Bridging the Iron Curtain. Futurology as Dissidence and Control

East European futurists were part of the transnational networks of futures research. The Ford Foundation sent Daniel Bell on a study trip in 1960 during which he made contact with some of the key milieus of revisionist Marxist thought: the Polska 2000 group led by Andrej Sicinski as well as the group of sociologists under the leadership of Radovan Richta in Prague. After 1968, futurologists helped introduce forms of management and computer science into the planning systems of the socialist economies under the banner of prognostika . The chapter examines the way that East European futurists used the future as a way of constructing an argument about the need to revise Marxism, and how future research became a space of protest and dissidence.

Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis) · Banner · Cold war · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Futures contract · Iron Curtain · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Successor cardinal · Timeline · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law