Over honderd jaar: De toekomst als politiek idee

by Jonathan White, Auke van den Berg (translator), Suzanne Willekens (translator)

Het lijkt wel alsof we de toekomst zijn gaan ervaren als een onafwendbaar noodlot. We graven ons in om rampen als klimaatopwarming, oorlog en economisch verval zo lang mogelijk buiten de deur te houden; echt invloed lijken we er niet op te hebben. Waarom lukt het ons niet meer om samen aan een betere toekomst te bouwen? Hebben we dat ooit wél gekund?

Jonathan White onderzoekt de ontwikkeling van de toekomst als politiek idee vanaf de Verlichting: de opkomst van toekomstvormende politieke bewegingen in de negentiende eeuw, de politieke crises van de vroege twintigste eeuw, het geheimhouden van de toekomst in de Koude Oorlog, en de individualisering – en daarmee de inperking – van de toekomst in het neoliberalisme. White beschrijft hoe essentiële voorwaarden voor een toekomstvormend democratisch systeem de afgelopen decennia stap voor stap zijn weggevallen, en houdt een vlammend pleidooi om die te herpakken.

Het idee dat de toekomst open ligt en dat burgers die samen, van generatie op generatie, vorm kunnen geven is onmisbaar voor de democratie. Hoe heikel de situatie waarin we ons bevinden ook is, we zullen de overtuiging moeten terugkrijgen dat we die samen – met elkaar en met toekomstige generaties – kunnen verbeteren. Onze voorouders hebben het ook gedaan.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Political Science, Futurism

280 pages, Paperback

Published November 21, 2024

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink]

In the Long Run is an apology for democracy and the importance of the future in the face of the escalating polycrisis of the early 21st Century. It gestures towards some important ideas while unfortunately falling short of what I wish it could be, a futures-oriented version of Benedict Anderson's classic Imaginary Communities. Those are massive expectations, unfair for any book, but is there anything more important than the future?

White's basic contention is that futurity is a key resource for democracy, dating back to the experiments of the French Revolution. He describes political parties as shared visions of the future, ideas capable of holding party members together against the various forces that would separate them, as well as linking the temporal frailty of a human lifespan to any grand project to create a new world. The issue is that today, the future is foreshortening, with climate change on one side, authoritarian revanchism on the other, and slow and ineffective democratic institutions in between. Iterated prisoner's dilemma (a useful model for any social choice that breaks down to cooperation or exploitation) unwinds from the end, and if a person sincerely believes that the electoral game is nearing a conclusion, either because of climate change, because one side is child-murdering Satanists, or because you're being called a child-murdering Satanist for just vibing, democracy becomes a lot less appealing.

White runs through several stages of futurity and democracy, though without much of the specific heat that characterizes a truly convincing argument. The first debate was on the Left, between the various utopian socialist factions of the 19th century on one side who envisioned a better world buttressed by incremental social change, and the Marxist revolutionaries who demanded a specific and pragmatic plan to organize workers and overthrow capitalism.

This was echoed by the Italian Futurists, who celebrated machines, speed, masculinity, and death in the lead-up to the First World War, and who's surviving members evolved into the Fascist movement afterwards. Italian Futurists demanded an end to rule by antiquarians and traditions, a strong statement from people living in a country defined by the Catholic Church and the remnants of the Roman Empire. Fascism is difficult to define, but I find the political aesthetics of violence to be at its core. A fascist has to hurt someone now, because rapid destruction defines their worldview. For White, while fascists can appeal to tradition, their future is about a complete breach with the past; continual reinvention in the furnace.

The Cold War and the rise of strategic planning and foresight created a new kind of future, the classified prediction which could not be released for the sake of state security. Operational secrecy has always been an element of war, but the conditions of the Cold War meant that nuclear war plans could not be publicly discussed, even if the basic premise, that a thermonuclear war was omnicidal, was of undeniable public concern. And as much as profitability requires sensitivity to changes in the market, corporate plans are also secret.

The final chapters, on emergencies and how the demand for response to the coming crisis prevents both long-term planning and democratic participation, is some of the better scholarship in the book, though still vague and frustrating. I think White makes an excellent point that contemporary political parties have decayed to a median center-right platform of hundreds of individual micro-issues rather than coherent visions. However, his reforms, increased recalls and more citizen "participation", seem at odds with the way that "fuck you and not this!" towards anything is the dominant political ideology everywhere.

I do believe we need a better idea of the future as a resource. And I think the problem is not with the ideology of democracy, per se, but with the processes of democracy in practice. What if we spent time writing good laws as opposed to grandstanding?

[Hannes]

3,5/5 Sternen

Erste Hälfte richtig gut, dann fällt es leider ab und erschöpft sich zu oft in den klassischen Phrasen der zeitgenössischen Krisentheorien.

[Sofia Svensson]

Fascinerande. Och föredömligt konkret om abstrakta idéer.

[Rik]

Aanrader om de inhoud, maar niet wat ik verwacht/gehoopr had.

Denk dat het een goed informatief boek is, maar niet wat ik er van had verwacht. Op basis van de achterkant verwachtte ik een interessant, goed in mee te komen, activerend boek, juist iets wat je zou willen om mensen aan te zetten tot denken over de toekomst als politiek idee. Wat ik niet had verwacht was een vrij wetenschappelijk boek wat vooral een geschiedenis van de toekomst als politiek idee besprak, in plaats van vlammend en ge-engageerd te betogen was het eerder een literatuur onderzoek met wat suggesties voor nu. Hoewel het boek een super interessant onderzoek betreft, en zeker aan te raden is op basis van de nieuwe kennis en ideeën die het geeft, denk ik dat het in een andere manier van schrijven misschien beter de toekomst als politiek idee had kunnen agenderen. Het publiek wat dit met plezier leest is nu waarschijnlijk een stuk minder breed.

[Jakub Dovcik]

The way we think about the future determines how we consider the present. This book analyses the thinking about and use of the concept of the future in the realm of politics. It looks like the approach to politics through dichotomies - open versus closed, near versus far, imagined versus calculated, rational versus impulsive, public versus secret and shared versus individual. In all of these, White presents a choice between a more radical, open and democratic alternative, in which the future works as a motivating factor to create something better than the present state of affairs, and a closed, authoritarian and negativistic alternative.

This book is a great demonstration of what David Graeber argued in one of his essays on structural violence - that the essence of left-wing thought is to define it through the imagination of a better future. White calls these ‘open’ & imagined’ futures, as opposed to ‘closed’ or ‘calculated’. This is a very useful framework for thinking about political programmes and these ideas are applied to some interesting contexts in the individual chapters.

There is a very good debate also on the sense of a shared future - for instance, political manifestos have moved from general calls for collective political projects to lists of giveaways for individual pressure groups. He traces the thinking about the future from its origins in 18th-century Europe, where it implied a chance for collective betterment, to the present-day modelling of private gain based on the limited number of observable variables from the present day.

One of the most interesting chapters is one on Italian Fascism and how it was a purely future-orientated ideology, as this analysis of it is different from how it is usually presented today. But a fascist conception of the future was a purely destructive, impulsive and dynamic one, disregarding any rules of the present for some purposefully undefined or ill-defined future. It was a rejection of rationalism for ‘an instinct for action’.

In the latter parts of the book, White deals with the temporal features of the current democratic structures. He argues for the recall of elected officials, and if that works, then we could have longer lengths of tenures for political offices. One reviewer in the New Statesman called White’s recommendations ‘a call for sluggish politics’, but I am not sure how far I actually agree with that. It is more than White recognises the highly powerful nature of the near future, which can be weaponised, like in times of emergencies, or when it is too calculated, to be limiting any sense of meaningful change beyond the current existing structures. But I am not sure how robust would his recommendations be against the potential threat of being gamed or exploited in the same ways as today’s existing democratic rules and standards.

The author of this book is obviously extremely clever, but the style of his writing is really difficult. The book reads as if you went for a pint with the author, and he started going through the individual perspectives on the topic of the future without a clear structure of what he is actually saying. That is not actually true - the book makes a lot of sense as a whole, and individual chapters make a coherent whole - but the individual paragraphs are extremely dense and, in a lot of the chapters in the middle of the book, quite hard to follow. With the exception of the chapter on fascism, the author does not spend too much time on individual aspects of his argument and quite rushes through.

But the flip side of that is that there are some fascinating one-liners in the book - like, for instance, in one chapter labelling the European Union citizenship as a ‘consumerist citizenship’, in another chapter describing the sense that the choice in every election seems now irreversible as ‘if contemporary democracy is in trouble, one of the reasons is precisely that its politics has come to resemble that of a referendum’, or in another linking the rise of methods of forecasting and prediction as a component in the development of modern capitalism.

One of the most thought-inspiring books I have read this year and for some time - not in a way that there would be such novel things presented, but in the way it is structured, as it provides very interesting frameworks for arguments, criticism of today’s presentist politics and about the potential of future as a political idea for the common benefit. The famous quote by Keynes, which is hinted at in the title, is not a call for cynicism but rather a call to action to sort out crises and not wait them out passively. In that sense, the future should always be seen as an opportunity for something better.

[Marc Sabatier]

A great work of contemporary political theory.

White lays out the development of the future as a political idea - from the early "imagined futures" in the 18th and 19th centuries, where the change brought by industrialisation led to thinkers imagining how a far-away world could be. This can be the base of ideology, in working against a certain goal, and constructing a political language that envisions a future in service of the common good.

The best chapter is "Futures Imagined and Calculated", where White distinguishes between the above imagined futures, where ideologies or philosophers construct a world we do not yet know, against calculated futures, where we extrapolate from current developments or make certain assumptions about the future, to calculate the costs and benefits of certain actions. "Calculated Futures" is the precondition for any welfare policy, having to practically see whether a given policy is worth it or not. This is the domain of expertise, where experts claim authority in projecting events in the future. Generally, the idea of a "complicated" future, or a future which may harm the public to learn about (e.g. the risk of a city being nuked) is seen as the domain of experts. White further has the excellent chapter "Futures Public and Secret", where this distinction is developed, as some futures (defense scenarios, catastrofe simulations etc) are known to a small group of people (the executive and experts), and a source of power.

"In the long run" is somewhat chronologically ordered, and the latter chapters, which focus on the contemporary, lost somewhat pace for me. Here, the focus was mainly on emergencies, and the vision of the work felt somewhat narrowed. Nonetheless, interesting and recommended.

[Nicholas]

I have to confess that I am predisposed to loving this book. For me, there’s nothing more interesting in politics than conceptions of time. Two groups that have the same goal, for example, cutting emissions, may clash if they believe in different timelines (doing so in 5 or 20 years). Two groups with radically different wants may live peacefully with each other if they believe time is on their side and the future is open. Debates about history also often function as proxy debates about theories of change. In other words, they are about the future. Past times are not meaningful without being placed in conversation with future times.

Using smart and telling chapter titles like ‘Futures Open and Closed’, ‘Futures Near and Far’, ‘Futures Imagined and Calculated’, ‘Futures Rational and Impulsive’, ‘Futures Public and Secret’, and ‘Futures Shared and Apart’, In the Long Run discusses the complicated relationship between the future and democracy. For White, democracy was once the ideal political form because it, together with political parties, is a good mediating factor in our relationship with the future.

Democracies, with their theoretical openness in election results, help keep future horizons open, unlike autocracies that run on enclosed time. This gives people hope and agency. At the same time, the procedural nature of democracies, their checks and balances, and the constant return to electoral cycles mean democracies are meant to slow down time. You deliberate, you calibrate, and you sometimes have to wait for your turn. In other words, when functioning optimally, democracy is like this race where everyone can join, and also a race where the tortoise (featured on the book cover) has a chance to win. It combines radical openness and contingency with repetitive cycles. Things may change, but some things should stay the same.

In White’s convincing account, what puts democracies at risk now is this sense of emergency and crisis, which he defines counterintuitively as “a crucial period from which multiple exists are possible” (p. 165). But it makes sense. Under normal circumstances, democracy is suspended in an emergency. But we return to normal times eventually. When this moment of emergency is felt as a crisis, both in the normal meaning of having existential stakes and White’s idea of multiple exits, what you get is a destabilising situation of people feeling the future is both radically open and definitively closed.

Neither is good for democracy, because a closed future obviates the meaning of voting, let alone waiting, while a radically open future means everything is fair game, including doing away with democracy. When those two visions crash into one other, you have both apocalyptic dread and messianic zeal.

Donald Trump is a product of such confusing times. He is a man clearly anchored in a yuppie past (and is hardly a technologist, let alone a futurist, despite all the AI talk), yet brought back to life to scramble the timelines. He can do so because his vapid capriciousness runs against a more entrenched liberal technocratic vision that understands the future as rational, shared, and public.

All those visions have suffered setbacks in this age of inequality, climate collapse, and technology disruption. Scientism has not developed public rationality; capitalism has not created shared wealth; and social media has fragmented, rather than creating anything close to a civic public square. In this context, as White notes, Trump’s unpredictability gave him “an aura of authenticity”, which means he looks to many as a “figure of freedom” who cuts through the webs of stultifying calculus and interests (p. 103).

Yet, that also makes the future associated with Trump as open as it is undemanding. That’s why many of us who study the new radical right around the world tend to feel let down by their ideas. They are products of an undemanding culture. Even as the future felt through Trump has an element of openness, a man of impulse is not exactly a man of miracles.

The book is littered with astute observations about how we reached this point. What is most memorable to me is how party manifestos have kept getting longer over time and have shifted from visions to lists. This signifies that parties no longer present themselves as vehicles for shared futures, but as platforms that let voters shop for parts from a fragmented whole.

But not all fragmentation is bad. Another smart observation in this book is that active and civil political citizenship requires us to retain our multiple selves (p. 153). We need to compartmentalise so we can move in and out of projects, ensuring one identity doesn’t compromise the other (protesting corporations doesn’t mean losing your job; voting for a conservative party shouldn’t mean losing your gay friends) and, most importantly, change our views without suffering devastating reputational costs.

But technology has made that increasingly difficult, with our faces recorded and words immortalised. Far from being just a forward-looking instrument, technology also has “backward-looking gaze” that inscribes our past into future times (p. 153). This makes compartmentalisation necessary for social organisation difficult. Thus, technology is as much a means to manifest individual agency as it is a tool for conformity. But to conform is to have little to hope for.

What makes me less sanguine about the book is its proposals. Much of which seems to be about solving the age-old problems of democracies: the question of representation. That element is not to be trivialised, but I struggle to see how ideas like recall mechanisms and a pretty held-back version of sortition (one that focuses on representation, not responsibility) can effectively confront the temporal schizophrenia facing democracies. That is, the challenge of reconciling democracy’s form as a slow swing between parties with a seemingly accelerating future for the earth that wild swings between different endgames.

In his defence, White did suggest a meaningful timescale for representative democracies to work: decades (p. 213). But the question remains: which decade matters? Then or now? Now or later? And whose decade is this?

[Nils]

A profound little book on the relationship between democracy and the imaginary of the future, that emphasizes that many of the most momentous political movements and doctrines of the past, from nineteenth-century utopianism to twentieth-century fascism, have been driven by elaborate notions of future transformations. Flaws, dysfunctions, and injustices are inherent in democratic government, White observes. But such maladies have not proved fatal for democracy because citizens and leaders have believed that errors can be corrected in the years ahead by future elections. Ergo White's thesis: if people see the future as open, losing in electoral democracy, for instance, is not calamitous—they can always try again. But White worries that democratic societies increasingly fear that time is not on their side. The growing prospect of catastrophic climate change or demographic collapse or runaway autonomous technology all conjure a bleak futures of restricted possibilities. Wearing his learning lightly, White explores the many ways that ideas about the future have framed how people engage with one another across political divides. He shows

[Paul Ransom]

In a culture of permanent crisis, the future contracts, self-interest narrows, and public disaffection often morphs into ‘last chance’ desperation and conspiratorial thinking. Jonathan White’s ‘In The Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea’ unpacks what we might call ‘the history of the future’ as a player in political thought and action since the Enlightenment Era. Specifically, he ties it to the evolution of democratic ideas and institutions, charting a broad arc from idealism to managerialism. Of course, it is difficult to broach these topics in a climate of febrile disagreement, and White will likely be accused of both bias and blindness by those of a more absolutist persuasion. Yet, he makes a good fist of staying in helicopter view, of trying to understand ‘moments’ in the context of longer timeframes. Granted, we may question the underpinning assumptions of his logic, but as a dive into the body politic this is engaging, accessible and, importantly, sober. Also, fascinating and insightful.

[Jack O’Neill]

2.5 ⭐️ - in the absence of half stars, tipping it to 3 as it was purchased in a lovely local book store.

I was really excited to read this - how the short termism of politics holds us back, how we grapple with accepting democracy if it doesn’t deliver on the pressing, global concerns. However, something was missing a little for me. I felt like it peaked in the introduction when such questions were posed and pondered. We were then taken through a history of “the idea of the future”, some of these chapters were really interesting, others felt quite tiresome. Unfortunately I also found some of the “solutions” to be a little off the mark. Nonetheless, a decent political theory analysis on an issue that no doubt should have more attention.

[Shreya Margale]

Jonathan White's book is a deeply insightful and elegantly written exploration of how the concept of the “long term” shapes political thought and action. White argues that appeals to the long run, often seen as responsible or visionary, can actually depoliticize urgent issues by placing them beyond democratic debate. His critique is sharp and nuanced. Some readers may find his style more academic than accessible, and the book’s abstract focus limits its engagement with concrete policy debates.

[Fin Dulson]

This book explores ideas of time and the future as applied to people, institutions and democracy. While some of the chapters raised interesting themes e.g. how can democratic systems be reformed to better take account of long term interests, it felt like there was no common argument or thrust tying the whole book together.

[Warren]

Possibly one of the most important books published this year

[Rolf Wijma]

Interesting book. Provides high level answers to the question whether democracy is up to the task of addressing the current age of emergencies. Quite timely with all that is going on in the world.

[Robert Varik]

Ajaloo- ja politoloogiaraamat, mis kujunes lõpuks mingit sorti manifestiks. Ma ei tea, kas mulle see päris meeldib. Võibolla sellepärast, et ka manifesti sõnum polnud kõige veenvam.