Jenny Andersson

The future has been a central object of inquiry in the twentieth-century social theory. In this essay, a first generation of intellectual concern with the future is represented in the post-war turn towards a hermeneutics of time and reflections on modernity in the writings of conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck and philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In their writings, the future was both essential reflection on the limits of human existence and a fundamental liberation of political potential. As such they situated the future in what was defined as historical time. A second wave of scholarly thinking came in the explosion of a post-war field of futures studies. The future, to post-war futurists, was a loss of telos and an indication of the fundamental immaturity and hubris of the human subject. History was a cumbersome remnant of past destruction, and the imperative was to move beyond. In a third generation, currently taking form, the future is considered as part of a postmodern, indeed posthuman existence. ‘There is no such thing as humanity’ makes human history impossible and opens the question of whether it is even possible to engage with the future without a clear anchoring in the history of what it is to be human.

This article explores the role of ideological heritages—ideologies past—in the political discourse of the Third Way and points to the divergence between social democratic parties in their interpretation of change. The cases are New Labour and the Swedish SAP, cases that display important differences in interpretations of the knowledge economy and its implications for social change. The people’s library and the electronic workshop, as the metaphors the parties use to describe the knowledge economy, contain different future visions, and echo politics of the past. The people’s library plays on the historical Swedish notion of a people’s home, whereas the electronic workshop draws on a British past of industrial progress and capitalist entrepreneurship, values that have been placed at the heart of New Labour debates on welfare state change. These metaphors serve as the point of departure for the discussion.

This paper examines a struggle over the future use of Nordic forests, which took place from 2009 to 2012 within a major research program, Future Forests—Sustainable Strategies under Uncertainty and Risk, organized and funded by Mistra, The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research. We explore the role of strategic environmental research in societal constructions of long-term challenges and future risks. Specifically, we draw attention to the role played by environmental research in the creation of future images that become dominant for how societies structure action for the long term. We also show that this process is on several accounts problematic. Research labeled “strategic” or “relevant” is intended to manage long-term risks and challenges in a sustainable way, by taking into account the “open” and “plural” nature of the future. The case of Future Forests suggests, rather, that by contributing to the emergence of dominant future images, environmental research is entangled with a process of gradual consensus creation around what may be highly selective or biased narratives of the long term, which may conceal or postpone key forms of future conflict.