The Future of the World is devoted to the intriguing field of study
which emerged after World War Two, futurism or futurology. Jenny
Andersson explains how futurist scholars and researchers imagined the
Cold War and post Cold War world and the tools and methods they would
use to influence and change that world. Futurists were a motley crew
of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace
activists. Some argued it should be a closed sphere of science defined
by delimited probabilities. They were challenged by alternative
notions of the future as a potentially open realm. Futurism also drew
on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from
positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some
of which sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science
fiction, journalism, or religion. These different forms of prediction
laid very different claims to how accurately futures could be known,
and what kind of control could be exerted over what was yet to come.
The Future of the World carefully examines these different engagements
with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the
post war period. Using unexplored archival collections, The Future of
the World reconstructs the Cold War networks of futurologists and
futurists.
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Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192545510
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter