thought or reason that exist independently of their actual empirical forms (as reflected in aesthetic and intellectual creations, in science and spiritual forms). The ideas of truth, freedom or justice are not exhausted by specific attempts to embody them. As is well established in philosophy, systems of reference transcend their interpretation by providing them with their conditions of possibility. This was Plato’s basic insight about becoming and being, with the former the transient world of change/history/time and the latter the world of eternal ideals and forms of thought. The problem though was Plato only saw a separation between both. As Karl-Otto Apel argued in his many publications on what he called the macro-ethics of collective responsibility, we need to presume the existence of an idea to have ideals, even if they are never realized in attempts to actualize them. ² Ideas of Reason, the idea of the future, is always there as a necessary transcendent principle that provides an orientation for thought and action. With its basis in the structure of the mind, the future, as Adam argues in her article in this issue, has a ‘dual orientation’ – we are oriented towards the future and guided by it for action in the present. She demonstrates the latter perspective with respect to Weber’s methodological writings.

The idea of the future is a temporal concept, but its relation to time is far from simple. The future is not something that temporally arrives after the present, but it is a part of the present and consequently will become the past when our present time comes to an end. It does not come already defined, nor is it an empty space that the present moves into. Whatever order or coherence it has comes from how we construe it and from how we experience time itself. The subject is always oriented to the future in many ways, for example, through hope, despair, fear, fantasy and wonder. There is what William James called the ‘specious present’, by which he meant the immediate present, the short duration of a few seconds to a few minutes. This is how we experience the present moment, and it is the basic intuition of time, sometimes called ‘chronoception’ (meaning time perception). What is always experienced is the present, even when we are thinking of the past. The phenomenological fact of time as something experienced in the present moment can give rise to the illusion that our sense of time has an objectivity. However, when we look into the starry sky much of what we see there is the past, in the form of the light that was emitted by those stars that died, in many cases millions of years ago.

The future is not only a temporal concept, but also spatial. It is located in a social and historical context that is necessarily spatial. It can be seen as a space in which alternatives to the present are created; it is a space that is produced by imaginary projections; and it is a field of struggles, since there are conflicting conceptions of what the future should be. It is also spatial in the sense of having a reference position. As is also demonstrated in Einstein’s theory of special relativity, the passage of time makes sense only in relation to a spatial reference: a temporal moment is relative to an observer’s given position in space, which is also not a fixed one. Time, motion and space are inter-linked; time itself slows or speeds up depending on motion, and it is also affected by gravity. This idea has a more general validity in social and historical applications. ³ It is not possible in any meaningful way to think of the future without a spatial referent. It may be argued that the category of the future is in the final analysis of a spatial concept whereby future occurrences can be understood in terms of spatial shifts. Such a position, which has a basis in physics, would need to conceive of such shifts as movements entailing some notion of speed or motion (Einstein once held this position since he was sceptical of the objectivity of time). But even so, we end up with something that is the functional equivalent of time and with it the sense of temporality in which the future is a meaningful category. Indeed, in the end, Einstein conceded the necessity of time as a relevant concept to make sense of the world. Rather than separate time and space, they should be seen as interlinked phenomena. In many ways, the space time relation corresponds to the future/futurity distinction. A firm distinction cannot be easily made, as the terms are fluid and do not have fixed meanings. Nonetheless, the notion of the future captures the temporal aspect of a time yet to come, while futurity expresses a projection from the present, which is to say from an existing space of possibilities. But we also need to go beyond the space–time relation.

The future additionally has an epistemic dimension. To speak of the future always entails knowledge claims of some sort. The most obvious ones entail prediction or forecasting. Prophecies are also epistemic claims. Both predictions and prophecies, as different as they are, tend to be concerned with the very near future. Prophecies, which have made a comeback today, in the form of popular futurist cultures of Armageddon, evangelical proclamations of the Apocalypse and conspiracy theories, locate end times scenarios already in the present, the time of the Now, as Aldo Mascareno argues in his article in this issue. This includes some of the more extreme interpretations of the implications of AI. Even the Anthropocene is the time of the Now, as is the Late Holocene. But there is also the distant future. As an open-ended interpretive category, the future cannot be reduced to the idea of progress or seen only in terms of catastrophe, which are specific images or imaginaries of the future. Mascareno makes the perceptive assessment that ‘apocalyptic eschatologies secure a foothold and exhibit enhanced prospects for symbolic generalization when the experience of reality diverges from the expectations and possibilities offered by society’.

Much discussed in recent literature is the notion of the future as an imaginary. While there is the danger, as mentioned above, of over-emphasizing this popular concept, it does correspond to one dimension of the future, namely, as a category of interpretation. In this way, we can see different embodiments of the future articulated in various cultural models in which imaginary visions of the future are projected. Still, the future may be open to interpretation, but it is not entirely open. History is full of examples of failed futurist projects, the inevitable result of the limits of the possible.

In the most fundamental sense, the future can be understood as a form of transcendence; it concerns the way the present is transcended. Transcendence is made possible by the existential condition that humans are necessarily oriented to the future. It is arguably the case that humans are more oriented to the future than to the past. As both Strydom and Guéguen and Jeanpierre show in their articles in this issue, there is also the fact of necessity at work in shaping future possibility, which in turn arises out of the potentialities that have merged from the past as well as those that are latent in the present. In a similar vein, Adam notes in her article in this issue,

much of this world is not material in the conventional sense but marked by latency and immanence. It is a world of deeds that may have only partially materialized, while much of it has not yet congealed into matter. It is a future of processes, whether these be chemical, biological, genetic, fiscal, political or cultural, to name just a few.

Transcendence is also expressed in hope and responsibility. Kant’s famous question, posed at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, is still relevant, What may I hope? (A805/B833). Loren Goldman, as mentioned earlier in his article in this issue, discusses the importance of hope as an indispensable principle of political action (see also Goldman, 2023). In addition to hope, the future is also something we have responsibility for, as Andersson also points out in her critique of posthumanist trends, which appear to discard responsibility for the future. On the other hand, longtermism jettisons responsibility for the present in favour of a very distant future.

Conclusion

There is a new sensibility for the idea of the future in the human and social sciences today. The emerging idea of the future is not only a time yet to come but is also a way of thinking about the present and about the past. The shadow of the future is present in many spheres of life. What is now the past was once the future.

Until now, it has generally been assumed that to face the future one only needs to know the past, for the errors of the past are a guide to preparation for the future. This may no longer be the case, for with the severity of the challenges facing humanity today it is not self-evident that there is much instruction to be found in the ways people in the past prepared for the future. While we have greater knowledge today, it does not lead to greater certainty. The future is looking increasingly unknown, in contrast to much of modernity when the future was seen as something that the present can master. The kind of problems human societies faced in the past are today in the context of the Anthropocene, with climate change endangering the viability of society, the as-yet uncertain implications of new technologies such as AI and increased societal complexity very different from the problems that previous societies had to deal with. The past does not provide much of a guide when it comes to anthropogenic risks, which are now generally regarded as the most likely cause of existential threats to humankind, since the major catastrophes that occurred in human history were predominantly natural.

The fact of ever greater uncertainty and indeterminacy is also a source of fear, for in general people fear that which they do not know or control. This can lead to irrational responses or a quest for the illusion of control, but it can also shape future thinking in more adequate ways since fear can lead to political mobilization.

While the idea of the future today is very different from those that prevailed until now, some of the basic questions that inspired thinking about the future are still relevant. It is, for example, a way to reflect on the meaning of humanity and the human condition. As with Kant, it is related to the abiding question, ‘What may I hope’, and to the pursuit of the ‘good life’. While the future is in once sense infinite, it is also finite, in that it is as Heidegger wrote always marked by the finality of death.

The concept of the future, like many concepts in the human and social sciences, is contested, as is clear from some of the major debates discussed above. Much of this contestation is the result of very different intellectual traditions. The aim of this issue and the foregoing is a contribution to conceptual coherence. The concept of the future is unavoidably multidimensional. It is a temporal, embodied and spatial as well as an epistemic category. While not specifically a normative concept, normative issues are bound up in it in so far as it is something we have responsibility for. It is first and foremost an idea that takes a variety of cultural and political forms. This is perhaps what also lends to its contestation, for it is expressed in struggles to realize different ideals, which in turn are based on conflicting imaginaries. If critique is a form of disclosure in which the present reflects upon itself to reveal alternative possibilities within the present, an overall conclusion is that the idea of the future is essential to an adequate critique of society.