Prof Jonathan White

This course is available on the MSc in Comparative Politics, MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe, MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe (LSE & Columbia), MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe (LSE & Sciences Po), MSc in Political Economy of Europe, MSc in Political Economy of Europe (LSE and Fudan) , MSc in Political Economy of Europe (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in Political Science (Conflict Studies and Comparative Politics), MSc in Political Science (Global Politics), MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Public Policy and Administration. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). In previous years we have been able to provide places for all students that apply but that may not continue to be the case.

The future is unknowable, but it can be made intelligible.  It raises practical and conceptual problems, as well as reasons for conflict, but also promises to resolve contradictions.  This course examines how the future is used and abused in politics, and the particular significance it holds for democracy.  We begin historically, looking at the future as an emerging theme in eighteenth-century European Enlightenment thought and as a centrepiece of ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We go on to explore what is distinctive about the future orientations found in societies today; what these imply for the governance of salient issues, from economic crisis to climate change; and what institutions, national and transnational, can help democratise the future and counter pathologies of both short- and long-termism.  As we shall see, beliefs about what lies ahead carry implications for who should hold power, how it should be exercised, and for the sake of what ends.  The course should provide students with a cross-disciplinary grasp of how present-day public affairs are shaped by the ways the future is conceived and acted upon.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term. This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

A 2-hour review session will be held at the start of the Spring Term.

• One 1,500 word unassessed essay.
• A 10-12 minute class presentation.

• White, J. (2024), In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea (London: Profile).

• Delanty, G. (2024), Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today ​(de Gruyter).

• Claeys, G. (2020), Utopia: the history of an idea (London: Thames & Hudson).

• Nowotny, H. (2016), The Cunning of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity).

• Mackenzie, Michael (2021), Future Publics: Democracy, Deliberation, and Future-Regarding Collective Action (Oxford: OUP).

• Adam, B. & C. Groves (2007), Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (Leiden: Brill).

• Innerarity, D. (2012), The Future and its Enemies (Stanford: Stanford UP).

• Beckert, J. (2016), Imagined Futures: Fictional expectations and capitalist dynamics (Harvard: Harvard UP).

• González-Ricoy, I. & A. Gosseries (2016), Institutions for Future Generations (Oxford: OUP).

• Koselleck, R. (2004), Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (NY: Columbia).

• Forrester, K. and S. Smith (eds) (2018), Nature, Action and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment (Cambridge: CUP).

• Andersson, J. (2012), ‘The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World’, American Historical Review 117 (5).

• Urry, J. (2016), What is the Future? (Polity).

• White, J. (2024), 'Technocratic Myopia: on the pitfalls of depoliticising the future', European Journal of Social Theory.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours) in the spring exam period.

The summative assessment will take the form of an e-exam in the Spring Term. E-exams are assessments run under invigilated exam conditions on campus. Students will complete the assessment using software downloaded to their personal laptops.