OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE DO NOT COPY THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE DO NOT COPY OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE DO NOT COPY The Future of the World Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination JENNY ANDERSSON 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE DO NOT COPY 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6D P, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jenny Andersson 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933809 ISBN 978–0–19–881433–7 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE DO NOT COPY For Liv Maman, tu travailles vraiment sur le futur? Mais c’est quoi, en fait? OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE DO NOT COPY OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE DO NOT COPY Acknowledgments This book came not only out of my personal research but also out of the collective efforts of the Futurepol project in Paris. I acknowledge funding from the European Research Council through grant 283706. The ERC grant allowed for extensive archival and documentary work. Egle Rindzeviciute, Viteszlav Sommer, Sybille Duhautois, Pauline Prat, and Adam Freeman were a truly outstanding group of scholars and I thank all of them for their input to this book. I hope that I have done justice to their work in the coming pages. I particularly want to acknowledge the invaluable help from Vita Sommer as well as from Malgorzata Mazurek, Lukas Becht, and David Priestland on what became Chapter 7. I also want to thank two research assistants, Kecia Fong who helped me access Lewis Mumford’s materials at UPenn when I could not travel, and Grayson Fuller in Paris. The book as a whole has benefited from many colleagues in different disciplines: Erik Westholm, Marie-Laure Djelic, Michael Gordin, Dominique Pestre, Nicolas Guilhot, Sonja Amadae, Martin Giraudeau, Benoit Pelopidas, Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins, Mathieu Leimgruber, Mathias Schmelzer, Jennifer Light, John Hall, Paul Edwards, Gabrielle Hecht, Stephane van Damme, Barbara Adam, Sandra Kemp, Jakob Vogel, Paul Warde, Marc Lazar, Nicolas Delalandes, Ariane Leendertz, Patricia Clavin, Caspar Sylvest, Or Rosenboim, Wolfgang Streeck, Robert Fishman, Marion Fourcade, Desmond King, and Jens Beckert. Particular thanks go to Nils Gilman and Duncan Bell for their comments on the first draft manuscript, as well as to the Oxford editors for their enthusiasm and reactivity. I have relied extensively on the work of librarians and archivists in many fine institutions. Ngram views can take you a bit of the way but, thankfully, we still have libraries and archives. I am particularly indebted to the people that I inter- viewed and talked to during the research for the book. As these conversations ranged from proper interviews to more informal talks, I list them here: Lars Ingelstam and Göran Bäckstrand in Sweden, Bart van Steenbergen in the Netherlands, Theodore Gordon in upstate New York, Anthony Judge in Brussels, Wendell Bell in New Haven, James Dator in Paris and Honolulu, Jennifer Gidley in Melbourne, Hugues de Jouvenel in Paris, and Jerome Glenn in Washington. Particular thanks to Eleonora Masini, whose living room I invaded for a week while her grandchildren carried boxes of old documents up and down the stairs, and to Ted Gordon for the use of personal photos. About halfway through this book, I fell very ill. As I was diagnosed, many of my friends and colleagues became the pillars of a monumental support network. Thanks to everyone at Sciences Po, MaxPo, and CEE and particularly Florence Faucher, Linda Amrani, Renaud Dehousse and Laurie Boussaguet, Sarah Gensberger, Imola Streho, Sandrine Perrot, Olivier Godechot, Allison Rovny, and Patrick Legales. Thanks to my friends, Ann Gallagher and Frank Roselli in Somerville, who let me use my old postdoc room while working in Cambridge OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE viii DOAcknowledgments NOT COPY archives, and thanks to Paul Edwards and Gabrielle Hecht for an edifying dinner conversation as I finished my archival research at Ann Arbor. Thanks also to Nina Larriaga and Jenny Bastide and their families, and to Rana and Lars Wedin. My sister Lina Cronebäck, Henrik, Lovisa, and Estelle and my parents have been by my side. So has my husband Olivier Borraz, with whom I have shared some very difficult moments but also the very happiest ones. Liv Andersson Borraz is the light of my life, my lovely, courageous, curious, clever daughter. Vous êtes mes amours. Merci also to Rouzbeh Parsi. The cover image of the book shows the Future Boardgame, invented by Ted Gordon, Olaf Helmer, and Hans Goldschmidt in 1969 for the American company Kaiser Aluminum. The game is in Ted Gordon’s possession. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE DO NOT COPY Contents List of Figures xiii List of Abbreviations xv 1. Introduction 1 The Problem of the Future 1 Repertoires of Future Making: Origins of Future Expertise 4 Understanding the Spaces of Futurism: A Note on Method 8 The tructureS of the Book 12 2. A New History of the Future? From Conceptual History to Intellectual World History 14 Why Did Historians Lose Sight of the Future? 14 Revisiting Social Time 18 The utureF as Global Category 20 Imagining a Post-Cold War World 26 3. The utureF as Moral Imperative. Foundations of Futurism 30 The End 30 Cosmic Powers 32 Prediction as Power Over Time 35 The utureF is Us 37 Mankind 40 The Invention of Futurology by a Ukrainian Jew in Atlanta 43 Concluding Remarks 47 4. Futures of Liberalism. The Congress for Cultural Freedom and Futurology as a Transnational Space 49 From the End of Ideology to Futurology: The Congress for Cultural Freedom 49 An Open vs. Closed Future 50 A Liberal Theory of History: Daniel Bell and the End of Ideology 54 The utureF of Democratic Institutions: The Ford Foundation and the Futuribles Project 57 The utureF as Synthèse and Rational Decision in the Centre de Prospective 65 Conjecture as Anti-Planning: The Surmising Forum 70 Concluding Remarks 73 5. The utureF as Social Technology. Prediction and the Rise of Futurology 75 A General Theory of the Future 75 The utureF as Social Technology 76 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NOT FOR SALE x DO NOTContents COPY From the Long Range to the Long Term 82 Formalizing Expert Opinion: The Invention of Delphi 85 Substituting Passionate Opinion 90 Concluding Remarks: Traveling Delphi 96 6. Predicting the Future of American Society: From RAND to the Commission for the Year 2000 98 The End of Ideology Thesis Revisited 98 Social Change as a Deliberately Planned Process: From Planning to Prediction 101 A Sense of National Priority 106 Rational Social Choice 110 People Who Can Read Trends 114 Future Crash 118 Concluding Remarks 120 7. Bridging the Iron Curtain. Futurology as Dissidence and Control 122 Dreams of an Open Future 122 A New Future Horizon: The Polska 2000 Group 127 Civilization at the Crossroads and the Futurological Society of the Prague Spring 134 In Russian the Word Future Exists Only in the Singular 139 Futures Studies as Dissidence: Mihail Botes and the Center for Methodological Future Research in Bucharest 146 Concluding Remarks: from Futurology to Prognostika 150 8. The utureF of the World. The World Futures Studies Federation and the Future as Counter Expertise 151 Taking Future Research to the World 151 The mageI 155 The utureF as Radical Imagination 158 Reshaping Activism: Future Research and Social Science 161 Data-in-being 165 The Anti-RAND: Uniting World Social Movements 167 Models as Micro-utopias 174 The orldW Plan 176 The Future Workshop 179 Concluding Remarks 181 9. The uturists.F Experts in World Futures 184 From System to Self 184 The Look utO Institution: The World Futures Studies Federation 188 I’m Off to Pyongyang to See Some Friends. Futurism after 1989 196 Man: The Fundamental Particle 198 Future Artefacts.