Conclusion

What marks the idea of the future in the post-war period is not, as historians have suggested, a sudden shift from progress to decline after 1973, but rather, a struggle between conceptions of world temporalities as singular or plural. The chapters of this book have shown that the post-war period was marked by heterogeneous and often times directly rivalling conceptions of the world future. These were marked by the opposition between representations of the future as a teleological and foreseeable narrative of a stage driven logic of modernization, and representations of the future as infinitely plural—because of the variety of human life, politics, and imaginations. The world futures that emanated from the different strands of future research tell an important story of how conceptions of the world, and of human influence on that world, changed during the post-war decades.

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