Jenny Andersson. The Future of the World

In a trend that is fairly recent, the future has become a central issue in the humanities and has been particularly taken up in the historical sciences. Of course, historical scholarship has always drawn on the category of time, since periodization is one of its key tasks, and from the 1990s historians have been strongly influenced by studies on cultural memory that stress that the past is constantly present in everyday experience (e.g., Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen [1992]; Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire [1997]). However, it is only in the last few years that historical scholarship has occupied itself more fully both with processes of reconfiguring the past, the present, and the future and with the specific role futures have played in history. This is a change of approach, which can plausibly be seen as a reaction to increasingly persistent crisis perceptions (e.g., “AHR Forum: Histories of the Future,” AHR 117, no. 5 [2012]; Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage, eds., Breaking Up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future [2013]; Elke Seefried, ed., “Politics and Time from the 1960s to the 1980s,” special issue, Journal of Modern European History 13, no. 3 [2015]; Seefried, Zukünfte: Aufstieg und Krise der Zukunftsforschung, 1945–1980 [2015]; Lucian Hölscher, Die Entdeckung der Zukunft, 2nd ed. [2016]). Almost canonically, historians have referred to Reinhart Koselleck, who first opened the whole field with his studies on historical time and “past futures,” mainly developed from his distinctive history of concepts (Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time [(1979) 1985]). Many historians have taken up his categories of “spaces of experience” and “horizons of expectation”—both of which, he claimed, became detached during the Sattelzeit (around 1800). However, scholars have also sought to develop alternative categories for analyzing perceptions of time and the future, and have even begun to historicize Koselleck’s work itself (Fernando Esposito, ed., Zeitenwandel: Transformationen geschichtlicher Zeitlichkeit nach dem Boom [2017]).

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