Does the future have a history? Probably not, since what lies ahead is unknown and unknowable, and the discipline of history is relentlessly retrospective. But ideas about the future do have a history. For most of the human journey, ordinary people surely imagined the future as very similar to their present life, for change was slow, almost imperceptible. When ancient cultural or religious figures did imagine a different future, it was often framed as returning to an earlier and better age. Confucius, for example, sought an alternative to the political and social disorder of his time in a return to a former era of imagined tranquility and harmony. Muhammad wanted Jews, Christians, and Arabs alike to return to the primordial religion of Abraham, from which all of them had departed.

With the coming of the Scientific Revolution and the European Enlightenment (see Chapter 15), predictions or imaginations about the future were more often expressed in terms of a sharp break with the past that embodied something altogether new or unprecedented. “The old rubbish must be thrown away,” wrote a seventeenth-century English scientist. “These are the days that must lay a new foundation of a more magnificent philosophy.”1 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followers of Karl Marx and socialists generally looked forward to a future of abundance, equality, and social harmony very different from the sharp class conflicts of rich and poor that characterized all preceding civilizations. And in varying degrees, modern feminists too imagined a radically different future that would put an end to millennia of patriarchy.

The sources that follow present a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century anticipations, predictions, hopes, and warnings about what lay ahead. The first two sources focus largely on technology from the perspective of early twentieth-century American and European observers. The third conveys something of the aspirations for international life associated with the founding of the United Nations in 1945. In the fourth source, the hopes of the “new nations” released from colonial rule after World War II, find expression. The final two sources derive from the 2010s as people seek to imagine the environmental futures of the planet. These sources invite us to consider the hopes and fears of people living at various times during the last century or so, to assess the accuracy of their forecasts, and in some cases to explain why these visions of the future either came to pass or failed to materialize.

Notes