Gerard Delanty

eBook, ePUB

Senses of the Future (eBook, ePUB)

Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today

Beschreibung

The future has become a problem for the present. Almost every critical issue is now understood and experienced through the prism of the future since this is the primary focus for the playing out of crises.

Senses of the Future offers a wide-ranging discussion of theories of the future. It covers the main ideas of the future in modern thought and explores how we should view the future today in light of a plurality of very different and conflicting visions. The key contribution of this book is to bring together the different approaches with an account that is grounded in sociological and philosophical analysis as opposed to visions of the future that are inspired by extreme visions of catastrophe or approaches that see the future as only the continuation of the present. Given a revival of apocalyptical visions of the 'end times' and dystopian views of the future of human societies, there is urgent need for a new approach on how we should imagine the future. The author explores the future as a field of tensions that is revealed in narratives, utopian desires, hope, imaginaries, and social struggles concerning the potential possibilities of the present: the future does not just arrive; it has to be fought for.

This book is an important contribution to a critical sociology of the future. It is both a work of reconstruction and critique grounded in a historical and philosophical hermeneutics of the future.

Technische Details

• Geräte: eReader
• ohne Kopierschutz

Barrierefreiheit

• Text-to-Speech

Autor

Gerard Delanty Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Sussex University. His recent books include (with Neal Harris) Capitalism and its Critics (Routledge, 2022) and Critical Theory and Social Transformation (Routledge 2020).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Seitenzahl: 223
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. März 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9783111253916
• Artikelnr.: 69914380

Rezensionen

"Senses of the Future is a wonderfully rich work of scholarship ... Delanty's book is a testament to the richness of thinking about the future as precisely a problem of action in the twentieth century, and yet we stand at a moment in time when we seem to be faced not simply with the loss of future that, it is said, leads to nostalgia and grief, but with an overwhelming sense of future catastrophe and inaction."
Jenny Andersson in Modern Intellectual History

"Delanty offers a productive way of approaching the future, especially in a time when it seems rather bleak."
Elizabeth Soer, European Journal of Sociology

"A first-rate book-and Gerard Delanty's Senses of the Future belongs to this

category-can affect the reader in two ways. You can learn something new from it that is important; and it can also help you to think for yourself and formulate your own opinion."
Richard Swedberg, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Cornell University (US), in his review "On the future as possibilities", published in the Journal of Classical Sociology

"Do we have a future? Does it matter? Our present is being defined and redefined by the future. Enlightenment confidence in reason and progress has evaporated and our sense of catastrophe has produced multiple responses including dystopia, and retrotopia. However, Gerard Delanty argues that we must not see the future only as our fate. In his masterly overview of past and present visions of the future, Delanty's diagnosis and prescriptions are indeed timely."
Bryan S. Turner, Catholic University Australia, Sydney (Australia)

"Ideas of and about the future are as necessary now, in our own transformative times, as they were in earlier epochs of great transformation, as during the Axial Age or the 18th-century birth of modernity. Delanty's critical examination of some dominant theories and approaches is an instructive and illuminating guide to current thinking about the future. An exemplary book, as timely as it is necessary."
Krishan Kumar, University Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia (US)

"This very important book combines a vast range of historical reference with a sustained set of arguments about how we have conceived the future in the past and how we should do so today."
William Outhwaite, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Newcastle (UK)

"This is the right book at the right time. Behind the modest methodological habitus of a scrupulous, however hitherto unmatched mapping of the most pertinent visions of the future stands a radical thesis: That a total reorientation of social theory toward the future is underway and demands to be openly affirmed. Systematically drawing on phenomenology and critical theory, this new 'critical hermeneutics of the future' asserts the inevitable orientation toward transcendence, centrally positioning the categories of possibility and potentiality, and thereby breaks open the horizon of agency and transformation so badly needed now. It convincingly serves as a counter-poison to any dystopian, negativistic, or simply neo-realist apologetics of the status quo in our challenging times."
Hans-Herbert Kögler, University of North Florida/Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt