A New History of the Future? From Conceptual History to Intellectual World History

Chapter 2 argues that historians need to reengage with the future. It sets out an argument for a transnational history of the future, which traces the circulation of forms of predictive knowledge and expertise as part of a powered claim on world futures and as part of a struggle over the “long term.” The chapter revisits Reinhart Koselleck’s futures past argument, and challenges it universalistic dimensions while engaging with a recent historiography of world temporalities, modernization, and planning. It also proposes that a situated and contextualized intellectual history of the future is an alternative to the “annalistics of the long term” proposed recently, and that such a history needs to be thought of as a situated intellectual history of circulation of forms of knowledge and expertise deeply involved with world making.